Next Sunday, 11 May 2014, is Mother’s Day. I was planning to do a big article in appreciation of mothers, but that plan was shelved on Friday morning after I received a breathless phone call from my friend Luke McCormack of the Australian Family Association. Luke wanted to tell me about the current government’s new attack on motherhood. I was devastated to hear the news. Let me explain. The new Commission ...

You may remember that I recently told the story of Gallipoli VC awardee Captain Shout in a special edition of Dads4Kids about the upcoming Train the Trainer Summit. Imagine my surprise on having dinner with Mark Jeffery, one of the Dads4Kids Board Members, the night before ANZAC Day, that his wife Rochelle told me that her grandfather had been awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross in Vietnam. I almost fell off my ...

We are in the middle of celebrating Easter.  Our children think that Easter is all about chocolate eggs and rabbits, but of course it is really about something far deeper and stronger.  Good Friday is called ‘good’ because it celebrates the death of Jesus Christ on a cruel cross, and Easter Sunday is a celebration of his resurrection.  Many people think of Jesus as effeminate, or as Larry Norman said, ‘a ...

At Gallipoli on the morning of 9th August 1915, with a small party of soldiers, Aussie Dad and soldier Alfred Shout  charged down trenches strongly occupied by the enemy and personally threw four bombs among them, killing eight and routing the remainder. In the afternoon of the same day, from the position gained in the morning, he captured a further length of trench under similar conditions and continued personally to bomb ...

Well-known UK commentator Peter Hitchens in an article called ‘So Much for Father’s Day’ said, “By the end of his or her childhood, a British boy or girl is much more likely to have a TV set in the bedroom than a father at home. Our 45 year war against traditional family life has been so successful that almost 50% of 15 year olds no longer live with both their parents.” ...

I will always remember walking home from primary school at Blackheath in the Blue Mountains, NSW being annoyed by my mother and father’s constant insistence about saying ‘thank you’ and ‘please’. It seemed totally illogical to my egotistical young brain at the time. Looking back now, I am thankful for parents who insisted I say ‘thank you’ whether I thought it was a good idea or not. You see, all children ...

In a few days time we celebrate the beginning of a new year. Taylor Swift’s words are true, “This is a new year. A new beginning and things will change”. However, the older you get the harder it is to change, but if you are a father, you have to keep on changing, for the better, all the time. It is great to see a younger generation getting interested in fatherhood. ...

On Australia’s federal election night (7 September 2013), I received an excited phone call from James Adams, one of the fathers behind Fathers4Equality. As I missed his call, he later expressed his thoughts in text: “Did you hear Abbott’s acceptance speech?  Of three aims he promised to support ‘our forgotten families’. F***king really great news! We have worked long and hard to protect children and return honesty and balance between the ...