THE Federal Government is building 65 new family relationship centres across Australia.

The $200 million initiative announced in last week's Budget is meant to curb the bitterness of divorce.

Fat chance.

The culture of human bitterness surrounding Australia's family law system is so entrenched that nothing short of direct parliamentary intervention in the way the court makes its decisions can soothe it.

Not that family relationship centres aren't a nice idea.

More niceness, though, is hardly the solution to a crisis that has been caused by our family law court being excessively nice already -- especially towards those custodial parents who regularly, and without punishment by the court, violate the court's own orders regarding access to children by the non-custodial parent.

The idea behind family relationship centres is that divorcing couples can draw up parenting plans with the help of expert mediators.

In theory, this should remove future conflicts over access to children. Should.

Unfortunately, the total experience of the Family Court in Australia since the 1970s points firmly in the opposite direction.

Unless the court begins to prosecute those who violate a clear and agreed custody and access arrangement -- for example, a mother refusing to let a father see his children when the court has told her to -- then "family law" in Australia will remain nothing more than what it is: an oxymoron.

Grass-roots pressure against the Family Court to change has been building for many years, with some extreme voices as well as many moderate ones challenging the court's values, particularly in relation to non-custodial fathers.

Parliamentarians are well aware that this is the most painful issue "out there" in their electorates.

Yet through a depressing combination of elite (often feminist) politics and simple moral confusion, even the most sympathetic politicians, such as John Howard and the recently retired Mark Latham, have been unable to co-ordinate any meaningful reform of the court's often destructive decision-making methods.

Family Relationship Centres (2005) and other forms of policy frosting -- such as proclaiming the principle that children have the right to see both parents (1996) -- are symptoms of the parliamentarians' malaise.

They can't, or won't oblige the Family Court to change the way the cake is baked by enforcing its own decisions.

Combined with the Child Support Agency, which carries enforcement to totalitarian extremes, this has created a tsunami of resentment that charges daily from coast to coast wrecking lives and undermining faith in our public culture.

Fortunately, though, one good thing has recently happened. One of Australia's leading historians, the mild-mannered Dr John Hirst from Latrobe University, has produced an Emile Zola-style pamphlet of accusation against our family law system which shatters the court's last remaining intellectual pretensions to self-defence.

I won't spell out everything in Hirst's 85-page demolition of the Family Court.

You can read it yourself in Quarterly Essay, available in bookshops and libraries.

But its importance is signalled by the response.

Former chief justice Alastair Nicholson accused Hirst of being "grossly irresponsible, "emotional and unbalanced" and "just plain wrong".

This is because Hirst dared criticise the court. With footnotes. Nicholson's attack is a smokescreen.

Hirst, in fact, mixes his criticism with fair-minded praise of Nicholson himself, particularly for his belated reform aimed at reducing the adversarial nature of Family Court proceedings, and for advocating (unsuccessfully) for some objective test of truth, rather than mere "doubt" in the judge's mind, in cases involving child abuse allegations against a father. But it is the fairness of Hirst's thoughtful criticisms of the court which make them so devastating.

For example, Hirst does not accuse it of being a court of social engineering, as some have done. Rather, he accuses it of being a court of timidity:

"It usually allocates children to their mother, with the father having access, and no matter what the mother subsequently does it is reluctant to penalise the mother or disturb her custody of the children."

The court's problem, in other words, "is not that it is too much the social engineer, but that it does not want to engineer enough".

The court's policy may not be social engineering, but it does violate nature.

No one is a perfect parent, but unless there's a clear and verifiable danger of a crime being committed, no one has the right to ban a parent from seeing their child either.

The Family Court assumes that right, systematically.

Its bluff has now been called.

paulgray@skynet.net.au

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