Quotes of the Day

How it works at these Tuesday night dads' meetings in Kanwal, on the New South Wales Central Coast, is that a glass ball is passed around the circle of men, and whoever has the ball has the floor. He may talk for as long as he likes and is free to digress, though at the core of all this venting is a single sentiment: how painful it is to see so little of one's children. The six men who've shown up at the community center this sweltering February evening are a diverse bunch in manner and circumstance, but they're bonded - forever, they say - by this common ache. Dressed all in black, Nick looks pale and tired; the light behind his eyes has gone out. Divorced for eight years, he is entitled to see his 11-year-old daughter every second weekend, but says his ex-wife has devised tactics to block even that paltry contact. He says his blood pressure has soared and he's right on the edge: "All I want to do is see my daughter. It's killing me inside."

Beside him is Steve. The divorce he doesn't want comes through in a few months. When he starts talking about his two children - eight and four - he breaks down and needs a minute to compose himself, during which he flicks the ball from hand to hand and wipes his eyes with his shirt. No one speaks or looks the least uncomfortable: they're used to this. Steve has just moved into a crummy granny flat and in the last nine months has seen his children only a handful of times. "I had a real good relationship with the kids," he says. "But they're starting to drift away from me. I'm still Dad, but I'm not Dad like I was."

Meetings like this one, convened by the support group Dads in Distress, happen almost every day across Australia and New Zealand. The raison d'être of many of the countries' several hundred men's organizations is a conviction that the system crushes men after their marriages fall apart; that a two-punch combination of vindictive ex-partners and courts that favor mothers in custodial disputes is destroying fathers' relationships with their children. DiD meetings begin with a minute's silence for the five men who commit suicide in Australia each day, on the assumption that many of them have acted out of despair over separation from loved ones.

Of course, most fathers with these feelings don't kill themselves, though some are so tormented they can't hold a job nor take pleasure in anything, and their sense of victimhood can stir their baser instincts. "She's really getting a lot of pleasure out of watching me suffer," one of the Kanwal group says of his wife. He wants revenge. "Not physical. But I'm looking forward to the day when the kids work this out and turn on her. And when that happens I want to be there to see it. And that will be revenge."

It may be too late for this man to have a civil relationship with his former love, or to feel as close as he once did to his children. But in the emotion-charged arena of family law, change is on the way. "I think this could be the year of the dad," says DiD founder Tony Miller. Indeed, if just some of the new ideas work, among the winners will be decent, loving fathers - and the children who might otherwise have missed out on knowing them.

Shortly after its May Budget, the Australian government will legislate to reform a system that almost everyone - from shattered, working-class dads to the country's sharpest legal minds - agrees is broken. "These will be the most substantial reforms of family law since the 1970s," says Federal Attorney-General Philip Ruddock, who envisages a cheaper, quicker and less adversarial system designed to give both parents, wherever possible, every chance to stay involved with their kids. Complementing a raft of proposed amendments to the Family Law Act, the plan's centerpiece is a nationwide network of Family Relationship Centres (FRCs), where counselors will help separating parents work out a parenting plan before their anger and hurt - perhaps occasionally stoked by lawyers - can mutate into intransigence. And a task force, established by the government last August and headed by University of Sydney law professor Patrick Parkinson, will report soon with ideas on reforming that instrument of justice that enrages separated parents, mostly fathers, as nothing else does: the wage-garnishing Child Support Scheme. On the eve of the changes there's cause for both optimism and hardheaded caution. "I'm not convinced I'll put in place the perfect system," says Ruddock. "I don't feel I'm God. But I do think we can do a hell of a lot better than we have done." New Zealand men's groups - which insist their country's family law system is more flawed than Australia's - are watching with interest and planning a fresh lobbying assault on parliamentarians.

