Child Support: The Bitter Harvest

Matt Miller

With Special Guests:

• Matt Miller
• Sue Price
• John Flanagan
• Phillip York.

Nothing makes separated dads more upset or more angry than the Child Support Agency, with its constant and brutal intrusions into their lives and its systemic stripping of their income and assets. While the government has built an enormous and ruthless bureaucratic empire around child support, and will pursue fathers literally to the grave for a few dollars, the same government does absolutely nothing to ensure that kids get to see their dads.

This government is now overseeing complex and confusing changes to the child support system which is meant to make it fairer, but in fact will see many if not most fathers paying more, while stripping them of their family allowance.

Disgracefully, one of the architects of the scheme, academic Patrick Parkinson, has refused requests to come on this program. Like it or not we are the world’s longest running father’s show and Australia’s leading dads program. Parkinson was happy to fly recently all the way to London, no doubt at tax payers expense, to attempt to convince the British government to keep their massive fiasco of a scheme, which they have sensibily abolished, but he can’t find 20 minutes to come on a radio program? Give us a break. Of course Parkinson, a family law insider, was the government’s favourite academic on family law and child support issues, and he should have had the simple decency and the simple courtesy to come and explain this mess.

While he heads the country’s most despised and destructive institution - and has rapidly become the country’s most disliked bureaucrat - at least Matt Miller has had the gumption to come on and attempt to justify the changes. Also on the show this week are John Flanagan from the Fairness in Child Support group, Ed Dabrowski from the Shared Parenting Council of Australia, Sue Price from the Men’s Rights Agency and Phillip York from Dads in Distress.

Sadly, the new Labor government is turning out to be worse than any one could have possibly imagined. The sycophant focus group derived rhetoric on “working families” Labor used so effectively to win the last election clearly doesn’t extend to separated dads, with responsible minister Joe Ludwig joining his predecessor in bashing up on separated dads. He talks proudly of the new army of bureaucrats to hunt down dads who can’t meet thier “responsibilities” - read government ordained theft. Much of the sick anti-father propaganda regularly released by the CSA claiming that fathers owe huge amounts of overdue child support is in fact made up of penalties or disputed amounts - they charge an estimated 105% interest a year if they deem you owe them money.

And of course the agency operates on the same utterly dishonest principles as Centrelink and family law. If there is a dispute over facts, it is almost invaribly settled in favour of the mother - because according to the extremist 1970s style feminism on which these institutions were based anything the mother says is the voice of an oppressed class, and therefore to be treated with respect, and anything the father says is nothing but the mutterings of the patriarchy.

Unfortunately after all these years of politicians knowingly inflicting pain on fathers it is tempting to say there is only one real solution to this mess.

All these politicians spewing forth their dishonest andf insensitive bile against separated dads should each have their own families torn apart, they should each have their own children abitrarily removed by the Family Court and they should each have the vast majority of their income stripped off them and their assets removed and then be told their destruction was “in the best interests of children”. Then they might acquire a shred of sympathy for the people they are happy to stir up so much community hatred towards.

There is no doubt whatsoever that the institutional abuse metered out to fathers - and in particular the outrageous conduct of the Child Support Agency - is directly responsible for the high death rate of separated dads. Many fathers dealing with the loss of their children are suffering from post traumatic stress syndrome. As they face the awful truth that they will no longer be seeing their kids every day, the jack boots from the Agency step in, turning their lives to mud.

There can be no moral justification for taxing people differently depending on their marital status. But that is exactly what the Agency does. There is no guarantee whatsoever that a single cent collected by the Agency goes anywhere near the children and much of it is nothing more than social security claw back. In Australia it is possible to pay 47% tax plus 36% child support - calculated on gross taken out of net - plus 1.5% medicare. An astonishing total of 84.5% in government imposts. That is indefensible and amounts to modern slavery

The previous Prime Minister John Howard expressed astonishment when fathers in his electorate went to him and pointed out to him the levels they were expected to pay. But just like in family law, he did nothing about it, and ended up double crossing his once staunch supporters, those naive enough to believe he couldn’t possibly support this left wing anti-father lunacy.

Since we began broadcasting in 2000 we have asked a succession of the responsible government ministers a simple question: how many child support agency clients die each day?

Not one of them has been able to answer. Not one of them has even had the decency or integrity to find out, repeating the mantra that it is not part of their legislative obligations to count their own dead. The latest in this long and hapless line is the Labor Party’s Joe Ludwig, who has so far ignored our requests to come on the show.

So much for duty of care.

That is why we finally put up a counter on our web site estimating for ourselves the number of clients who die each day. As of today, we estimate that at least 2545 clients have died since Kevin Rudd became Prime Minister six months ago.

Here is the spiel we have placed with it:

When elected in November 2007, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said he would be a Prime Minister for all Australians. He forgot to include separated families. The high death rate amongst separated men is strongly associated with their mistreatment at the hands of government agencies, including the Child Support Agency (CSA), the Family Court, Legal Aid, Centrelink and their supporting bureaucracies. These agencies systematically strip fathers not just of their beloved children but of their assets and their incomes, with devastating affects on their physical and mental health. What makes this so offensive is that the bureaucrats and judges enforcing this antiquated system perpetuate the myth that they are acting “in the best interests of children”.

The first child support agencies were created by the Bolsheviks in Russia in the early part of last century. They were introduced into Australia to fund the Family Court’s style of custody order which almost invariably favours sole mother custody. Dads on the Air estimates, using all the available and published data, that at least 12 clients of the Australian Child Support Agency die every day. This figure has never been denied by the CSA. While not all of these deaths are suicides by fathers, too many of them are.

We hereby call on the government to publish monthly figures on the number of deaths of CSA clients and to fully investigate every one of these deaths. Even when it has been clear that the CSA has been a major factor in a father’s death, the Agency has refused to appear at inquests using privacy legislation as an excuse. No proper study has ever been conducted into the social and personal impacts of Australia’s despised child support system; and we hereby call on the government to institute such an inquiry as a matter of urgency. As is obvious to almost everyone who has dealt with them, the Australian Child Support Agency is a failed social experiment which should have been abolished a long time ago.

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