Brisbane car fire: Hannah Clarke murder, child killings must prompt action

Hannah Clarke with her children.

Out of respect for Hannah Clarke and her three children, Hanson’s pet inquiry must not proceed

A Joint Parliamentary Inquiry into Family Law and Child Support was announced by the Prime Minister, Scott Morrison last October. At the time, it was described as a political fix designed to win two PHON votes in the Senate. Viewed through the events at Camp Hill earlier this week, it’s an obscenity.

Submissions have been received. The inquiry is scheduled to commence public hearings in Townsville on March 10. Out of respect for Hannah Clarke and her three children it should not go ahead. If it does proceed, it will provide further evidence that our federal parliament is so divorced from the people, so distanced from reality that we may as well set up a roller coaster and a ferris wheel along Parliament Drive.

Hannah Clarke and her children Trey, Aaliyah and Laianah.

Don’t get me wrong. There is a need for an investigation but not by witless parliamentarians with an axe to grind or a niche electorate to appease.

What needs to be investigated is why men who face family breakdown and conclude that if they can’t have things their way, they will go and murder their own children and their ex-spouses.

What sort of man would commit the incomprehensible crime of murdering by immolation his ex-wife, Hannah Clarke, 31 and his own children, Aaliyah, six, Laianah, four, and Trey, three?

What sort of man grabs his four-year-old daughter, Darcey and throws her off West Gate Bridge, where she falls 58 metres to her death, after telling his wife by phone, “Say goodbye to your children. You will never see your children alive again,” as Arthur Freeman did in January 2009?

What sort of man would enter a house with loaded firearms and kill his 58-year-old wife Cynda, their daughter Katrina, 35, and her four children – daughter Taye, 13, and sons Rylan, 12, Arye, 10 and Kadyn, eight while they slept in their beds as 62-year-old Peter Miles did in Margaret River, WA in May 2018?

These are headline cases, but they are not isolated events. Sadly, there are too many to mention here. Families wiped out, women and children’s lives brutally ended. The headlines fail to define the extent of what is an epidemic of violence against women and children.

According to the Commissioner of Queensland Police, Katarina Carroll, there are 267 domestic violence cases coming to the attention of Queensland Police daily with call outs rising 7.5 per cent to a record 97,500 in the last 12 months. These figures are mirrored around the country.

Are we going to blame an imperfect legal system for infanticide? Are we going to blame failures in policing and case management instead of the men who murder their own children? Are we going to blame the victims?

The scene where Hannah Clarke and her children were murdered.

Pauline Hanson had been angling for this inquiry for a long time. She has courted the men’s rights vote and put herself forward as a spokesperson for their interminable victim mentality.

For what it’s worth One Nation has a policy on Family Law. It’s not long and features a series of euphemisms thrown together to form what we might call a fatherhood statement.

“One Nation believes that support must be given to both parents through a fairer family law and child support system. Many parents are denied access to their children, with many committing suicide. Children have a right to have both parents involved in their life if the parents are deemed to be fit and able.”

But Pauline Hanson who will co-chair the inquiry goes a lot further. By her own words her starting point in any review of family law is not that men are violent but that women lie.

“Women abuse the system by instigating false DVO (domestic violence orders) against their former partners,” Hanson told Georgie Gardner on Channel Nine’s Today Show in September last year.

Hanson advocates the equal parental share of the custody of children. This is the baseline view of the Family Court, too, albeit with a judge exercising discretion based on the evidence presented. Hanson wants judicial discretion removed.

Hanson told Gardner that in the absence of a criminal record or alcoholism or drug taking and without evidence of domestic violence prior to separation, mothers and fathers should share custody equally.

Rowan Baxter.

On what we know of Rowan Baxter, he ticks all those boxes. By the PHON senator’s reckoning, Rowan Baxter should have enjoyed equal custody of his children.

Let’s just let that sink in for a minute.

In that same interview, Hanson went to bat for stalkers; men, she said, who “text and text and text and say I want to see my child or ask about the child and that’s (a breach of a) domestic violence order? I don’t think that’s good enough.”

Yes, Family Law needs repeal. At the end of last year, there were more than 20,000 cases waiting to be heard, which means families are waiting up to five years for child custody and/or property disputes to be settled.

The Australian Law Reform Commission prepared a report on Family Law in Australia which contained 60 recommendations in 2018. Not one of those recommendations has been acted on by the federal government.

What harm could one more inquiry do? In the case of Joint Parliamentary Inquiry into Family Law and Child Support it will provide a voice, a formality to men who share the sorts of grievances that drove the monster Baxter to his murderous denouement.

This inquiry should be cancelled. Put away and never seen or heard of again.

If you or someone you know may be at risk of suicide call Lifeline (13 11 14), the Suicide Call Back Service (1300 659 467) or Kids Helpline (1800 55 1800)