How Family Courts Contribute to Family Destruction

With special guest:

• “Diana”.

This week we present a compelling interview with a separated Australian mother of three, whose ex-husband successfully resorted to all the malicious tools available to both parents under the family justice system. Her appalling experience as a victim of the system will resonate with many fathers, as statistically these very same tactics are mostly used by mothers in order to separate fathers from their children.

“Diana” (not her real name because we’re prevented by law from using her real name), describes in great detail how her ex-husband was able to use false child sex abuse allegations and take out an AVO against her, in order to separate her from her children, safe in the knowledge he would not be punished as a result of his perjury.
 
Our Prime Minister made it known in no uncertain terms recently, that “those that trade on the tragedy of others should rot in jail” and in fact “should rot in hell”. In his view, those that do so, “are engaged in the world’s most evil trade and represent the absolute scum of the earth… the lowest form of life”. 
 
Well Mr Rudd, we have a whole industry trading on the tragedy of others, that has done so with the blessing of successive Australian Governments for the past 35 years. This industry has wreaked absolute havoc and destroyed millions of lives during its long reign of terror against separating parents and their children, yet hardly a whisper of concern is raised by our legislators.
 
This week’s program again illustrates how easy it is for both responsible fathers and mothers to be separated from their children when a malicious, vindictive ex-partner decides to make use of false child sex abuse and domestic violence allegations, in order to obtain valuable time to set in motion the insidious parental alienation process, which turns children against their own family.

The perpetrators of this insidious practice are free to do so under the watchful eye of the judiciary, in the perjury-friendly atmosphere of our family courts, and ironically, somehow this is seen to be “in the best interests of our children”.

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Men's Health and Rallying Forces

With special guests:

• Professor John Macdonald
• John Roberts and
• Sue Price.

This week we will be talking with two of the country’s leading experts on men’s health. First up Prof John Macdonald, who is president of the Australasian Men’s Health Forum, Co-Director of the Men’s Health Information and Resource Centre at the University of Western Sydney and one of the Federal Government’s Men’s Health Ambassadors. He has been closely involved with the government’s community consultation process for the development of the first National Men’s Health Policy, and related matters around men’s health in Australia. He will be bringing us up to date with developments.

John Roberts is the chair of the organising committee for the Men’s Health Gathering to be held at Newcastle University in October this year. John also works for the Benevolent Society in the Hunter Valley of NSW and runs their MARS (Men Accessing Resources & Services) Program which has produced some fabulous resources for blokes such as the Our Men, Our Community posters, the Blokes Booklet and the Blokes Card. He also works with community organisations around the Hunter and Central Coast regions to encourage them to become more “men-friendly”.

We close the show talking with leading lobbyist Sue Price from the Men’s Rights Agency about the women’s groups organising rallies outside Family Courts amidst concern the courts may be too generous to dads!

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Family Heartbreak System Down

With special guests:

• Michael Jeffries
• Angelo Lobo and
• Chris Amos.

Before getting down to the serious business, this week Dads on the Air starts off with an interview with Chris Amos, the figure behind taking DOTA into the 21st century by setting up a special Facebook group. For those older parents unfamiliar with the technology of social networking sites, so popular amongst many of our listeners’ teenage children, he explains how it all works and how to get involved.

This week we are honoured to have two American activists on our show. First up we have Michael Jeffries, author of the new book A Family’s Heartbreak: a Parent’s Introduction to Parental Alienation. The book arose from the author’s personal experience and details all the tricks and sick behaviour that separating parents use against each other, poisoning the minds of their children against the other parent. That such behaviour is enormously damaging to the children involved and ultimately destructive to both the perpetrator and the targeted parent should be obvious to anyone. Yet there are no public messages out there discouraging parents from this sick and abusive behaviour. While women most often attempt to poison their kids minds against their fathers during custody disputes, men can be equally guilty.

We close the show talking with Angelo Lobo, Director and Producer of a new documentary on the shocking US Family Law and Child Support System called SUPPORT? System Down. The documentary is nearing completion after four years of work. SUPPORT? System Down explores the fundamental flaws in America’s Family Courts regarding the Divorce and Child Support System. The film explores the problems through over 38 interviews with both custodial and non-custodial parents and the attorneys, judges and county employees on both sides of the paradigm. SUPPORT? System Down was made to be educational and provocative in order to spark a call to action to bring about much-needed reform in the family courts. Children should not have to suffer due to an ineffectual and corrupt legal system!

