By Bettina Arndt
“The Family Court system is in enormous trouble.” That’s a momentous statement given that the speaker, former judge and now Adelaide barrister Stuart Lindsay, has dealt with more than 2000 family law cases. But there’s much more… This experienced insider blames the parlous state of this vital institution on a campaign led by the Labor party to “promote a particular pronounced feminist ideology in the Family Law Act.”
Lindsay spent ten years, from 2004-2014, working as a judge in the Federal Circuit court dealing mainly with family court matters. He’s now back working as special counsel for a local firm, on the coalface of a system he sees as being in dire straits.
He’s been right there, witnessing the destructive impact of feminist ideology infiltrating the family law system, destroying the lives of so many ordinary families. Lindsay explains the big push started with Prime Minister Julia Gillard, but Kevin Rudd was right on board, as successive Labor governments have “tried to ensure judges provide for right outcomes in accordance with the invariably feminist ideology.”
The play sheet at the heart of this ideology is domestic violence, namely the nonsensical feminist claim that all other considerations regarding the best interests of children must be swept aside by the need to protect youngsters from dangerous dads. This incentivises false allegations of violence since they give women immense power throughout the family law process.
During my conversation with him it was utterly fascinating to hear this former judicial officer describing what it was like being on the receiving end of feminist efforts to insert domestic violence into every part of the Family Law Act, requiring judges to endlessly “dip their lid to this particular notion.”
Judges must “bend the knee and give recognition to these political declarations,” says Lindsay, even though, when proper evidence is presented to the court, many domestic violence allegations are withdrawn or fall apart. But by then, the allegations have often been successfully used to have fathers removed from the home and denied contact with children; with the accuser given endless advantages, including financial benefits when it comes to negotiating her way through the system.
The consequences have been dire. “The Family Law Act has promoted great wickedness throughout Australian society for 50 years,” declared Stuart Lindsay.
I had pages of questions I planned to ask the good judge but in the end most of our conversation focused on the influence of feminism on the Family Court system because it has been taboo to name this powerful enemy as responsible for much of the damage to the institution. Lindsay says emphatically that the Court is in the worst shape it has been in for many decades.
He’s keen to point out that the rot has set in “not just in the legislation, not just the way the court operates.” He also blames Commonwealth bureaucrats in the Attorney Generals Department (now 70% female) who are responsible for writing the legislation and making decisions about the structure of the court system – a system which now includes huge numbers of relatively inexperienced, largely female registrars, often keen to toe the party line.
Key professional law groups have also been captured, with the Law Societies and Bar Associations across the country now “dutifully enlisted into these ideological excursions.”
As an example of how the feminist ideology is playing out in court, Lindsay discusses the latest changes to the Family Law Act – new legislation snuck through parliament by Labor on the last sitting day last year, which gives more of the marital assets to alleged victims of domestic violence.
Lindsay says this new law sets judges “an impossible task”, requiring them to perform “acts of political theatre” as they try to find evidence of the impact of domestic violence, often over long decades in a marriage. The result will be a “huge waste of resources”, with trials needlessly extended, and vastly more paperwork racking up the billable hours for expensive lawyers. And for the families concerned, the pain, the distress will be needlessly intensified by this ideological exercise. And for what? Lindsay predicts that it will not change how assets are divided.
Equally compelling are Lindsay’s strong views on other key failings of the court. In particular, there is the failure of the court to enforce parenting orders, and the lack of penalties for false allegations.
In discussing the damage caused to the authority of the court through the enforcement failure, Lindsay makes it clear that there are remedies – judges can take action in cases where parents flaunt orders. He tells the story of a case where he decided to send the mother to prison after the court had thrown out her child sexual abuse allegation, but she still refused to allow the father access to the children. He pronounced his sentence but when the time came to take the woman away, the court officials were all in a flutter. It had never been done before! They had to rapidly work out a procedure for taking the woman into custody.
Regarding penalties for false allegations, Lindsay described a similar case where a mother had sworn a false affidavit regarding abuse by the father, which she used to keep the children away from her ex-husband. The perjury case was referred to the Attorney General’s Department – “They weren’t interested,” Lindsay reports. Attempts to prosecute the case privately ended up in the District Court but came unstuck when the prosecutors refused to proceed.
That’s what happens when all our institutions are captured. The rot has set in everywhere.
The interview with Stuart Lindsay is a first. It should be a big news story that this former judge has been so outspoken in acknowledging the failures of the Family Court system, the ideological capture of the institution, and most of all, the damage this feminist campaign is causing to our community.
