*You confuse fact with subjective interpretation.*

Well Pymchme, biology is generally backed up by a huge amount of
evidence, but that is another story.

*then it would be just as much in a female's interest to spread her own about wouldn't it*

Have you ever heard of the milkman, postman, poolboy etc, being the
real father? DNA tests show its true and not just myth.

*In the interest of mixing up the genes, she'd be just as irresistably driven to having a baby every year.*

and who would feed all those babies? Popping them out is not a
problem for humans, feeding them for years and years is another story.

*Group sex would then be the norm, with one woman to several partners in rapid succession, so that the most superiour sperm could out race all the others to the egg.*

Well its common in chimps etc, where mothers don't need a partner
to feed the offspring. Its common in some women too, so men
invest an ejaculation and run for cover when it comes to the offspring, for there is no guarantee that its theirs.

To get a partner to stick around, it helps to at least delude him
that its his kid. So the fling with the milkman is seldom mentioned lol.

*That is, sex is not only performed in the interest of reproduction. It may also be seen to have a function as an expression of trust and intimacy between people.*

Sex as pleasure evolved for good reasons. You'll find that if there
is no sex in a relationship, males generally don't stick around to
help feed the offspring.

*Gee Yabbs, that enables you to blame the "woman". *

I am not blaming anyone, but explaining to you how nature works.
You raised the issue of biology, I am explaining the bits that
you clearly don't understand

I was a single father once and one of my daughters mother would turn up in a wheelchair in court. I challenged the judge for lawyers to prove she needed a wheelchair and so he ordered this. They provided an affidavit of a doctor that she needed a wheelchair, just that I then made clear a vet is not qualified to make such a statement and the affidavit got withdrawn. The judge then stated (seeing the mother via monitor from another state (only seeing her shoulders and face) that he could see she needed a wheelchair. Since when is a judge a doctor? And since my daughter turned to age the mother no longer uses a wheelchair. And she refused to pay child support while my daughter was underage. Then I got a letter from CSA asking me to forgo the outstanding overdue child support and this I refused. Now, my daughter is 24 and I am getting the child support finally and only because I refused to cancel it!
When we have all this going on about deadbeat fathers it is too often ignored there are many deadbeat mothers also! Up to my daughter being 20 years old CSA had refused to collect any child support from the mother despite my numerous request (and registered court orders). As such it seems DOUBLE STANDARDS. They kept telling me that with non-custodian mothers there were different rules that apply.
Really?

Generaly speaking I agree that mising fathers evade Responsibiliy for their children.
1.The question is what happen when they do not know that they are fathers (temporary relations, moved in an other place etc, relations with two or males simultaneously, I read in Sweden 5 males claimed the fathership for a child ), what hapen if the male knows that he is father but the woman rejects the support from the father, because she is married and prefer to avoid family problems etc. There are some cases where fathers are missing not because they try to avoid to undertake their responsibilities BUT for other reasons.
2. What are father's responsibilities? Most fathers believe that their only responsibilities are the financial support for the child. Logicaly both parens have the same responsibilities and rights on their child/children, that means they should share the "cost" for their child/children. Most times is the mother who leaves her job, who destroys her carier, her future, who becomes fully dependant from the father BECAUSE THE FATHER DOES NOT UNDERTAKE EQUAL RESPONSIBILITIES AS THE MOTHER.
From studies we know that if both parents care their child it has higher probabilities to be more healthy and more succesfull. In Australia the law does not encourage employee fathers to spent more time with their children.
3. Bigger problem exist with the missing fathers or devorsed fathers. I had in my workplace a father who lives in the same city with his children (Adelaide)and did not see his children for four years. I try to convince him to see his children, even I promised to pay the gifts for his children but he did not care. He said he pays money for his children and mothing else.
4. Personaly, I was devorsed and my children was overseas with their mother, I sold my property, and I brought my children with me in Australia, working full time and caring three children.
5. We can not create a better future if we do not care our children, if we do not care ALL the children.
Antonios Symeonakis
Adelaide

R0bert:"dropping CSA would not satify the desire to make parents meet their responsibilities."

