John Stapleton spent a quarter of a century working as a general news reporter for two of Australia’s leading mastheads, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian. He is currently the editor of A Sense of Place Magazine and is the author of a number of books, including Terrorism in Australia: Workers’ Paradise Lost and Unfolding Catastrophe: Australia.
His latest book, Failure Family Law Reform Australia, released in late February 2025, is a scathing critique of Australia’s family law system, timed to mark the 50th anniversary of the Family Law Act of 1975. As a veteran journalist and founding producer of the long-running radio program Dads on the Air, Stapleton brings decades of observation and personal engagement to this work. The book argues that what began as a progressive reform – introducing no-fault divorce and a supposedly ‘helping’ Family Court – has devolved into a bureaucratic, ideologically driven nightmare that has harmed millions of Australian families. It’s a story of seemingly good intentions gone catastrophically wrong, and Stapleton doesn’t pull punches in laying blame at the feet of politicians, judges, and a resistant legal establishment.
Key Point 1: The Broken Promise of the Family Law Act
The book opens with a stark assertion: ‘The Year 2025 marks the 50th anniversary of the passing of the Family Law Act, the single most intrusive and destructive piece of legislation ever passed the Australian Parliament.’ Stapleton contends that the Act, hailed in the 1970s as a step towards gender equality and human divorce, quickly betrayed its promise. Instead of fostering cooperation and shared parenting, the Family Court became ‘a law unto itself’, prioritising sole custody – usually maternal – over joint arrangements, despite evidence of the harm this causes children and non-custodial parents, often fathers. Stapleton paints a vivid picture of the court’s early days: ‘Far from caring, helpful court promoting joint custody and cooperation after separation, as its founders envisaged, the Family Court rapidly became … overly legalistic, enormously bureaucratic, secretive, and unaccountable.’ This shift, he argues, wasn’t an accident but a product of ideological extremism – rooted in feminist advocacy – and political cowardice.
Key Point 2: The Human Cost
‘No-fault divorce’ was presented by its advocates as a humanising effort to allow marriages deemed ‘irretrievably broken’ to be terminated without the necessity of a court trial, painful testimony, and some finding of guilt. Ultimately, however, ‘no-fault’ divorce became the way of making marriage only provisional. The institution shifted from being a strong contract into being a remarkably weak contract; one which is in force insofar as both parties ‘feel’ equally committed to the relationship. Hence, it does not come as a surprise that the divorce rate has skyrocketed and divorce has become the norm rather than the exception. This should be a cause of great concern. There are tremendous costs all around us when marriages break up. According to the late Dr Barry Maley, who was one of our nation’s leading sociologists, ‘divorce is a common factor in wider social problems of crime, suicide, violence, poverty, child abuse, and educational social performance’. Accordingly, the real strength of Stapleton’s book lies in his focus on the human toll. He writes, ‘In terms of human suffering, the Australian public has already paid dearly for the family to fix outdated, badly administered and inappropriate institutions dealing with family breakdown.’
This isn’t abstract – through his years with Dads on the Air, Stapleton has heard the stories firsthand: fathers denied access to their kinds on flimsy pretexts, mothers trapped in adversarial battles, and children caught in the wreckage. One extract highlights the emotional weight: ‘The Family Court and its co-called evil sister the Child Support Agency have remained remarkably resistant to reform and indifferent to the public odium them attract.’ It is a line that resonates with anyone who is felt the system’s cold indifference. Stapleton does not just lament; he accuses. He sees the courts as a ‘cash cow for lawyers’ and ‘the single most hated jurisdiction in the country’, a sentiment that will strike a chord with many people sceptical of bloated bureaucracies.
Contrary to popular belief, child support payments have nothing to do with irresponsible fathers abandoning their children. Developed in the late 1980s to outset the jurisdiction of the courts, the nation’s child support scheme was largely driven by the need to ensure that private transfers of money from fathers to mothers reduced the burden of the state in terms of welfare expenditure. According to law professor Patrick Parkinson, the support scheme provides ‘perverse incentives … for primary caregivers to resist children spending more time with the other parent to avoid a reduction in the child support obligation’. As far as possible, he adds, these perverse incentives must be avoided, ‘…and legislative policies in these areas should be in harmony rather than conflict.’
Over one million Australian children are currently living without their fathers and the legislation underpinning the family court system and the child support scheme has been a major factor contributing to the present crisis of fatherlessness in this country. There is a clear link between the child support scheme and attempts to eradicate the relationship between children and fathers. These fathers are paying support through the government yet alienated from their children. Given that child support is calculated on the number of nights children spend with fathers, a moral hazard is created that can tempt a primary carer to withhold access for the basest of reasons, money.
Many women today can contemplate divorce with greater confidence that the financial benefits might outweigh the losses. For men, by contrast, a particular cause of dismay has been the imminent loss of contact with children they have loved, protected, and helped raise. A common scenario is where the wife leaves, taking the children with her – and sometimes all the furniture too. These wives get custody of the children, most of the value of the family house, and the child support agency ensures that the victimised husbands pay support for children they rarely see. Another familiar scenario is where the husband is forced to pay the mortgage payments but forced to leave the family home immediately and pay rent for a separate residence for himself.
