Over this month the Melbourne Comedy Festival will feature three women performing sketches celebrating “small moments in life that make us laugh.” These supposedly funny skits include a send up of a 2020 court case where one of Australia’s best-known entertainers, Craig McLachlan, was found not guilty of 13 charges of indecent assault and assault.

It’s hardly comedy gold. Particularly when one of the “funny” women was the star accuser — whose claims were shredded in court.

You would have thought this woman would be hanging her head in shame. But no. She’s out there claiming the court got it wrong.

That’s despite the fact that the magistrate awarded costs against the police. With the exception of cases which are withdrawn, costs are very rarely awarded against the police in criminal prosecutions. For a court to do so, it must have considered that it was an unmeritorious prosecution; in other words, charges should never have been laid in the first place. Victorian police ultimately paid out half a million dollars which is the highest payout ever against the police in Victoria!

This is confirmation that the allegations made by this witness and her fellow complainants didn’t stand up. All 13 charges were dismissed, and the police were forced to write Craig a fat $500,000 apology cheque.

But she’s still demanding public attention, flogging what should be a very dead horse. Fourteen times over the next three weeks she’ll be on the comedy circuit venting her indignation that some people think she’s the villain of the story.

One of the crazy twists in this whole bizarre story is I can’t name this actress, nor any of the other complainants, despite the fact they happily “outed” themselves in the media – appearing in newspaper stories long before going to the police – and have capitalised on their status as sex abuse victims ever since.

Look at this article which launched the whole attack on Craig, written by journalist Kate McClymont, who seems determined to end her career by claiming the scalps of a succession of high profile men named as sex abusers.

Craig’s accusers are featured prominently, named and pictured in the front-page newspaper story and for the last eight years they have continued to parade themselves in public. But even after the charges were thrown out in court, journalists are not permitted to name them because they are still somehow deemed “sex assault victims”. How’s that for conclusive proof that the law is an ass?

Somehow our media invariably fails to mention the vital fact that these accusations first surfaced just after the actresses discovered they had missed out on parts in the 2018 Rocky Horror show, where Craig was once again announced in the starring role.

Naturally, these failed victims have a mighty band of followers still keen to support them. “It never fails to astound me that multiple women can outline their experiences of harassment and abuse by one man, and there will be those who say it didn’t happen….I stand with every one of the brave women who came forward and with the women who haven’t come forward. I believe you!” rants activist Sherele Moody on her Red Heart victim support Facebook page.

Moody is mighty indignant that a podcast has been made exposing the truth about Craig’s court case. Not that she sees it that way: “This podcast is not about clarity or truth – it’s about power and control over the women he harmed, and it’s about maintaining power and control over the stories of survivors.”

Clearly, the many thousands who have been listening to the podcast don’t agree. Not Guilty – The Craig McLachlan case has been No. 3 in top trending Apple podcasts in recent weeks, with Vanessa and Craig flooded with positive feedback.

Please help circulate this powerful podcast series which exposes how easy it is for unjustified allegations to destroy men’s lives – all details here.

The podcast has been a labour of love from Craig’s partner, Vanessa Scammell, who’s been by his side through the whole 8-year ordeal since he was first accused. Vanessa scrambled to produce this amazingly detailed analysis of the court case, in between the demands of her own career, working as a conductor in ballet, musical theatre, concert repertoire and opera productions.

Many of you will have heard the talk Vanessa gave at our Restoring the Presumption of Innocence conference two years ago, where she aimed to set the record straight about the court case, challenging the distorted publicity from most of our media.

Since then, Craig McLachlan has discovered the hard way that in today’s Australia, a not “not guilty” verdict means very little in our feminist-led court of public opinion.

I recently sat down with Craig and Vanessa to talk about what’s happened to them in the last two years. Our chat had its laughs, but it laid bare something far darker: the raw, terrifying power of the feminist mob to turn a man into an unemployable villain — even after a not-guilty verdict and a costs award. They’re still trying to rewrite the court result to keep him blacklisted. It’s chilling stuff.

I hope you will watch our video for the full story but here in brief are some key developments:

Late last year Craig was due to be back on stage in a comedy called Cluedo, appearing alongside some other well-known actors. All was going well and then an actress called Queenie Van Der Sandt took it upon herself to wreak havoc.