The CSA doesn't actually accomplish that. The rate of unemployment among CSA "payer parents" is massively high - around 40% on the last data I saw, which is hardly conducive to meeting responsibility or to being a productive member of society. Each of those men costs the state several hundred a week on top of the cost of supporting the mother and children.

Additionally, of the money which is transferred, most is transferred privately, with the CSA having an automatic role only when at least one of the parents is receiving more than the base rate of FTB Part A or some other Centrelink benefit. They still claim the private transfers as part of their justification for existence, even though they have no part in them.

Also, if the OP's claim of men deliberately avoiding being identified is correct, it is hardly achieving the goal of making them meet their parental responsibility to be good carers, role models and advisors to their children. By focussing on the narrow financial aspect of responsibility we seem to have lost sight of the broader picture.

Is the aim to ensure kids are properly cared for or an ideological desire to punish fathers who mothers don't want around?

The Parkinson report worked out the cost of raising children and Centrelink knows the cost of supporting single mothers who choose not to work. It should be a simple matter to calculate a general levy on all taxpayers to raise the funds needed.

Children are a public social good and as such everyone benefits, not merely the parents. Even gay people had to come from somewhere and will require someone to look after them in their age and infirmity so why should they and the other childless be exempt from paying for the "production" of those future workers?

Whatever our society does, it is clear the CSA is a failure on all sorts of levels. abolish it and free up $1billion or so that could be paid to support children.

R0bert: 'For those wondering at ChazP's approach to fathers involvement in childrens lives have a look at http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=9151#145809'

R0bert again: ‘I think that ChazP has enough history on this topic to take the post at face value. Not a troll, just a strong anti-father bias. Have a browse through ChazP's posting history.’

Robert, you sound like a rape prosecutor inviting the court to consider the alleged victim’s shady past. ChazP simply made a post about missing father's and their drain on the public purse. Not a nice fact of life, but a fact of life nonetheless. And I personally know at least a dozen women who have or have had to live with this fact of life.

What ChazP has is not ‘a strong anti-father bias’ – only a strong refusal to kow-tow to the hypocritical emotional blackmail that you trot out on every divorce and gender thread. You provide this link as supposed evidence of her stony-hearted inability to sufficiently empathise with some anonymous father’s totally subjective, one-side account of having driven 3,000 miles to see his children (why not just catch a plane?), only to have Ethel the Cruel-Hearted Ex fail to show up at the proposed meeting place (maybe she just got the times mixed up).

In that particular past exchange you talked of men’s lives being ‘… torn to pieces under the pretense of childrens best interest which was really about mothers wants and interests’.

Whoa! Yet, after this stunning piece of rampant anti-mother bias, you then have the audacity to say this:

‘Enough of these gender wars … Continuing to make it about gender does nothing to help children.’

Oh, really? Well, if it’s not about gender, then practice some of the gender balance that you demand of others, especially the women here. Writing post after post after post about a fictitious divorce system that only looks after ‘mother’s wants and interests' to the exclusion of fathers and children is not exactly practicing what you preach.

Antiseptic I agree with you! (It must be the lunar eclipse or something).Child support based on biological parentage should be abolished and there should be a tax-budget allocation for all children (regardless of whether their parents live together) approach. Children are a public good - the future in fact and the childless will still need to be looked after in age and infirmity by the younger generations, even if they haven't directly produced some. Forcing one parent to pursue the other parent in order to have enough to house and feed the children has only produced grief and division. In many cases both parents are low income earners and each dollar taken from the other produces a sum of misery and hatred. The determined wealthy child support avoiders are also usually tax avoiders - use the force of the Commonwealth to pursue tax evasion. The public policy project of using child support as father bait should be buried.