A summary and comparison of legislation and policy in New Zealand and Australia.
Child Poverty Action Group [PDF ]

I don’t agree with this report, it relies heavily on the Trapski Report which is 14 years old.
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This article will be of interest.

Family trusts can be a great way to lose control of property in a divorce. But a landmark Supreme Court decision may help change that.
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Reading comments on MENZ recently one would think that a website that has for years been closely monitored by Politicians and Officials has been attacked by white ants.

My Father used to talk about white-anting as part of the toolkit of ideologies such as Communism and Fascism a tool that was used by the enemy to destroy a structure from within. (more…)

This article today headlined “Half of victims killed by unarmed attackers” gives further details on NZ homicides in 2009. Murders: 41 men, 24 women. Manslaughter: 18 men, 5 women. How dare Heather Henare, on National Radio today, comment on violence as if only women and children are subjected to it? How dare our government fund refuges and other services for females but not for males? How dare our government departments use our taxes to support sexist campaigns against violence that don’t see violence against men as deserving mention?

The article claims that nearly 75% of females and nearly 33% of males were killed by partners or family members. These proportions contradict other recent reports and, as is sadly typical, we cannot trust much of what is said about domestic violence.
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I am who I am.
I am female. I can do everything man can do!
I can fix a car or truck.
I can drive a tractor.
I can kill an animal with my bare hands and supply food for thy table.
I can make money to buy thy bread for thy table.
I can go to the well and pull up a bucket of water to quench thy thirsts.
I can dig holes to build a fence to keep thy stock in.
I can build thy shed to house thy stock.
I can cook & clean & sew.
I can love and share and praise.

My Dad taught me to do all this and much much more.

Do I blame my Dad for thy teachings to be an all rounded female and fend for myself and not rely on man?

But wait, I need thy man! To love and cherish, to have me, to have him. To raise our children together. To be a witness to my life. For me to witness his!

I am a female who is proud and strong! But without man I am nothing!!

I love my dearest and always will. Although I can do all he can, he is proud of me and we do it togehter equally! I need my man everyday. And everyday I tell him so!!

Crime figures were released by NZ police yesterday claiming a 9.2% rise in violent crime driven primarily by an 18.6% reported increase in domestic violence. Yesterday was April Fools Day and it’s sad that we, the NZ public, are being taken for fools concerning such an important social issue.

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I know for far too many fathers it will not be a happy Easter. It will be will lonely and hurtful time due to no fault of their own. For many other fathers it will be a frustrating time of mixed emotions. I am not a Christian but my thoughts are with you and your children. I am in the same boat. A childless time yet again for me. I just have reached a high degree of acceptance so I am able to have a happy Easter anyway. I hope you all enjoy the break as much as you can. Good wishes to you all but especially to all those fatherless children out there.

Cheers,

Dave.

A gathering of academicians drawn from a range of disciplines will meet on April 7, 2010, at Wagner College, Staten Island, New York, to examine the declining state of the male, stemming from cataclysmic changes in today’s culture, environment and global economy. The live teleconferenced colloquium will be chaired by Lionel Tiger, PhD, Rutgers University Charles Darwin Professor of Anthropology. It will encompass a broad range of topics relevant to the study of boys and men in contemporary society ranging from their roles in the family and workforce, as well as their physical and emotional health, to the growing problem of misandry–the hatred of males, an unacknowledged but underlying socio-cultural, economic, political and legal phenomenon endangering the well-being of both genders.

The link is here.

The feminist reaction to all this has been unsurprising.

Lots of different people have different ideas on what success is but I think it comes down to achieving goals you have set.

One group making success in the family court is American Fathers & Families with executive director Glenn Sacks. Their goal is to seek better lives for children through family court reform that establishes equal rights and responsibilities for fathers and mothers and they lobby for it alongside Allies that include Psychologists, man-friendly charity groups, army, navy and air force personnel who are being affected greatly by divorce laws while they’re serving their country overseas as well as lesbians and gays who are finding the family courts are choosing one partner as the custodial parent and the other as the visitor or non-custodial parent just as heterosexual child custody disputes have preference for the mother to be the custodial parent and the father the non-custodial parent or visitor.

Recently they introduced a wide-ranging package of California bills which include child custody reform, child support reform, protection from family court financial abuses, and others.
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article from here

MP doubts court changes
Thursday, 18 March 2004

CLEVEDON MP Judith Collins doubts proposed changes to the New Zealand courts system will help to bring greater transparency to the Family Court.

The National party’s families spokesperson said the Law Commission’s recommendation to open up the Family Court, including allowing the media to cover some aspects of court proceedings, will be no improvement on the current system.

“The current system uses children’s ‘best interests’ to justify secrecy and incompetence when in reality children would be best served by having real accountability in the Family Court,” said Ms Collins.

“The report appears to recommend that there be fewer restrictions on the reporting of family proceedings. However, in practice these recommendations would amount to an inability to report on proceedings other than those relating to property, wills and those too incapacitated to look after themselves.”