She took to social media to declare she was “shocked and disheartened” that Craig had landed a major role. Naturally, the online mob roared in, bullied the rest of the cast for daring to share a stage with him, and made life so toxic that the producer — displaying all the backbone of a wet paper towel —caved and booted Craig out.

These so-called powerful men who run showbiz in Australia don’t have spines — they have white flags. They once fawned over the Gold Logie star actor but now they cower, terrified they’ll be next on the mob’s menu.

So, Craig was forced to step aside from Cluedo, but the feminist outrage brigade has also had a go at bullying regional theatres which have been hosting his two-man show – Six String Stories, featuring Craig on guitar, singing, telling funny stories. It’s a great evening and is proving very popular.

The exciting news is Craig will also be starring in a daring new cabaret show called “Schadenfreude” in Melbourne later this year. It promises to be funny, dark, and entertaining. Full details here.

But I also have an appeal to you, good readers. If you are connected with a theatre or venue with a supportive community which would be willing to stand up for Craig by hosting his show, please contact me. Years ago, I managed to get Cassie Jaye’s movie, The Red Pill, shown around the country, despite fierce opposition from the cancel cult. Surely, we can do this again.

Now to explain more about what’s fuelling the ongoing attacks on Craig, we have to look at the role of the presiding judicial officer in the case, Magistrate Belinda Wallington.

The woman has quite a reputation as the magistrate who first ordered the late Cardinal George Pell to stand trial and then famously appeared in an ABC photograph with Louise Milligan, author of the notorious book, Cardinal, which very effectively poisoned public opinion before the Pell case went before a jury. The unanimous High Court decision dismissing the Pell allegations speaks volumes about the judgement of both women.

Her behaviour in Craig’s case is equally questionable. Having dismissed all the charges against Craig and awarded costs against the police, Wallington then weighed in with some unwarranted asides, describing the four complainants as “brave and honest” and Craig as an “egotistical and self-entitled man”.

Worse still, she threw in a comment about recent changes to sexual consent laws in Victoria, claiming if those changes had been in place at the time of the charges “it is possible that the result would have been different.”

Naturally the complainants seized upon Wallington’s extra-judicial swipes and went to the media claiming the case had been dismissed “on a technicality”.

Craig embarked on defamation action against the leading complainant and key media companies over their reporting in the case but ultimately pulled out after learning it was not permissible to refer to the not-guilty verdict in the defamation trial.

The ongoing debacle led Vanessa to make the podcast series, dissecting the evidence, showing that the behaviour of the complainants falls far short of Wallington’s praise and exposing her consent comment as thoroughly misleading.

Take a look at some examples of the real behaviour of these “brave and honest women,” many of which took place in front of sell-out audiences, all rivetted on Craig’s every move:

• The legendary thigh-tickling caper. One accusation involved Craig reaching up to tickle the complainant up to her inner thigh (while she was perched on an elevated platform). Problem was the physical setup made it comically implausible (he could barely get past her ankle). A further allegation that Craig touched this complainant’s vagina during the show was emphatically denied by the woman herself.
• The mid-song passionate smooch. It was alleged that Craig suddenly paused during his big number to passionately tongue-kiss one of the women onstage — even though the scene was choreographed to the split-second with music and lighting cues, giving him roughly zero room to improvise any erotic detours.
• Hug with extras. A late addition to the endlessly revised list of allegations involved a complainant asking Craig for a hug when an alleged surprise stiffy made an appearance. There was zero evidence supporting this nor the suggestion that Craig waltzed around the stage with no underwear under his flimsy boxer shorts.
• The face-grab fiasco. Witnesses swore blind that Craig grabbed one accuser by the jaw mid-scene and angrily hurled her face aside like a discarded prop. The actual complainant? She shrugged and said the scripted gentle face-touch was just “a little firmer than usual.”
• Much ado about absolutely bugger all. The bulk of the allegations were flatly denied by Craig, riddled with contradictions, or quietly undermined by complainants whose stories kept evolving. Throw in the fact that these women were full-throated participants in the hyper-sexualised, fishnet-and-corset madhouse that is Rocky Horror and the claim that they hadn’t given implied consent starts to look patently absurd.