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Gender-Neutral Approaches to Domestic Violence

With special guests:

• Joep Zander
• Patricia Gho and
• Paddy Murray

In the social justice arena, two small European countries appear to be way ahead of the pack, and Dads on the Air has been among the first to report these important historic developments to the English-speaking world. First, on the 10th of March we reported on the new “50/50 Equal Shared Parenting Time” laws in Belgium, and now we are pleased to report that the Dutch Government has finally recognized the need to provide domestic violence shelters for abused men.

First up we speak with Joep Zander, who is a well known author, artist and fathers rights activist in the Netherlands. He presents his view of the new DV shelters, acknowledging that because it is still very early days he has some reservations about the scheme. However he hopes the shelters will turn out to be successful in providing a much needed escape for men from their violent partners or families.

Next we speak with Patricia Gho of Stichting Wende, director of the men’s shelter in the Hague. Commenting on the radical change in Dutch Government thinking that led to the trial, she states that “the Government simply could no longer ignore all the data that has for many years shown that there is a real need to also provide shelter for the abused men in our community”.

Bringing the issue closer to home, last up we speak with Paddy Murray, the Buddhist chaplain from Goulburn prison. Mr Murray has done some interesting development work in violence-prevention in Campbelltown with both men and women. He ran the first violence prevention course for women, which unfortunately is no longer in operation. His approach, which he calls “peaceful relating”, is to move beyond gender in violence-prevention work, arguing that the gender lens is just a distortion that does not help much with the work.

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DOTA Goes Spiritual

With special guests:

• Archbishop Barry Hickey and
• Fighting Father Dave.

The mainstream churches have long ignored the many issues confronting fathers in Australia today, so we decided to take a look at the issues of fathers and the various churches.

Catholic Archbishop Barry Hickey has written that the absence of fathers is the biggest family and social problem in our society. “If Father Christmas was offering me gifts, I would ask for peace in every family and a father at the heart of every family,” he was quoted as saying in the publication Perth Now. “The absence of fathers is the biggest family and social problem we face today. It is the biggest cause of lifelong difficulties for fathers, mothers and, most of all, for children.”

“The absence of fathers is bigger than anger, aggression, alcohol, drugs, crime and under-achievement by children because it is the biggest single contributor to all of them. This is borne out worldwide by every large-scale, long-term study of family. I know that Father Christmas isn’t going to solve this problem for me, but I keep praying for it,” Archbishop Hickey said.

Fighting Father Dave is Parish priest, community worker, martial arts master, pro boxer, author, father of three. His website is www.fatherdave.org. Author of Sex, the Ring and The Eucharist, is the only Australian in the Holy Order of the Anglican Church who has ever had to box professionally in order to raise the funds to keep his ministry going. He is known as “Sydney’s Fighting Father,” who combines his work as a Parish Priest with a ministry to street kids, heroin addicts and other ‘undesirables’ from the underside of Australian Society. He uses boxing and the fighting arts to teach young people self-control.

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Dads in Distress

With special guests:

• Tony Miller
• Barry Wiliams
• Phillip York
• Scott Hayes
• Leon Schmeider
• Chris Stokes and
• Peter Smith.

We are pleased to present a Dads in Distress special, looking at the unique work this organisation does in helping fathers in crisis. DIDs aims to provide a safe forum for men going through the trauma of divorce, separation or relationship breakdown to express their grief. It also aims to nurture, validate and stabilise men and by the nautre of the sharing that takes place  guide men to become the cause of their future and not be the result of their past.

With the Rudd government preparing to defund all fathers groups, and the government not providing us with any response to our questions on the issue, we talk to some of the leading figures in Dads in Distress, including founder Tony Miller. He talks about the history of Dads In Distress, what drove him to found the group and the crises it now faces after having established groups around the country.

Barry Williams has been a committed advocate for lone fathers and their families for over thirty years. Leon Schmeider is the convenor of the Dads in Distress Group in Newcastle, and has worked tirelessly as a volunteer for Dids for many years. He has been an inspiration to many men in Newcastle and surrounding areas, as he seems to always go that little bit further in everything he does. Chris Stokes is a dad who also found Dads in Distress at a very tough time in his life. He talks about how DIDs can help blokes at a very difficult time in their lives. Peter Smith is just another dad in a long long line that have been thankful to find a Dads in Distress group in his area.

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International Men's Day: The Debate

With special guests:

• Clr Phillip Penfold
• Warwick Marsh and
• Dr. Elizabeth Celi.

Clr Philip Penfold says he is baffled by the opposition to the recognition that men have problems as well as women but is gratified by the media storm he has inadvertently created. Earlier this month The Newcastle Herald recorded that a motion for Maitland City Council to give equal support to International Men’s and Women’s Days has provoked a minor battle of the sexes with the city’s two female councillors voting against the proposal.

