The @Australian's @patskarvelas is one of my favorite print journalists #auspol #FamilyLawFail #JuliaGillardMHR ... ... But Pat's article today barely scratches the surface corruption that has grown out of Australia's corrupted Whitlam-era 'no fault' divorce laws. ORIGINAL STORY => FAMILY LAW REVAMP TO KEEP SHARED CARE by @patskarvelas http://bit.ly/gY8s2S ADDITIONAL LINKS => (1) The Family Law Court Crucible: http://jamesjohnsonohr.weebly.com/ (2) 12 Aussie Dads die in #Australia Every Day #CSA DeathToll http://bit.ly/gEy54l (3) Legal Authority Warns: Lawyers are a Family Health Hazard http://bit.ly/b4WoCL MY COMMENTS => The simple reality is that Australia's family lawyers have never allowed divorcing parents shared care of their children. Not before 2006 and not since John Howard's July 2006 amendments either. The children of divorcing parents become hostages in a bizarre game played out by the family lawyers against their divorcing parents. An escalation of the domestic 'warfare' in order to extract the maximum pain for the parents and profits for the lawyers. Right from the outset, the mother is awarded 100% custody (even in extreme cases) plus government benefits including multiple lawyer representation. The father is excluded and alienated and forced to fight a wall of legal processes. Criminal proceedings involving a Geelong, Australia, man Arthur #Freeman are currently on foot before a Jury in the Victorian Supreme Court and generating significant headlines. Anyone who read, or re-reads the headlines of January 20 2010 and thereabouts (including a full front page in the @HeraldSunOnline 'How Could He?” and the inside pages reporting of a loving dad driven to do the worst possible things, by being constantly badgered and beaten in a never ending cycle of family court custody and property claim proceedings) could get an inkling on the doublethought and doublespeak of Australia's post-2006 'equal parenting' presumptions that the lawyer classes and their lawyers courts simply refused to apply. Article 9 of the UN International Declaration of the Rights of the Child declares in 50 words or less that every child has the right to equal and loving relationships with both his/her parents. This UN Article has been approved by the Australian High Court for more than 30 years. It is the basis for domestic judicial laws in immigration cases, prohibiting the government from deporting non-Australian parents of Australian born children. And yet, whilst the Australian Government and its Law Courts (apparently) apply Article 9 of the UN to non-citizens, Australian-born children of Australian born parents are denied the same #humanrights. I''ve even seen situations where the Government funded, Australian lawyer for the Court (the de facto crown prosecutor, mockingly called the 'independent childrens lawyer') files a so-called report' describing an Australian born child of an Australian dad and an Asian born mum as an 'Asian' child, for the purposes of facilitating awarding the non-Australian mum full custody and taking the child away from her Aussie dad, Aussie grandparents, uncles and aunts, cousins and (4 generations of) extended family. Australia's Family Law Act was already 702 pages long even without this latest book of amendments. The Family Law Act could easily be reduced to as few of 3 or 4 pages if it weren't full to the brim of lawyers 'doublethought' and 'doublespeak' drawn up by self-interested lawyers, to cover up multiple denials of justice. The Family Law Act does not just paper over Article 9 of the UN IdotRotC. In words multiplied for the purpose it removes all manner of civil and human rights. These include supposed rights to fair trial, fair hearing, timely hearing, judgement first sentence after, rights to hear charges before (not after) you are required to give your defence, presumptions of innocence, no double jeopardy, decisions based on real evidence (not hearsay or, commonly, perjury), minimum burdens of proof of evidence and the most basic of all rights, the supposed right to equality under the law and freedom from gender-bias and other forms of prejudice and discrimination. No jury in sight, no open justice, no right to representation (it is not uncommon for one party to have multiple-govt funded lawyers, while the other party is forced to self-defend at the point of bankruptcy). Since 2007 (a kick back by the powerful Family Lawyer establishment against the exposure campaigns run by @JulianAssange_ and his mother Christine Assange) all family law litigants are given fake names before their cases are published. And even then, very few of the 10,000 cases processed each year (and the many procedural and other hearings involved during their average 9 years spent in the lawyers offices and courts) are ever published anyway. Any parent who dares to criticise the system is immediately hit with heavier reductions in parental access to their children, branded narcissistic (even psychiatrically diagnosed as such by the legally-challenged, non-psychiatric Judges themselves, when their Court appointed Psychiatrists, hired guns, refuse to do it). 