For happy families in which Mum and Dad share the reading of bedtime stories and both enjoy spontaneous moments of connection with their children - a shared chuckle in the hallway, a wink at the dinner table - the tribulations of separated parents can seem remote. But if it's not your own family that's breaking apart, then it's probably your neighbor's, or your sibling's or your colleague's. Australia's divorce rate of 42% equates to about 70,000 couples - most with children - splitting each year.

It's a rare marriage bust from which both parties walk away smiling, but those not involving children are generally simpler. Most people need lawyers to help them divide up property - a task that can inflame passions, to be sure, though not usually as explosively (nor over as long a period) as the business of dividing up time with one's kids. In both Australia and New Zealand, one child in four lives apart from one of his natural parents. What troubles many is that the parent on the outer is usually the dad. Mothers gain residential custody in a fraction less than 70% of cases that are tried, according to figures provided by the Family Court of Australia to a 2003 parliamentary inquiry into custodial arrangements after separation. That mightn't sound like an outrageous imbalance, but it's important to note that only about 6% of cases make it that far - and they tend to be the atypical ones, involving accusations of drug addiction or abuse by one or both parties. Separating couples are free to work out their own parenting plan, which they're not obliged to register with the courts, although many do in anticipation of disagreements later on. The remaining cases are settled in what insiders call "the shadow of the law" - that is, in the offices of lawyers and mediators, many of whom, based on experience, tend to advise the male client not to waste his money pursuing custody or, indeed, to aim too high in terms of time with his children. In Australia, only 12% of children from broken families live with their dad; for a variety of reasons, about a quarter see their father once a year or less. Commonly, men settle for the standard consolation of every second weekend and half the school holidays. And after trying it for a time, many feel it's not nearly enough.

Then there are fathers like fiftysomething Sydney executive Rob (his real name and other particulars cannot be published for legal reasons), who's spent more than $A20,000 on legal fees trying to secure just that result. Over dinner a few years ago, Rob's wife stunned him by announcing she wanted to end their 11-year marriage. He now has a new partner and his ex-wife has remarried, and they're still wrangling over how often he sees the kids - a teenage boy and a little girl. Rob says his ex-wife has tried to demonize him in the children's eyes, with some success. Last year, without warning him, she and the children moved to a town several hours' drive from Sydney, throwing his every-second-weekend contact into jeopardy. Could the little girl be flown to Sydney sometimes to see her dad? Do the trips to Sydney tire her out? These are some of the questions the court is grappling with. Recently, Rob read in a school newsletter that his daughter had been made class captain. Great! - except that she was using her stepfather's surname and the spelling of her Christian name had been changed. "My ex-wife would be happiest, I have no doubt whatsoever," Rob says, "if I disappeared and kept sending the (child support) checks." But in the wretched world of the non-custodial parent, Rob's ex-wife hasn't been his only source of frustration. A bungle by his solicitors, he says, locked him into making child support payments that rose if his income increased, but stayed the same if it fell. Sure enough, he was retrenched from his high-paying job and for a few months received unemployment benefits. Filing for bankruptcy was an option, but there was a catch. After five years a bankrupt receives automatic discharge from nearly all debts, though one exception is child support. Fortunately, Rob landed a new job.

Unless you enjoy an earbashing, it's best not to get separated men started on child support, a complex scheme of formulas and exemptions through which, in 2003-04, $A2.19 billion was transferred between parents. High on a long list of complaints is that the ex-wife doesn't have to account for how the money is spent: maybe the latest payment went toward school fees, or maybe it funded gym membership for her and her new boyfriend. Adding insult to injury, the way child support works is that the less contact you have with your children, the more you pay. Due to report back to the government by the end of the month, the task force is expected to recommend a revamp of the 17-year-old scheme.

By all appearances a reasonable man, Rob says in many areas of life women doubtless feel powerless, but in the Family Court the opposite is true. More than once, he says, a judge has given his ex-wife more than she's asked for. "The mother is seen as the nurturer," he says. The attitude is, "she knows how to relate to children, while fathers don't."

