shivers:"One has to be stoney broke. One has to be almost homeless"

No. My ex received nearly 5 years of legal aid funding. The whole time she lived in Housing Commission accommodation, received the maximum entitlements to benefits and worked just enough to stay under the thresholds.

In 2003 her taxable income was just $15000, but her income after tax was nearly $30000 - equivalent to an income of well over $40,000. At the time, my own income was just $28000 before tax and I had to pay private rent and all my own court costs as well as a usurious amount of child support based on an income some 25% greater than I was actually earning.

shivers:"Legal Aid is now denied to Applicants in Family Law."

You're wrong again. I have checked NSW, Qld and Victoria's Legal Aid guidelines and they do not say anything of the kind. My ex was the applicant in no less than 5 legal aid-funded Family Law matters. The last was in 2004.

Shivers:"Parenting is the most challenging, busiest and frustrating occupation of all."

Rubbish. I share the care of my children 50:50 after fighting hard to get it and I run my own business and I have a full and engaging social life. If some women are not up to the same thing, perhaps they shouldn;t be given care of the children?

I used to instal telephony and other services for Optus and Telstra. I entered literally hundreds of homes, a great many of which were single-mother households. On several occasions I had to can the job because the house was simply too filthy to work in. I visited one house no less than 8 times to reconnect the cable TV - the "admirable" single mum would get each new boyfriend to connect in his name then when he inevitably left in a week or two it would be cut off until the next one came along.

I think that it might do some of the sheltered workshop types here some good to see just what sort of scumbags their policies are supporting.

Antiseptic (RadFem) - a determination of Legal Aid is also assessed in terms of the MERIT of the case being brought. Obviously your ex had considerable merit to her case or she would not have been awarded legal aid.
BTW : Educate yourself about Feminism
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YA13GNT8Mc&feature=player_embedded#!

ChazP:"a determination of Legal Aid is also assessed in terms of the MERIT of the case being brought."

Yes, it does, but merit is narrowly defined, a bit like the way family violence isn't.

Funnily enough, the ex LOST each of those matters. apparently the only ones o think her claims had merit were the girls at the Qld Women's Legal aid service.

Funnily enough, she stopped the legal shenanigans whe the legal aid people finally revoked their funding. I estimate the taxpayer spent about $20-25,000 on her behalf, while I spent over $10,000 and ended up self-representing.

Still, as you're unlikely to be a taxpayer, that would probably suit you. How much has the taxpayer spent on YOU?

As for your little video, I didn't see a single poverty-stricken, downtroddem woman anywhere. I did see a large number of people who obviously think that professing support for the currently dominant paradigm is going to do them some good in their careers. Just more self-promotion from an ideology that is all about self-promotion.

To vanna,
This is the author.
You stated that,

"The author gives no figures as regards the child abuse rates.

...

The author leaves out a lot of information, and is not to be trusted.
Posted by vanna, Tuesday, 7 December 2010 7:38:44 AM"

The excuse that mothers more often are the so-called abusers of children is a common myth by people who advocate for the so-called "father's rights" agenda. In fact, one prominent men's rights person claimed that research conducted by NSPPC in 2005 proved that mothers were the greatest dangers to children.

I contacted NSPPC and they replied stating the following:

"...our study never claimed or attempted to prove that 'mothers are a greater danger to children'...
o According to our study: 'These are interesting results, as it seems surprising that fear of fathers should be more common when mothers and fathers were both implicated in physical and emotional maltreatment, with figures for mothers’ involvement [in physical maltreatment] slightly higher than for fathers. Nobes et al (1999) suggest that fathers are slightly more likely than mothers to inflict severe punishment. One possible explanation for the greater fear of fathers, could be that fathers’ violent behaviour to the child might have been more serious, even if not more frequent, and another that fathers were violent to mothers’ (Cawson, 2002, p. 27).

‘These figures need to be located in the context of the gender division of labour in relation to child care. Women are much more likely to be involved in the day to day care of children than men, so it would appear that given men’s relative lack of involvement in such care, the figure of 40 per cent is high and replicates similar findings (Featherstone, 1996 cited in Featherstone and Evans, 2004, p. 28).
o These figures also need to be located in the context that 10% of sample had never lived with a father."

Again, you seem to be using the "father's rights" approach that has have misused, skewed and twisted the stats to "prove" a fallacy.

Don't.

Trish.

vanna,
You also stated:
"There was never any allegations of fathers abusing children under the 80:20 rule, and fathers were often looking after their children for up to 3 weeks at a time, because they had the children for half the school holidays.

The abuse card began to be waved around when fathers wanted to see their children more than every second weekend and half the school holidays."

Wrong again.

There were more no-contact orders given before the 1995 "reforms." After the reforms contact with a parent accused of violence increased at the interim level-that means that there was no real investigation into the validity of the allegations, so children were ordered to contact with an abusive parent by default. They couldn't ALL be innocent. Remember, that's when screening was also supposed to have started before being allowed to file.
Justice Fogarty wrote in 2006 that since bout 1996, no appeal ever found that child sexual abuse had occurred in FC.
This is despite the finding that child abuse was the "core business" of the FC, and the cases of child abuse were "real, serious and severe."
That is why Magellan was implemented.
Claiming that ALL of these fathers are "good fathers", but they're victims of women who just want to wave around the abuse card tec. is merely also waving around the common excuse by the accused that they "didn't do it."
It is not a novel notion to be told by a person accused of violence that they didn't do it.
Do you want to paint ALL fathers with the same "victim accused by lying mother" brush and ALL mothers as "lying"? It seems you are. Yet this tact has worked against protective fathers as well, such that the father's rights groups can take credit for the way that protective fathers have also been treated in the FC- same as the protective mothers.

THAT has created the child protection crisis.

Consequently, "Fathers rights" campaigners should hang their collective heads in shame. Just who are they advocating for?
Not abused children.

Trish.

Happy,
Looking at some statistics provided in another forum, there were about 6 children killed by their father in Australia in one year, while more children were killed by their mother.

About 250,000 children are born each year, giving about 3,750,000 children in Australia up to the age of 15.

6 children killed out of 3,750,000 is 0.00016 % of children.

But that is enough for the federal government to want to change the current laws.

I would think that the changes have nothing to do with children’s safety.

The changes have more to do with feminist propaganda designed to vilify and denigrate fathers, and the government is now responding to that propaganda so as to look good for the female vote.

I know of no other laws or programs enacted by the Labor party to improve children's safey, and children's safety was not a priority or a policy in the last election.