Key Point 3: Failed Reforms and Political Inaction
A central thread in Stapleton’s book is the repeated failure of reform efforts. He carefully revisits key moments – like John Howard’s 2003 inquiry into shared custody, which garnered public support but fizzled out, or the 2006 Family Law Amendment (Shared Parental Responsibility) Act, dismissed as ‘too little too late and too easily overturned’. He is scathing about the political class: ‘Australia’s politicians are frightened of the very monster they created,’ pointing to the influence of ‘hundreds of taxpayer-funded women’s legal services, advocacy groups, refugees, and an armada of feminist academics and activist judges’. An extract from the introduction captures this frustration: ‘While our politicians could take us into unwise multi-billion-dollar wars on the toss of a coin … fixing our own internal war against fathers and fatherhood … has proven beyond our political class.’ And I particularly appreciate this disturbing piece of information in the book:
The adversarial nature of family encouraged false accusations from the earliest days of its formation. Changes which have set in since the turn of the millennium ensures there is no consequence for making false accusations, at least on the mother’s part, and has simply made the situation worse … family law became little more than a criminal assault on half of the population, a justification for stripping men of their assets, their dignity and their purpose in life. The high suicide rate amongst separated men was of no concern to the perpetrators.
Key Point 4: A Broader Societal Failure
Stapleton then goes on to argue that family law’s dysfunction reflects a deeper democratic rot. ‘The country’s failure to reform family law and child support is ultimately a failure of democracy itself,’ he writes. He sees the Act’s history as ‘an enduring example of ideological extremism, political opportunism and bureaucratic refusal to take seriously the voices of those they are meant to serve’. This isn’t just about divorce courts – it’s about how ideology, unchecked ‘metastasized across institutions to damage an entire society’. It is a warning about how apparently ‘progressive’ ideals, when hardened into dogma, erode trust and facture communities. ‘No one can go through the expensive rigmarole of a Family Court trial and emerge with the slightest respect for the lawyers who profit from this foul system, or the politicians who have allowed this travesty of public administration to spread its poison down the generations,’ Stapleton writes.
Key Point 5: The Role of Dads on the Air
According to Stapleton, ‘Overly legalistic, enormously bureaucratic, secretive, unaccountable and extremely ideological, defying community norms of morality and propriety, [the Family Court] soon became one of the country’s most hated institutions.’ Historically, this court denies contact with children on the flimsiest of excuses or most ludicrous accusation. One can hear the testimony of countless husbands whose wives have run off and been awarded sole custody of children, while they are cruelly alienated from their children and expected to pay child support, and sometimes even spouse maintenance.
Stapleton then weaves in his personal journey with Dads on the Air, DOTA, as it became commonly known, which he co-founded in 2000. ‘While hampered by the secrecy provisions in family law, which have worked effectively to keep the general public ignorant of the worst excesses of the court, its most farcical judgments and its repeated failure to take child protection issues seriously, particularly when those issues are raised by fathers, Dads on the Air has done its best to expose the court’s practices and its many dirty little secrets.’ This program also placed Stapleton on a front-row seat to the family court reform saga, and its archives, which, he writes, forms ‘a fascinating history of the men’s and fatherhood movement’.
Extracts and Style
Stapleton’s prose is direct and unsparing, blending journalistic precision with a storyteller’s flair. Another extract reads: ‘Far from being a helping court its founders told the public they imagined, it has become an enduring symbol of good intentions gone wrong, of the initial idealism of the left turning into a totalitarian nightmare visited upon millions of Australian families.’ He recalls moments of hope – like Philip Ruddock’s 2005 reforms – but laments their dilution: ‘The many thousands of volunteer groups that members of fathers and family law had put into pushing for reform were ignored.’ This personal angle adds warmth to the critique. It is not just about policy wonkery; it is a fight he has lived alongside countless others
Conclusion: A Call to Reflect
After reading Failure Family Reform Australia, it is simply not possible to disagree from its author that established as a ‘progressive’ social reform of the Whitlam Labor government, the Family Law Act of 1975 is ‘the most impactful and destructive legislation to ever pass the Parliament’. It is hard indeed to imagine the amount of pain and suffering this legislation has created. However, this book doesn’t offer easy solutions and Stapleton seems more intent on autopsy than prescription. But it is a compelling elegy for a system that has failed its people, and a challenge to rethink how Australia handles its most intimate fractures. Stapleton definitely is an excellent writer and his latest book a sobering tale of institutional overreach, human cost, and a democracy too timid to fix its own messes. It truly is an important book that demands a proper response and I thoroughly recommend it to all those with enough compassion and emotional fortitude for doing so.
Professor Augusto Zimmermann PhD, LLM, LLB, CIArb is a former member of the Law Reform Commission in Western Australia and a former associate dean (research) at Murdoch University, School of Law. He is also the President and Founder of WALTA Legal Theory Association.
Failure Family Reform Australia by John Stapleton can be ordered here.