There's some objective support for Rob's view. In 2001, the International Journal of Law, Policy and the Family published a paper by Melbourne academic Lawrie Moloney, who analyzed 22 of what he called "closely contested parenting judgments" made by the Family Court in the decade 1988-99. Moloney chose cases devoid of issues of violence or abuse, reasoning that these would be more revealing of judges' "core assumptions." He concluded that "presumptions about gender were an important aspect of judicial thinking . . . I found that mothers were likely to be successful if they appeared to conform to a maternal stereotype of self-sacrifice on behalf of their children. Generally, fathers were successful when mothers were judged to be in some way inadequate - that is, fathers tended to be successful by default."

Diana Bryant was sworn in as Chief Justice of Australia's Family Court last July. Though she rejects the accusation that the court is biased against men, fathers' groups generally have warmed to her because she's prepared to listen to them. In an interview with Time, Bryant argues that in the court's first years, in the late 1970s, almost no one complained that it was denying separated fathers sufficient time with their children. The judgments reflected the way we lived then: most fathers worked, most mothers didn't, so the formulaic patterns of contact after separation made sense. "I think the question one has to ask now, 30 years later," says Bryant, "is has society changed, (how much) has society changed, and has the court kept up with those changes?" A summary of her answers would be yes; quite a lot; and, perhaps not as well as it might have.

But if guaranteed extra time with their kids is all divorced dads are sweating on, they're going to be disappointed. In its report, Every Picture Tells a Story, the parliamentary inquiry rejected the idea that the courts should start from the presumption that children spend equal time with each parent after separation - the holy grail of many lobbyists in both Australia and New Zealand. A presumption of shared time would demolish the premise that, during the week, older children need a stable base from which to travel to and from school and do their homework. Arguments about whether equal time was fairer or even practical (for many separated parents and their children it is a logistical nightmare) were a distraction, the inquiry found, from the "primary issue": ensuring that both parents could and would stay involved in their children's lives. The government agreed, so the phrase it's pushing instead is "equal shared parental responsibility." That means separated parents agreeing to discuss, as equals, important issues about their children - what schools they attend, what sports they play. It means parents agreeing to notify each other of big events - speech nights and gala days - and both being welcomed by the other to attend, regardless of whose watch they fall on.

Sounds great. But can you legislate to make two people who may loathe each other cooperate? "Well, you can legislate to say they've got to give it their best shot, and that's what we're doing," says Ruddock. Separating parents won't have to use one of the 65 FRCs the government plans to have up and running by 2008. But before they can file suit in court they'll need to have been counseled by someone, even if it's separately by their lawyers. An amendment to the Family Law Act will "say to the (legal) profession very clearly that the Parliament wants you to be a mediator, a conciliator, and not a party to legal warfare," says Ruddock. "In other words, forget the adversarial role in which you've been trained . . . and recognize that there is a new role." (Most family lawyers would say they already perform this role.)

What's stopping some observers from getting too excited about the government's plan to enshrine "equal responsibility" in the Act is that it's essentially already there. Amendments in 1995 made explicit that, except in extreme circumstances, "parents share duties and responsibilities concerning the care, welfare and development of their children . . . (and) agree about the future parenting of their children." In addition, says Sydney family lawyer Hamish Cumming, assurances along these lines do little to mollify parents who feel their kids are slipping away from them. "When you try to say, 'Don't worry, you have the same level of parental responsibility as your spouse,' they don't all of a sudden go, 'Oh, well, then, that's fine I'm only seeing my child one day a fortnight,'" says Cumming. "That's not the issue. These terms are great for lawyers in that we understand them, we work with them and we can get our heads around them, but the client doesn't think that way. They're thinking, How long until I see my child and what involvement do I have in my child's day-to-day life?"