30,000 Dads a year lose all contact with their children, setting into place a family and social disintegration. poverty and depression that is likely to continue for their generations to come. If the present 702 page Family Law Act (and the 1000s of pages of regulations, forms, propaganda and judgements) were measured against our (weak) Constitutional and (stronger) UN and International Treaties and Laws, so many pages would be struck off as 'illegal' that our 702 page Family Law Act would probably have less than 3 'legal' pages of laws left. So why do we have a Family Law Act at all? Wouldn't Article 9 of the UN IDotRotC and High Court judgements thereon be enough. Well yes ... by where would the profit and the fun be for our 30,000 family lawyers? And (shudder) what else would they do with themselves if family laws were reduced to family-sized, family-friendly and lawyer-free principles? Australia's Family Courts are the modern (and therefore uglier) equivalents of the Salem Witchhunts of the 1690s. Many of the procedures, the methods of injustice, even the garbs worn by the wigged inquisitors are unchanged. Psychological and financial terror might have replaced more physical forms of torture, but the effects are the same: http://jamesjohnsonohr.weebly.com/ The Australian Family Courts are the jewel in the crown of more than $4bn annually of taxpayer funded Government Class Welfare to Lawyers. [Just imagine what would happen if the lawyers in our parliaments - 99% of all MPs are from the lawyers class, were to introduce compulsory legal insurance, Medicare for lawyers, as often mooted by lawyers (Government funded) societies and associations. This works out at $40,000 of taxpayer dollars for each of the 100,000 families the system processes that year. Just imagine how many Australian families would be saved, how many childhoods saved, how empty our #mentalhealth, our #police forces, our #prison systems and our #juvenile halls, if half this $4bn annually were kept by taxpayers and the remaining $2bn were spent in and on the distressed families instead of being taxpayer funds put into lawyers pockets. Imagine each of these 100,000 family getting 9 weeks of counselling with healers and coaches rather than 9 years (on average) of legal disputes which are really about milking the troubled families assets (drawing and quartering the divorce estates) into the lawyers pockets. Chuck in a one-in-a-lifetime family trip to Disney land, and the overtaxed Australian taxpayers would still come out ahead on the current lawyer-enrichment system. Most of these 100,000 per year distressed families mostly need counselling on personal relationships and financial and other aspects of life (after all more than half family breakdowns are due to financial problems - and that's before the expensive parade of lawyers come jousting in). Counselling on the things that they may have missed out on learning as they were growing up. Let's face it. Family lawyers are arrogant, argumentative, abusive, bullies. Hardly the skill set required to rescue a family on the brink of destruction. Are lawyers more or less likely to accelerate and aggravate the process, especially if there is rich booty, taxpayer subsidies and family assets to be plundered? Yes, the family breakdown industry is a $40 billion per annum industry, an engine room of the lawyers economy, and sole breadbasket for about 30,0000 (1 in 3) Australian 'legal' professionals. [NOTE: Like many #humanrights lawyers, who abhor the peculiar institution, the trafficking in families, the skin trade, call it what you will, I do query the 'legality' of it all.] Our MPs shed tears in #parliament and in the #media over Australian soldiers killed on active duty in #Afghanistan. But the reality is that only TWO Govt PAID Aussie Dads die each YEAR in #Afghanistan. While TWELVE Govt ABUSED Aussie Dads die EVERY DAY in Australia. http://bit.ly/gEy54l While not all of them are suicides too many of them are. And of course, no Government could or would accurately record suicides due to crooked government institutions and authorities practices. And of course for every one suicide that succeeds there are (according to former Australian of the Year Patrick McGorry) 8 or 9 failed attempts. And how many other kinds of self-harm, depression, anti-social behaviours falling short of attempted or 'successful' suicides. Imagine the ultimate tyranny, being driven to express thoughts of suicidal tendencies (ie self-harm) by extreme authoritarianism and lawyer abuse being labelled as actual violence (domestic violence against others). Our Lawyer MPs could easily prevent 2 Aussie Dads dying each year in Afghanistan. Just bring them home, like Whitlam brought the boys home from Vietnam in the early 70s. [Then, as in now, they should not be off Australian soil anyway, but that's another kind of taxpayer rorted, Government Class Welfare.] #FamilyLawFail was raised in the House of Representatives by Pauline Hanson in her #maidenspeech on 20 September 1996 (PaulineHanson spoke immediately after Joe Hockey delivered his #maidenspeech). It was also raised by the current Liberal Deputy Leader Julie Bishop MPs' predecessor, Mr Rocher when he was Deputy Speaker, in a dazzling if brief speech on the floor of the House of Representatives on 16 June 1997. So why do Julia Gillard, Robert McClelland, Tanya Pilbersek and more than a dozen MPs (all of them lawyers, like 99% of our MPs, Top Bureacrats and Judges) refuse to receive pettitions demanding that they investigate and address the unconstitutional killer human rights violations in their Family Law Courts? Why do our current Prime Minister and Attorney-General, our current crop of MPs keep throwing more taxpayer billions and more pages of authoritarian regulations, at making the situation worse? How bad must it be allowed to get, before the Government Class Welfare (to Lawyers) is cut-off and children and families are legally protected and no longer legally hunted, by the nations 30.0000 government protected family lawyers? James Johnson Solicitor & Barrister of the High Court of Australia (Celebrating 20 years of legal practice 1990-2010) Independent Federal Candidate for Lalor (Australian House of Representatives)