Please help ensure that this important video reaches a large audience. Send it to journalists, lawyers, anyone who should be interested in hearing the truth about what’s going on in our Family Courts. Here’s the link.
We’ve put together a number of short videos to promote his unprecedented statements on social media – see here and here. Look at this fun meme about judges bending the knee to feminists! Please help me get these out there.
My conversation with Stuart Lindsay ended with discussion of what can be done about the derailing of this major institution. This is where you come in.
We are currently lobbying politicians on key issues prior to the forthcoming election and this is one of our priorities. It is essential that we convince the Opposition parties that there is massive support for winding back Labor’s disastrous changes to the Family Law Act last year.
Late last year, Shadow Attorney-General Michaelia Cash said the parenting changes “send a very disturbing message” to Australian families. The Opposition has committed to repeal Anthony Albanese’s changes to family law if it wins the next election – including the removal of the clauses related to shared parenting.
We must hold them to this promise. Yet we are told the Liberal Party isn’t convinced there’s major support in the community for this move. This is very odd, considering that John Howard had a 4% increase in popularity when he first promoted shared parenting.
One million votes
After John Howard introduced the reforms supporting shared parental responsibility there followed a succession of Labor governments determined to wind this all back. Interestingly, when Kevin Rudd was considering doing this, he warned it could prove tricky. “We’ve got to get this right—there’s a million votes riding on it, and that’s not an exaggeration,” he announced at a press conference on April 29, 2009.
Surely those million votes are still there, even though we dropped the ball and remained largely silent while Labor and the Greens pushed through last year’s disastrous changes. Given the ever-increasing toll on Australian families from the Family Court system there have to be many more than a million men and their families who know how important it is to protect children’s right to have fathers as part of their lives. Every time a father is denied contact, so many people are affected – grandparents, new partners, often his entire extended family and friendship group.
Many of you will be part of these networks. I need you all to step up now and get them all on board.
It’s very simple to do your bit. You just need a couple of minutes to put your postcode into our automated system here – https://familylaw.lumient.com.au/
Local members from Opposition parties will receive a draft letter warning we expect them to follow through on their promise. The letter for Labor politicians and their Green/Teal cronies explains this was a key issue in deciding not to vote for them.
These are very short letters, as required by our automated system. But we also have longer versions which you can adapt to send to all your local candidates. The one for Opposition candidates is here. And the one for Labor/Teal/Green candidates is here. You will need to cut and paste this draft into an email in order to edit it. You may have to adapt the letter to suit candidates who don’t fall into these two categories.
To find your Federal MP and local senators click on this LINK. It would be great if you could also find out if there are new Opposition candidates for your electorate and send letters to them as well. This link will help you do that. You will have to do some minor editing to make the draft letter suitable for someone who has not previously been in parliament.
We really need you to recruit as many people as possible to spend a few minutes sending off these letters. We have to convince politicians that feminists speak for a small minority on this vital issue.
Other Parties.
Don’t forget the minor parties. When you are sending off letters to Senators, take a few minutes to redraft the letter to offer congratulations to the rare people who actually voted against Labor’s changes.
These were One Nation Senators Pauline Hanson and Malcolm Roberts, and UAP’s Ralph Babet. They deserve support.
And watch out for new Libertarian candidates. The Libertarians (formerly the Liberal Democrats) have made a major effort to develop Family Law policies which include shared parenting proposals, proper evidence supporting domestic violence allegations, enforcement of parenting orders with penalties for breaches and “a national apology to all parents and children alienated from one another through the family law system in recognition of the injustice and hurt suffered by parents denied access to their children due to court orders made on mere allegations.” Many of these are very sensible ideas and worth supporting. Their candidates are listed here.
We get the governments we deserve. Ditto the Family Law system. We really only have ourselves to blame for being asleep at the wheel and allowing feminists to take control of this vital institution impacting on so many Australian families.
It’s time for those million plus voters to stand up and give a mighty roar of protest at this shameful state of affairs. Making sure candidates for the next election are aware of what’s going on is only the beginning. But it’s a good place to start.
About the Author
Bettina Arndt is a leading Australian journalist and social commentator who has been writing across a broad range of topics since the 1970s. She has been the only mainstream journalist in Australia to consistently speak out about the rampant abuses in the country’s massively destructive domestic violence industry.
Bettina Arndt recently hosted a major conference in Sydney titled The Presumption of Innocence. You can read more about it HERE.
You can read more about her colourful career at her Wikipedia entry HERE. You can follow her most recent work on her Substack page HERE.
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