Warwick Marsh of the Fatherhood Foundation, who has been one of the leading proponents of the day, says everone needs encouragement: “It cuts both ways. Men need a day of their own. Father’s day has risen in the public sphere in recent years, and we hope that International Men’s Day will do the same. Councillor Penfold is ground breaking, he is a pioneer. Around the world the day is gathering momentum. It will become a very important day in the calendar.”

Dr Elizabeth Celi, author of Regular Joe versus Mr Invincible: The Battle For the True Man, said International Men’s Day was more than just about men’s health, it is about celebrating masculinity and the wide variety of roles that men play in the community. In her book, when she asked men to list the strengths they bring to their relationships, many fell silent. Celebrating IMD might help men recognise the many strengths and abilities that they bring not only to their relationships but to their workplaces and to the community at large.

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Stolen Babies

With special guests:

• Geoffrey Greene and
• Christine Cole.

First up we talk with Geoffrey Greene, who as a former head of the Shared Parenting Council of Australia, was a key player in the previous government’s reforms of family law. While DOTA was critical that the reforms did not go far enough to address the extreme bigotry and anti-father bias that saturated family law in Australia, at least there was some movement in the right direction. Unbelievably, it would appear that the present government is trying to wind things back to the dark ages when many fathers entering the court did not see their children again.

We close the show with a deeply moving and fascinating interview with Christine Cole, author of the book Babies Stolen: Mothers’ stories of their stolen babies. Bureaucrats during the past century, employed in removing children from their natural parents, claimed to be acting in the best interests of children, despite the obvious harm they were doing. There are many lessons for fathers from this history.

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Making History

With special guests:

• Pascal Gallez and
• Michael Green.

We have a very special program this week. Our guest is Pascal Gallez from Belgium, and the subject of our discussion today is the revelation that we now appear to have a template of Real Equal Shared Parenting Time laws in Belgium. Dads on the Air understands we are making history by being the first to bring this to the attention of the English-speaking world. While not perfect, it certainly is a big step forward in the right direction.

This is an important milestone, because it will provide all those fighting so hard around the world to bring about change to the Draconian Family Justice System, with an example of how “Equal Shared Parenting Time” laws need to be structured and how they can work.

Also on the program we’ll be speaking with Michael Green. Michael currently is the patron and past President of the Shared Parenting Council of Australia. He is a Lawyer, a QC, an author of two books on parenting issues, and runs a mediation company. We’ll be speaking to him about his thoughts on Belgium’s new Shared Parenting Laws and how they might work in Australia and other countries.

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Organised Crime

With special guests:

• Tom Gilling and
• Maggie Campbell.

This week we interview the author of Smack Express: How organised crime got hooked on drugs, journalist, author and father of two Tom Gilling. And we close the show with lawyer Maggie Campbell, who is an interesting variation on a theme - as a career woman she lost custody of her son in the Family Court to her husband and his new stay-at-home partner, showing just how barbaric and out-of-date the family law jurisdiction remains. Like so many men, she was incensed by what had been done to her and became a lawyer as a result.

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The Rude Guys

With Special Guests:

• Rich Zubaty and
• Ian Purdie.

The Australian Rude Guy meets the American Rude Guy. This hilarious show covers a great deal of ground, with both men being highly prolific and outspoken non-conformists, ready to fly in the face of many an accepted norm.

Both men publish their own books and produce their own broadcasts, and both men have little time for the establishment. “Everyone who is calm and sensible is insane” is the leading quote at Rich Zubati’s website www.therudeguy.com. “The Rude Guy is the poison mushroom on the pizza of corporate culture. The arrow in the ass of the institutions of our time.”

As well as broadcasting The Rude Guy podcast, Rich Zubaty has published a number of books including What Men Know That Women Don’t, The Corporate Cult and Your Brain Is Not Your Own. You can find out more at his other website www.happyfool.org.

Ian Purdie has been a wonderfully entertaining part of Dads On The Air for more than two years now. His handmade books include: The Imnothero Principle, Splatterpuss, The Book of Nasty and The Daddies’ Split Guide. See more at www.ianpurdie.com.

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Gay Dads and Surrogacy

With Special Guests:

• Corey Irlam and
• Rodney Cruise.