She said not allowing witnesses or others connected with proceedings to be identified with leave of the court means there is unlikely to be reporting of government department incompetence, counsel for the child, bad behaviour of custodial parents and incompetence parading as cultural sensitivity.

“Under the proposed changes parents will still not be able to talk about the proceedings without leave of the court. Again, this prevents proper accountability,” Ms Collins said.

“While the problems of secrecy and lack of accountability are correctly identified, the report’s recommendations would make little impact on the seriousness of those problems,” said Ms Collins.

I just found a site dedicated to men in early childhood education.
I have no idea if these folk are incredibly brave or incredibly naive.
Check it out for yourself:

http://www.ecmenz.org/index.html

Consider the state of the NZ male when you read this quote.
Tell me if you think this describes the state of NZ men today and why. Afterwards I’ll tell you who wrote it and when.

A wise ancient declared that the most perfect popular government was that ‘where an injury done to the meanest subject is an insult upon the whole constitution’. What, therefore, can be said for a Government that deliberately inflicts injury upon a great mass of its intelligent and respectable subjects; that virtually ignores their existence in all that can contribute to their happiness as subjects; that takes a special care to strike at the root of their love of country by teaching them that they have no part in forming or maintaining its glory, while it rigidly exerts from them all penalties; even unto death? What can be said, what urged, in extenuation of this crying evil, this monstrous injustice? ‘Custom; use; it has always been so’. This may be enough to say of the past — ‘let the dead past bury its dead’; but is it to be remedied for the future?

Wellington – Single women have a problem finding a husband or partner in New Zealand
– they outnumber men.

There are 35,000 more women in the prime marrying age group of 20 to 45, according to Statistics New Zealand and the situation is so bad that a 32-year-old Kiwi woman has as much chance of finding a partner her age as an 82-year-old.

‘The reason being the 82-year-old men are dead and the 32-year-old men aren’t there,’ according to international demographer Bernard Salt, who has studied what he calls the ‘man drought’ in New Zealand and Australia.

‘Young Kiwis in their mid to late-20s leave the country, but it’s mostly the women who come back,’ he said.

Why would they come back?
In other countries they are rewarded more for their hard work. It doesn’t take them long to realise they are more highly valued by foreign women than NZ women.

What is also increasing is the number of men that either immigrate or go for a foreign bride in order to have a better future for themselves. It is time this was discussed more openly rather than by just a few.

Wikipedia (which you will know can be edited by anybody) has this to say about the stereotypical NZ female:

The kiwi female

There are few stereotypes surrounding New Zealand women, and these stereotypes are not as strong as those involving men. The two strongest stereotypes are:

* Independence: New Zealand women are sometimes thought to be more independent than women elsewhere. New Zealand being the first country in the world to give women the vote and the only to have all its most important positions of state power simultaneously filled by women is seen as evidence of this. This ignores the century in between these two events in which New Zealand was far from progressive on women’s rights: for example rape within marriage was only criminalised in the mid 1980s.

* Lack of femininity: Women in New Zealand are supposedly unfeminine, for example wearing masculine clothing and spending little time on makeup and other forms of personal grooming. This can also be seen in a positive light; Kiwi women are portrayed as not being held back by ideas about being ‘ladylike’ and are therefore willing to take on ‘masculine’ tasks such as car maintenance and playing rugby. Former Prime Minister Helen Clark is often seen as an embodiment of this stereotype, for good and bad: critics point at her lack of children and her choice on one occasion to meet the Queen while wearing trousers; supporters like her passion for mountain climbing and ability to hold her own in parliamentary debates.[22]

Just thought I’d mention it seen as there is a lot of discussion about NZ women on here at the moment.

In today’ press, the violence industry is at it again.

To get funding they need to show the numbers up. So what do they do? they create them by encouraging women to break up their families. They have the tools for that. As one admits in this article you can’t encourage a woman to break and drop them her in a hole afterward. This is backed by reality. A woman who breaks through Women’ Refuge gets a free lawyer, the house and all the other assets. + the children of course and a salary for life. Who would refuse that? (more…)

The series starts Wednesday 31st of March and thanks to the online men’s network, I will be able to post links for your viewing pleasure. But for now, a preview will suffice…………..

Sara Feilden, the producer for Films of Record, who made the BBC series says she is glad to have found the brief window of opportunity in which to tell father’s stories since the UK allowed journalists to report on the family courts. Unfortunately, there is a Bill going through Parliament that would make it impossible, once again, to film people who have been involved in family legal disputes. “It’s unlikely that we would ever again be able to make a programme about this important issue,” she says.

