Men and Fathers Health Summit
Submission from Roland Foster, Secretary, Fairness in Child Support (FICS)
Fairness in Child Support (FICS) is a community-based group with a membership
consisting primarily of separated parents who have been unable to continue to
exercise their parenting responsibilities despite their desire to do so.
Our backgrounds and personal circumstances are diverse, but we share the common
conviction that the constraints on our freedom to care for, nurture and protect our
children are a direct consequence of wrongful government activity.
Our primary concern is the impact of this on the mental health and well being of
separated fathers and their children.
The sudden loss of their children by fathers, on top of the stress of the separation,
often leaves them in a vulnerable state in which their emotions are raw and their sense
of identity and purpose is extinguished. The Child Support Agency (CSA) then
compounds this suffering with a brutality and intrusiveness that too often produces
consequences that are catastrophic. Among our former members are victims of
suicide. We understand the processes that delivered them to this end. We believe that
the CSA is complicate in their deaths and also in the deaths of many others.
Our goal
Our goal is to bring hope, health and purpose to men’s lives by restoring their
capacity to exercise their responsibilities as fathers. The benefits will flow on to their
children and families.
This outcome will reverse the trend towards the defathering of society and enable the
next generation of men to enjoy the dignity and purpose that fatherhood delivers.
The battle plan
FICS calls for affirmative action beginning with, but not restricted to, the
establishment of an Office for Status of Men and Fathers. This agency would have
the responsibility of assessing all legislation, both existing and proposed, for it’s
impact on men and fathers. More importantly, it must also be given the authority to
require appropriate amendments to the legislation where necessary.
We believe that a restoration of Fatherhood cannot be achieved without the abolition
of the Child Support Agency. This is because the ideological basis of the Child
Support Agency is fundamentally flawed. It is founded on the invalid premise that
fathers, from the moment of separation, become incapable of making decisions about
the care of their children. The fathers’ authority is then delivered into the hands of
rogue government bureaucrats running feral in a legislative landscape of
unaccountability.
Like slavery, abolition rather than reform is the only reasonable and workable option.
To exercise responsibility fathers need freedom and authority, not coercion.