Where time is the main issue, lawyers could often be more ambitious in the arrangements they seek for their clients, argues Anne Hollonds, chief executive officer of Relationships Australia (N.S.W.). Precedent guides lawyers; but in family law precedents are set in that small percentage of cases that make it to trial. "These needn't be the guide for how to handle cases where the two people are O.K. with each other," Hollonds says. It's a "wrong vision," she adds, which people won't be exposed to in the FRCs, lawyer-free zones to be run by community-based organizations such as her own.

Still, fathers' groups are worried about the centers' being staffed by female-dominated outfits like Relationships Australia and Centacare, which are already active in the system as providers under the Family Relationships Services Program. There's anecdotal evidence that some of these counselors are biased against men, according to Lone Fathers Association national president Barry Williams, who says he's warned the Attorney-General that the government's reforms will flop unless fresh blood infiltrates the counseling ranks. Though it would be unfair to suggest that most of these counselors mistrust and dislike men, argues Michael Green, QC, president of the Shared Parenting Council of Australia and author of the 1998 book Fathers After Divorce, "in some agencies there's an element of feminism." In Green's view, Bryant's predecessor as Chief Justice, Alastair Nicholson, tended to be swayed by the arguments of women's groups and "wasn't especially sympathetic to fathers' concerns." Green, who's also a mediator, believes the centers should be run by a skeleton government staff that would distribute work to a range of mediators - including, perhaps, his own small firm. But the Attorney-General says he's seen no persuasive evidence of bias. "I get very upset sometimes when the men's groups criticize us," says Relationships Australia's Hollonds. "Because what they don't understand is we're actually their best friends when it comes to this, in that we are working so hard to encourage men to be involved in their kids' lives all along the way, and for women to allow them to be." Coincidental to the government's plans for family law reform, the Family Court recently took steps toward self-improvement. Launched in two Sydney registries a year ago, the pilot Children's Cases Program aims to make cases quicker, cheaper, less formal and less acrimonious. Speed is achieved by skirting the rules of evidence: there's little scope for legal objection or technical argument. Litigants make an opening statement, directly addressing the judge, who - perhaps eschewing the wig and robe - keeps things moving with a word of advice here, a cautionary tale there. "The (eight) judges who've been involved in the CCP all embrace it very enthusiastically," says Chief Justice Bryant, who thinks it "highly likely" the CCP will eventually become the template for all Family Court trials.

Ultimately, the success of a system depends to a large degree on the attitudes of the people within it. Boiled down, most of the government's reforms have a single, extraordinarily ambitious aim: to encourage separating spouses to be reasonable in their negotiations with each other. And there's the rub. In the emotional storm that is the aftermath to breakup, many lack both the capacity for magnanimity and the clear-headedness to focus on the best interests of another person, even their own child. As Bryant said in a recent speech, couples who appear in her court tend to carry "with them not just baggage, but an entire caravan of family values, views and expectations." For every mother who, filled with spite, does all she can to limit her ex-husband's time with his children, there's a father who doesn't show up when he should or defaults on child support. Maybe he's stopped caring - or never did; maybe he finds it too distressing or insulting to be an occasional father. The Kanwal dads seem like a decent bunch, but on this night there's a lot of self-pity and no introspection. None of the monologues contains questions: Did I bring any of this on myself? Could I have been a better husband? Was I there for my wife when she needed me? The men are suffering, and it's sad; the emotional state of their children is less clear. Toward the end there's anger so intense it's unnerving: "I haven't f___ed a woman in years," one sneers. "I don't want a f___ing thing to do with them." It takes a soothing interjection from the group's facilitator, James Fitzclarence, to temper the mood.

With the best of intentions, the government will spend big and refine the law to try to make things better for separated parents and their children. It will be clearer soon to Australians whether the problems of post-separation parenting are predominantly legal, or whether they're hopelessly ensnared in the limitations of the human spirit.

• Daniel Williams
• Inside the family law revolution that's offering hope to disgruntled dads