Journalist Cassandra Jardine of the UK Telegraph says watching the review of the BBC series made her feel ashamed to be a woman and that…. the men on the programme appeared to be loving, attentive fathers who only wanted to play their part in the upbringing of their children while it seemed, vengeful, short-sighted women were selfishly trying to thwart them.
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I am sure most people still remember the No smacking referendum where 87.6 percent of the 1,622,150 New Zealanders who participated in exercising their right to democracy voted ‘NO’ (full provisional results) and the petitions that circulated New Zealand to make the referendum possible. (more…)

Carey Roberts’ latest piece highlights how the International Violence Against Women Act, VAWA, appears to violate the US constitution. Sooner or later, keen rights advocates are likely to challenge this sexist and divisive legislation and, like many other temporary US laws, it will be shafted.

New Zealand on the other hand has no constitution. There is little protection here for any basic rights or freedoms. We have a Bill of Rights, but just this week the Key government showed how weak and irrelevant the Bill of Rights is. The fact that Key’s law changes regarding benefits was found to contravene the Bill of Rights on various grounds was simply disregarded, treated with utter contempt by that government, without consequence. Hence we put up with all manner of male denigration and anti-male sexism in law, jurisprudence, state services, advertising and business practice even though discrimination on the grounds of gender is supposedly banned under the Bill of Rights.
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Check out this on the return on investment of children.

The Australian government worked out middle income folk spend $160,140 raising a child to age 18. This article considers what do you get for your $160,140?

National’s flagship welfare reforms have been found to unfairly discriminate against 43,000 solo mums and dads.

In a report just tabled in Parliament, Attorney-General Chris Finlayson says the reforms breach the Bill of Rights Act on three grounds by discriminating on the basis of sex and family and marital status.

Report Here

Regards

Scrap

This is a very thoughtful insight by Mark Brandenburg.  The full article can be found here.

“Can we possibly continue with a system in which half of our children witness the breakup of their parent’s marriage? Is a divorce rate near 50% enough to have us consider new ideas about how we decide about marriage and divorce?

One idea we might consider is educating young people about the qualities of a successful marriage. The best way to do this is to model these qualities for your children. In addition, we can talk to them about the specific qualities and actions which make a marriage successful.

Here are some of those qualities:

1. Commitment:
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Stuff.co.nz has an article on Author Kathy Lette about her latest book titled, ‘Men: A User’s Guide’. It’s a collection of clever and caustic quips collected from her writing and observations from her marriage to human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robinson but it sounds like a lot of feminist spin.

Lette tells the interviewer that her human rights lawyer husband is bad because he doesn’t do enough around the home, while her housekeeper serves them tea and biscuits.

When asked about her book being man hate Lette replied….

It’s not man-bashing, it’s just annoying them until they start paying us more attention and pull their finger out,” she says.

First reaction would have to be, “Sack her husband as a human rights lawyer” but being raised by a single mother, it is possible Lette’s angry for not having her father around.
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It was reported in the NZH that there will be welfare reforms.

In this article it claims that:

“They also involve tightening the requirement procedures for those who repeatedly receive hardship grants, and extend part-time work obligations to domestic purposes beneficiaries with children over six years old.”

Since when have there been part-time work obligations for DPB? Is there any substance to this?

I had a look at WINZ site and all I could find was:

”

Your obligations

You’ll need to take part in a planning process to help you set goals for your future, including:

• coming to planning meetings with us and
• preparing a personal development and employment plan that covers your goals for the future and the things you will do to reach those goals.

You’ll also need to show us that you are committed to reaching your goals.”

This is not really any limitation at all. If fact it simply means you can get free training while staying on the DPB as long as you like.

A British returned soldier locked family court doors with chains, barring staff from entering their workplace, in protest of his treatment while serving his country. He says,

“I recently returned from duty fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan to find that judges at Darlington county court had granted my wife a non-molestation and an occupation order of the marital home, this was all done ex parte in my absence whilst serving Queen and country overseas.”

“My wife has since moved her new lover in and has been denying contact to our 2 young children.”

“If this is how the courts treat a serving soldier based on a false allegation, imagine how they could treat you.”

“All my wife needed was to say there was a ‘perceived fear’ of what I may do when I found out about her affair, the judge said because I was a soldier I was ’obviously violent’ he then granted her an occupation order and has denied me going within a mile of our home.”
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MP Peter Dunne from United Future political party opened the Wairarapa Men’s Health meeting very well, ..I thought. I particularly liked the way he addressed lots of areas where work is needed and included men’s issues spoken on men’s sites. I know some of his wording won’t go down well but I also know it’s good to see progress.

Here is part of his speech….

I want to spend a few minutes this morning touching on some of the more difficult realities faced by men in New Zealand – and perhaps it will be a sensitive issue in this room today, as much as it is in wider New Zealand.

We have a lot of angry men in this country.

They tend to be men who are very hurt, often coming out of relationship break-ups in which they feel they have been unfairly treated – particularly in areas such as custody of children and child support.

Chief Family Court Judge Peter Boshier last year – to his very real credit – addressed the tragedy that 18 people involved in Family Court proceedings had killed themselves in a 12-month period to June last year.

Add to that four homicides.
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