"As Australia's divorce laws stand, one spouse can simply apply for a divorce and get it without any questions asked and that's the end of the marriage. Reform will force both parents to really face up to the costs of the divorce", Barry Maley told the Melbourne Age on September 1. Maley, a senior fellow at the Centre For Independent Studies (CIS), was launching his new discussion paper on Australia's divorce laws.
Maley's report had two main proposals. The first, and most radical, was to deny divorce in cases where only one partner had requested it. The second was to allow divorces initiated by one partner, but to legally "penalise" the "guilty" partner through the custody, asset and money settlement.
Maley explained that what he meant by guilty included a spouse leaving to form a relationship with someone younger, healthier or "better looking", or leaving because of business failure or financial problems. He did not mention physical or sexual abuse.
The CIS is one of Australia's most right-wing "think-tanks". Like most think-tanks, while presenting itself as "independent" research institution, its board is stacked with corporate headkickers, including the chairpersons of James Hardy Industries and Normandy Mining, and directors of BHP-Billiton, Wespac, Coles Myer and the Macquarie Bank.
Maley, a retired lecturer in behaviour studies, is frequently quoted by the corporate media as an "expert" on marriage, because of his credentials as director of the"Taking Children Seriously" research program — a program initiated and funded by CIS.
According to its introductory web page, the program was initiated because, "changes to family law and taxation have not encouraged the institutions of marriage and the benefits of raising children, and it is more difficult today for families to survive financially under the taxation and welfare system than a generation ago".
The basis of this "children's rights" organisation is actually maintenance of the family system — including abusive families — at the cost of women's well-being and sanity.
Maley claims his agenda is not to make things harder for women, arguing that, in part, he is seeking to protect women from getting left "holding the baby".
But a December 2001 article Maley wrote for the Sydney Morning Herald, entitled "Children pay the price of gender feminism war", tells a different story. In it, Maley wrote: "It is gender feminism's contempt for the family that best explains why there is a backlash against it by women who accept the centrality of children and family as a cherished fulfillment for women."
Arguing that the sole parent pension "removed responsibility from fathers and transferred it to the state, i.e. the taxpayer", Maley presents a case for financially disadvantaging single and non-custodial parents.
Women benefit enormously under the current "no fault" divorce laws that were adopted in 1975. Under the old system, that Maley would have us return to, women could lose custody of children simply because they decided to leave a relationship.
Maley wants to return to a system that uses fear of poverty and losing custody to force women into staying in unhappy, and possibly abusive, relationships.
Can you imagine having to justify why you broke up a relationship to a courtroom? Imagine if a woman fleeing a violent partner needed material proof of such violence in order to gain custody of her children.
Whether to be in a relationship or not should be a private decision, not the state's decision. Far from abolishing single parent benefits, the welfare system should be extended so that child and spousal maintenance programs are unnecessary — the costs of raising children should be borne socially, rather than being the sole responsibility of individual parents.
Custody should always be decided with the interests of the children as paramount — not as a way of punishing and rewarding "good" and "bad" parents.
Thankfully, although warmly welcomed by columnists and Sydney Catholic Archbishop George Pell, Maley's proposals have been mostly ignored by politicians with the power to change the laws.
BY ALISON DELLIT
From Green Left Weekly, September 17, 2003.
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