The BUZZ: 20 Oct 2007

The Australian
13 October 2007

Family Court grabs the lion's share of federal funding
By Michael Pelly

Attorney General Philip Ruddock has promised adjustments to funding for federal courts amid concerns the Family Court is citing the complexity of its work to justify massive discrepancies.

The court will receive $131million in funding for 2007-08, a figure that matches the total for both the Federal Court ($78million) and Federal Magistrates Court ($53 million).

Yet court statistics show it is doing a fraction of the work of the other two courts.

It's an understandable figure really. There are a lot of costs involved in supporting inhuman acts and abuses of civil rights.

Dear colleagues,

It is with great pleasure that I (for the second time in as many years!) have secured a commitment from Amnesty International' s International Secretariat in London to remove false and misleading statistics on violence against women from their websites and printed materials, and to conduct "thorough checks on the sources of all statistics to be used on the Stop Violence Against Women campaign pages" in the future.

Time will tell whether they keep this commitment up or whether they lapse once again into the lazy use of feminist factoids.

The WHO organization has also promised to withdraw the copy of this spurious report from its international pages.

Legal experts in the US have publicly declared that the administration of abuse and domestic violence legislation, especially VAWA, is unconstitutional because it assumes men are guilty until proven innocent. -- Wonder how long it will take Australia to find a few brave leaders or intellectually honest academics to do the same?

In aussie slang, "The Family Court is a BROTHEL and everyone knows it, including Ruddock. .." jez 'bout sez it all (but there is much more in this election year!)