This week Corey Irlam from the Coalition for Equality and Rodney Cruise from Gay Dads Australia talk about changes to surrogacy laws which could see potentially thousands of gay male couples bringing up children around the country. While society is getting more accustomed to the idea of lesbians bringing up children, gay men doing the same is still something of a novelty. Rodney Cruise and his partner are already bringing up a surrogate child in Melbourne.

A paper has been released on a national proposal for public consultation in a move to harmonise State and Commonwealth surrogate parenting laws. The national Standing Committee of Attorneys General (SCAG) and the ministerial councils for Community Services and Health are calling for submissions on national surrogacy regulation. The paper, A proposal for a National Model to Harmonise Regulation of Surrogacy, makes a number of recommendations including that people who use a surrogate mother would be able to apply for legal recognition as the child’s parents and that the differing state laws be harmonised. Other regulations under review include paying a surrogate mother’s medical costs, financial losses during and other expenses during pregnancy. But commercial surrogacy would remain illegal in Australia, the paper recommends. Submissions Close on 16 April 2009.

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Divorced From Reality

With Special Guest:

• Dr Stephen Baskerville.

We are delighted to have the author of Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family, Dr Stephen Baskerville, on the show once again.

No one has done more to expose the ideological war against fathers by the welfare, family law, domestic violence and child support industries as Dr Baskerville. While those impacted by these industries, many of whom have seen their lives and their children’s lives destroyed, know all too well the disastrous impacts of the current reigning ideologies, separated fathers are traditionally ridiculed. With his academic credibility and forecefulness of personality, Baskerville has been able to articulate the shocking damage being wreaked not just on fathers and their children but on society as a whole.

In Australia, the Labor Party, now in power, created many of the country’s most despised and destructive institutions, including the Family Court and the Child Support Agency. The conservatives did nothing to stop their ever increasing power.

We last interviewed Dr Baskerville in 2007 on the publication of Taken Into Custody. This week we catch up with activities since, including the establishment of his own blog.

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Insane Levels of Stress

With special guests:

• “Matthew”
  
• “Dave” and
• “Steve”.

In the wake of an appalling tragedy where a four year old girl was allegedly thrown off a bridge by her father, we talk with three fathers about the stresses in their lives. It surprised no long term observers that shortly afterwards the father was found and then arrested in the environs of Melbourne’s Family Court.

While vigilantes have called for the man’s blood, others have called for compassion and understanding. Disgracefully, some feminist commentators have attempted to use the incident in their ideological campaign against the commonsense notion of shared parenting.

While making no direct comment on the case itself - the father has now been charged with murder - we do look at the insane levels of stress that fathers are put under by our reviled family law system.

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The Perils of Ideology

Erin Pizzey

With special guests:

• Erin Pizzey
• Mark Sutton and
• Susan E. Block.

In May 2007 Dads on the Air interviewed the founder of the world’s first refuge for battered women, Erin Pizzey. This interview was circulated far and wide, making it one of the most publicised broadcasts in DOTA’s history. As the Australian Government has recently been raising the issue of domestic violence from a one-sided ideological perspective, including the establishment of the National Council to Prevent Violence Against Women and Children, we thought it would be timely to re-broadcast the Erin Pizzey interview to try and bring some balance and rationality to the domestic violence debate.

Also on today’s program we feature another wonderful contribution by Mark Sutton from Liberal Arts Radio in the US. Alec Baldwin took a lot of heat after an angry voicemail to his daughter was leaked back in 2007. In his recently released book about Parental Alienation, A Promise to Ourselves, he confides that he was suicidal after the voicemail incident. Susan E. Block, a family law attorney and the former Administrative Judge of the Family Court of St. Louis County, looks at the problems facing non-custodial parents as well as new solutions that are being implemented in the US state of Missouri. More at www.liberalartsradio.com.

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The Impending Depression

Scott Longden

With special guests:

• Professor Bill Mitchell
• Scott Longden and
• Sue Price.

This week we feature a fascinating interview with Professor Bill Mitchell from the Centre of Full Employment and Equity at the University of Newcastle. He is one of the academics who is predicting that there could be a million Australians on the dole queues by the end of next year. On this week’s show he explains just how easily this could come about and also talks about the devastating social consequences for the nation - how severe the impacts are on fathers, families and children.

Also this week we run extracts from an interview with Scott Longden from the Fatherhood Project in Northern NSW. He talks about how important it is for fathers to get involved with their children from birth, and how men can help each other in prenatal classes to become the best fathers they can. For too long fathers have been seen as an almost irrelevant adjunct to the birth, whereas in reality fathers are vital to their children from their earliest days.

We finish the show with Sue Price from the Men’s Rights Agency, who talks about the frequency with which men are being jailed for alleged abuses which occur sometimes decades before they are actually jailed, often on extremely flimsy if not non-existent evidence.

