MENZ Issues: news and discussion about New Zealand men, fathers, family law, divorce, courts, protests, gender politics, and male health.

Media Release

Parents for Children

Child Support Act Creates Unjust and Inequitable Situation for Student Loan Borrowers

Parents for Children have been supporting a father, who has a student debt, though the Family Court child support departure order process. The dad was seeking a variation to the rigid child support formula assessment (a Departure Order) to take into account his compulsory student loan repayments when calculating the amount of child support he was assessed to pay. The applicant was a self represented litigant supported by a McKenzie friend from Parents for Children.

The basis of the application for a variation from the rigid child support formula was that compulsory student loan repayments significantly reduced the capacity of this dad to support his son. In his decision, dated July 28 2005 , the Family Court Judge agreed with the fathers position that the student loan repayments were necessary and that the applicants ability to support his son, due to compulsory student loan repayments, was significantly reduced.
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Hamilton police will decide this week whether to charge two women who made separate false rape complaints at the weekend.

Detective Sergeant Nigel Keall said police spent time and resources investigating the women’s complaints.

“It’s just a waste of resources that could have been used elsewhere.”
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Senior investigators estimate that between 60 and 80 per cent of rape complaints made by women are false.

Mr Keall said false complaints tainted the community’s perception of sexual offending and the genuine victims who needed support.

He said there was also a difference between people making complaints of stranger rapes and making allegations against a specific person, which could sometimes be malicious.

A parliamentary committee has rejected a call for a royal commission of inquiry into the case of convicted childcare worker Peter Ellis.
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A petition calling for a top-level look at the creche case has been with Parliament’s justice and electoral select committee for two years.

Committee chairman Tim Barnett said today a royal commission was not the most effective way to address the real issues emerging from the case.

The committee made seven recommendations including that the attorney-general not oppose, or oppose only in principle, a proposed application by Ellis for leave to appeal to the Privy Council.

Is the glare of publicity too harsh for Family Courts to endure?, ask Citizens for Justice. They note that:

On or about 29 July 2005, at about 5pm, exactly 29 days – just 4 weeks and 1 day – after the new “Care of Children Act 2004″ came into effect, all those beautiful Family Court Flowers [ie: published FC decisions] had mysteriously died, or at least, disappeared, leaving little trace in the blackened and scorched earth that remained. The entire list, published and presented for general, global public consumption on the Family Courts’ website, at http://www.justice.govt.nz/family/decisions/ had suddenly, without apparent warning or explanation, been deleted, the link deactivated, and replaced on almost every page on the site, with charcoal lettering as shown below

C4J goes on to explain to the uninitiated about how to retrieve old web pages from search engine caches, so all the cases (which have been unwisely left on the site) , have now been safely downloaded to at least half a dozen personal archives around the country.

It seems someone whose case was published has complained.

The Family Court says:

“The decisions have been removed due to updates taking
place. They should be up and running within the next few days.

Some items in the media about the Christchurch Men’s Issues Summit.

In Father & Child Magazine Issue 30, Winter 2005 Page 18:

Another forum touts the message that men are hard done by. It has all the ingredients of another expensive failure, writes Harald BreidingBuss.
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Now, eight years later, we have had a ‘Men’s Forum’. This time around the event started in Auckland, and is now in the process of being exported to Christchurch as well. Instead of the Governor General (which at the moment is female) the organisers picked John Tamihere as their high profile person. Unwittingly, choosing a ‘yesterday’s man’ like Tamihere is symptomatic for the rest of the lineup, which almost entirely consists of the recycled remnants of a national fathers committee I once tried to create: the “NZ Father & Child Society”.

That was also in 1998, and I guess it is telling that in those seven intervening years this group has failed to bring any new faces to the fore. Although I created it to support a national approach for developing on the ground services for fathers, the resulting group never wanted to go there. Like ‘Fathering the Future’ they saw the way forward in pestering the media with opinions rather than being there for dads when they are needed. Without any work going into building up the base, no new people could emerge, and, like ‘Fathering the Future’ the group was quickly heading for either oblivion or insignificance.

Nevertheless, two of the speakers in the upcoming Christchurch Forum chose to use ‘NZ Father & Child Society’ in identifying their credentials, although they have no connection with the work linked to the name Father & Child, such as this magazine, our teen dads project or our work in the area of childbirth.

Ironically, all of the speakers at the forum are worth listening to. But while once more the political world, and political correctness, will be slammed for neglecting men, and changes will be called for, no group or organisation emerges that could actually institute such change.

And so we will have another few days, perhaps a couple of weeks, where organisers and/or speakers can bask in the glory of being quoted in the media before patting each other on the back for a job well done and going back to business as usual.

Frankly, who needs it?

After the summit:

Christchurch think tank issues call to address issue of gender balance before it swings in the opposite direction

Major social problems are being forecast, as women increasingly break through the career glass ceiling and take on top jobs.

A Men’s Issues summit in Christchurch has heard nearly 60 percent of tertiary students are now women.

Massey University’s Centre for Public Policy Evaluation director Stuart Birks says in two decades women in senior management positions could outnumber men.

Under the heading: Experts reject theory of male early-life crisis , Keri Welham notes:

New Zealand experts have dismissed a British study that claims men are more likely to suffer an early-life crisis than the traditional mid-life variety.

Then a passing mention of the Men’s Issues Summit:

The pressures facing men were canvassed at a summit in Christchurch on Friday. Featuring outspoken Labour MP John Tamihere, the summit looked at issues such as violence and boys lagging behind girls in education.

Rex McCann, director of an Auckland-based support group, Essentially Men, told The Press the supposed new early-life crisis phenomenon would not replace the “mid-life transition”, a recognised identity crisis that hits men in their 40s.

“You can’t have an identity crisis until you’ve got your identity formed,” he said.

Press Release: Society For Promotion Of Community Standards Inc.
Bradford’s Repeal of s. 59 Criminalises all Parents

Ms Bradford’s private members bill – the Crimes (Abolition of Force as a Justification for Child Discipline) Amendment Bill – that repeals section 59 of the Crimes Act 1961, was referred to the Justice and Electoral Committee last week following its first reading. Ms Bradford is no doubt well intentioned in wanting to address the serious problem she calls “the culture of violence” against children in our country. However, the Society believes the repeal of s. 59 will do nothing to address the root causes or shocking symptoms of this violence. Instead it will have a seriously negative impact on many families whose parents seek to and effectively apply good parenting techniques in the discipline of their children.

Ms Bradford and her supporters such as Ms Beth Wood, spokeswoman for UNICEF and anti-smacking group Epoch (End Physical Punishment of Children), Dr Cindy Kiro, Children’s Commissioner and Kaye Crowther, Plunket president, are determined to remove all legal protections to good parents who choose to smack their kids for serious wrongdoing as a means of discipline. The Explanatory note to the bill states that “the repeal of section 59 ought not revive any old common law justification, excuse or defence [for the use of “reasonable force” including smacking] that the provision may have codified.”
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The vast majority of New Zealand parents deeply love their children, do all they can to correctly discipline their children so they learn that there are consequences to wrongdoing and abhor all forms of child abuse and violence against children. It is these outstanding loving parents who would be criminalised if Ms Bradford’s bill became law. She and her misguided supporters deliberately conflate the controlled and measured use of smacking with “abuse” and “violence”. By the fallacious substitution of some pejorative noun such as “hitting”, “violence”, “assault” or “abuse” for “smacking”, they have attempted to subvert the use of language. Their linguistically strained rhetoric is dishonest.
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