Examinator, you are very good at telling others they are wrong, & they should get the facts. However, you appear to be very short of facts, yourself.

In another post you told me Captain Bleigh had nothing to do with wild rivers, as if your statement made it fact, & now we get another "fact".

Well here's a couple for you.

In a 10 year period I ran a little group of manufacturing companies, behind the Gold Coast.

In this period I gave on average, a couple of young ladies their first ever job, each year. A couple were graduates, but most were working in assembly warehousing, or office areas, often all three, as many moved up the chain.

A couple didn't last long, as drugs, & grog made them unemployable, however of the twenty that started, six got pregnant, within 2 years. Two were accidents, & one of these still works there. However, four decided to get pregnant, & go on the be benifit.

Thats 20% for one fact.

Now the Gold Coast has some doctors who somehow get these young ladies on a benifit, as soon as they are pregnant. Three of these girls were gone the moment they could start bludging. The other worked as long as she could, before leaving.

She was back, looking for a job, about five months later, she didn't like the bludging life. She had a hard time, as she did not get anywhere near as much help [almost mone in fact] as the bludgers on the benifit.

She got no public housing, & when she did some extra work for a while, they decided she was rich, & took her health care card off her.

We had quite a few young mothers, both single, & with partners, working for us, as we had a policy that allowed them to take "kid" time off, any time required, without loss of pay, provided their important work was up to date. Most of the staff would help them out. This saved their sick pay for a real emergancy.

Hasbeen,

With all due respect you do tend to jump to conclusions by micro analyzing portions of what was said and miss the context.

I said Bligh ("being an awful woman" and her deals) had nothing to do with the topic posed NOT nothing to do with wild rivers ....I suggest you read the whole post in context.

I have no doubt that in your experience in one specific area of Qld lots of girls become deliberately pregnant etc but if you look at ALL the figures state or Aust wide you would be surprised how few BY COMPARISON there actually are.

I also note from other reports that 'professional' mums tend to occur more frequently in areas of lower economic average. It raises all sorts of possibilities when it come to causes.

i.e. Logan has more than Indooroopilly

Master:“Jewels, actually I'm quite the romantic (or was, I'm well past it now). There was nothing better in life than to spend those wonderful times with my wife, who I loved with all my heart, and still do even though she's left this planet. I go through a lot of torment when I try to rationalise my non belief in an afterlife with the fact that she's gone. I think it's something I'll never come to terms with.”

I remember your wife’s maiden name… I’m the same, can’t wrap my head around an afterlife. I have requested my family vaporize me, I want nothing left behind.

Now prior to marriage, and many a man must wonder... are there any little fatherless Masters out there?

Then there are all the poor men who discover after being a father to a child that oops, kid isn’t theirs. Didn’t Britain find a huge percentage of men were discovered not to be the real dad’s of children they’d raised?

Surely the more honest women in this scenario actually buggered off to raise a child alone.

“But I do have support from loved ones, so I'm ok.”

Good, it’s important and you remain where the memories are.

Mog:”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.”

You could all start with the children who have neither their mother or father as they need society to help them even more than the others. Help the state wards first.

Piper

The statistics for "misattributed paternity" is 20-30% of 0.025% of Australian men.

A lot of fuss was made of the 20-30% figure, but it applies only to a minute sub-set of men - 0.025%.

"But this minuscule, highly skewed group has a very different rate of misattributed paternity from the rest of us - the other 99.975%. One way to track the percentage of misattributed paternity for the general (and trusting) population is by certain medical conditions that can be passed to the children if, and only if, both parents carry the condition. This tells us that in the general Australian population (and most of Western society), misattributed paternity is around 1-5%, and usually much closer to 1% than 5%. This backs up a 2001 Australian sex survey that looked at 10,173 adults who had been in a regular relationship for over a year. This survey found that 2.9% of women had more than one sexual partner over that year."

and

"The 30% figure is a very dramatic one, and is endlessly trotted out by the media. It is also publicised by two other groups - first, support groups for the fathers who are indeed not biologically related to one or more of their children, and second, the Paternity Laboratories who charge for the tests."

Please read the link below for the full story.

http://abc.gov.au/science/articles/2006/06/02/1646546.htm

As you are no doubt already aware there are plenty of people who will grab at any reason to denigrate mothers and this 30% figure is just one of them.

As Examinator pointed out:

"STATISTICS ARE GENERALISATIONS. Raw numbers open to various alternatives. Their value depends on how they were collected."

Fractelle
"why you singled out Chazp... "and others" "
It was Chazp discussion point that had such a factually poor foundation and the others that were writing at the time were going off in their prejudice driven axe grindings. with perspectives that
Years at the coal face has taught me that stats are for holistic planing (perhaps)but bear no relationship to the day to day specifics.
All the arguments tend to emphasize their personal bias by generalizing on that 'personalized prism'. A bit like defining a pile of coloured gravel by describing a few different coloured pebbles.
Besides I don't want to get involved in a heated war unless it is based on solid facts.
Weak? perhaps. Ambiguous how so?
There isn't enough substance to the arguments thus far. Most respond with soft and highly unreliable data. As I said to Hasbeen what one sees in one part of a state or the country doesn't necessarily follow for the whole.

It appears that three different questions are becoming entangled here. The first question is whether these men have an obligation to at least offer financial and emotional support to the mother. It appears that almost all posters think that the answer is yes.

The second question is whether these dads also have rights to see their child. I think so.

The third question is the most hotly contested. How do we get those dads who won't honour their obligations to change their ways?

In the past, we have relied largely on social pressure to get these men to do the right thing by the mother. This is a powerful weapon but it won't get any more men to change because it has already been tried so extensively.

We could also look at the current child support arrangements. The current system is so unpopular that many women refuse to name the father (if they know) and many men use tactics like tax evasion or going onto welfare. If the demands made of men were less unreasonable, more men might accept them.

If the parents were in long term relationships, the number of these babies would also reduce. In the past, society has pressured people not to sleep around. Whatever one’s opinion of the morality of this, it has been tried and hasn’t worked. I believe that the quality of advice given to (heterosexual) women about men is one area that could easily be improved. We no longer talk about how to distinguish between men who love them and pick-up artists, because of paternalistic ideas about self-esteem. Whatever people think about her right to make choices, lets make these choices informed.