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Get Off the Bench

With special guests:

• Bob Norton
• Larry Holland
• Peter Van de Voorde
• Mark Sutton and
• Angelo Lobo.

This week on Dads on the Air we present excerpts from two popular US radio programs that deal with men’s and fathers’ issues. First up, Dads on the Air recently joined the discussion on popular weekly American radio program Get Off The Bench. Our own Peter van de Voorde together with the co-hosts of the program, Bob Norton and Larry Holland, discuss many of the Family Law issues that are presently faced in so many countries around the world.

This is followed by an excellent interview with filmmaker Angelo Lobo on Liberal Arts Radio. Liberal Arts is a radio show that explores the arts from an unapologetically political perspective. Host Mark Sutton (NPR, Air America, XM Satellite Radio) is joined by politically-opinionated guests from the world of music, art, political cartoons, film and more. The Family Court system is on trial in Angelo Lobo’s documentary film Support System Down, which looks at ways in which people have been trapped in divorce proceeding that can last for years, cost into the millions of dollars, and separate parents from kids.

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Propaganda

With special guests:

• Robert Belcher
• Geoffrey Greene and
• Sue Price.

The widespread use of propaganda by governments in the climate change debate to convince a naive population to accept yet more taxes and yet more government control has many corollaries with the taxpayer-funded war on fathers. Which is why Dads On The Air has paid particular attention to the debate.

Robert Belcher is the founder of Sustainable Agricultural Communities Australia. He is one of the few voices speaking out against the Rudd government’s plans to literally change the entire rural landscape of Australia by converting it to carbon sink forests, using generous tax concessions to promote this change.

With the Rudd government rapidly moving to overthrow even the extremely modest family law reforms of the Howard government, it is even more essential to understand how the government has essentially killed a social movement, by marginalising them, ridiculing them and failing to fund them. And by the incessant use of propaganda.

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2008: The Year That Was

Launched in 2000, Dads On The Air has stumbled, triumphed and survived another year. That is a miracle in itself. We would very much like to take this opportunity to thank all our listeners and supporters who have made the show possible.

While we haven’t managed to squeeze everyone in, our much appreciated Rockin’ Pop aka Peter van de Voorde has done a wonderful job of selecting extracts from some of the year’s best interviews, sampling of our core themes around shared parenting and child custody in Australia, and the sad winding back of family law reforms which, however inadequate, went some way to encouraging shared parenting and cooperation after separation. The present system creates nothing but a well of pain on all sides, for men, women and children. Critics argue that the winding back of the modestly improved treatment of separated fathers, so vital in their children’s lives, is a retrograde step, a kowtowing to entrenched self-interests locked in 1970s mindsets. The tragedy and appalling failure of social policy in this country, intertwined with child protection, child support, welfare and even education, has continued to play out during the entire life of Dads on the Air and we have continued to cover these issues in greater detail than any Australian media outlet.

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Take Heart

Ken Thompson

With Special Guests:

• Ken Thompson and
• Maggie Dent.

This is our second-last show for the year, so best wishes of the season to all our listeners. First up we talk with Ken Thompson, the NSW Deputy Fire Commissioner, who has come to understand what many men in this country experience through the loss of his son Andrew. Andrew John Thompson, now aged four, was illegally abducted by his mother Melinda Thompson (also known as Melinda Stratton) from Australia to Germany in April this year. This is a criminal offence under the Family Law Act. The Family Court has ordered that a warning must be issued stating that no one is to approach Melinda Thompson and that any information should be provided immediately to local police and/or Interpol. Anyone with information about the whereabouts of Andrew and Melinda should contact local Police, Interpol, or the Australian Federal Police on +61 (0)2 6126 7777. If you wish to assist Ken Thompson in the search for his son by taking part in an email-circulation effort, please call +61 (0)417 416 024.

Maggie Dent is an author, publisher and a parenting and resilience specialist. She writes a free email newsletter that promotes the healthy raising of children. This week we play Maggie’s keynote address from the Men’s Advisory Network Second National Conference held recently in Fremantle, Western Australia. Titled Dear Boys: About the Healthy Mothering of Boys, her poignant and often hilarious keynote explores the vital role in boys’ lives of healthy mothering. It is especially helpful for mothers and teachers who are confused by the boys in their lives. The impact of abandonment, avoidance and misunderstanding can shape a boy for the rest of his life in very negative ways. This will show you how to engage, connect and enjoy these interesting lads from early years to adulthood.

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