As for Wallington’s comment about new sexual consent laws. There has been a change in Victorian law requiring that the accused person not only has to genuinely believe he had consent but that a reasonable person in the same circumstance would reach the same conclusion.

In only two of the 13 charges was consent law even mentioned as being applicable. One example where consent was an issue involved Craig sitting on a complainant’s lap. Evidence showed lap-sitting was commonplace in the bawdy backstage culture of the Rocky production. In fact, the same complainant had also straddled Craig’s thigh, joking about leaving “snail trails.”

Here the charges were dismissed because the magistrate accepted that Craig genuinely believed she consented. And, given the circumstances, it is a fair bet that any reasonable person in his position would have believed the same. So, even under Victoria’s new consent laws, the result would have been no different.

Wallington’s unwarranted editorial comments were entirely unnecessary to the decision. They were unnecessary comments that she ought to have known would be weaponised to undermine the very verdict she had delivered. In one breath she cleared him; she awarded him costs; and in the next she handed his critics the perfect excuse to misleadingly claim that his acquittal was the result of a mere technicality. The damage has been profound and lasting.

Yet the truth is finally breaking through. Vanessa Scammell’s compelling podcast Not Guilty is reaching people the world over who have watched #MeToo cases explode with devastating publicity but no proper media scrutiny when they disintegrate in court.

Craig McLachlan is determined to move forward. With exciting projects ahead, he is ready to reclaim the stage that was stolen from him. Spread the word. Help bring one of Australia’s finest entertainers back to where he belongs.

The post Craig McLachlan under siege appeared first on Bettina Arndt.

It’s easy to see why Melbourne’s Swinburne University promoted Aimee Stanton as one of their “pioneers for women.” She’s blond, lively, attractive and she’s a “celebrity”, having been a contestant on Australian Survivor and a presenter on a Channel 7 television program.

Most important of all, she’s a qualified female plumber – a very rare breed indeed. No wonder Swinburne couldn’t resist including her in many media stories, including their Stories for a Brighter Tomorrow promotion, with a whole page dedicated to this Swinburne alum who “survived and thrived as a lady tradie”.

The university was obviously very happy to overlook Ms Stanton’s blemishes. Minor defects like being a self-confessed perpetrator of sexual assault.

Back in 2017, Stanton appeared on Channel 10’s now defunct TV show, The Project, alongside a panel including comedian Tommy Little. Midst great hilarity, Stanton asked Little if he remembered their previous encounter. It turned out that a few years earlier she had met him during promotion for her Survivor appearances and, as she put it, “groped his downstairs region” – apparently in response to a dare. He was very shocked – she was removed by security. Naturally the panel found this all a great joke and laughed off the whole incident.

Given that Swinburne makes a big deal of their zero-tolerance stance against sexual assault and harassment, a group of students has been rightly calling the university out for their hypocrisy and sexism. The ensuing correspondence with the arrogant administration was a “masterclass in bureaucratic deflection,” according to the YouTuber Daily Insight who documented the saga in two videos – here and here. It’s great to see he has attracted a large audience for these videos exposing the double standards of the university.

But that kerfuffle aside, what’s fascinating was Swinbourne’s willingness to take the risk of promoting Stanton – despite this tawdry history – because of her status as a lady tradie.

Take a look at this graph, which highlights the failure of our feminists to achieve growth of women in construction, as compared to a variety of other male-dominated jobs and professions.

No wonder the gender warriors of the ABC are tearing their hair out. Back in 2018 they published an article quoting various academics suggesting the government should do more to shake up “the boys club” and get more women into construction. The academics had done research into why this wasn’t happening.

Their brilliant conclusion? A particular problem was a culture of “presenteeism.” Construction apparently isn’t keen on people who don’t show up! “There is little tolerance for those who won’t commit, and part-time, shared or flexible work doesn’t exist,” lamented the academics.

And, they said, the problem is made worse by the “push to complete projects on time.”

Duh. You can imagine the reaction online when this article was published. Here’s one scathing tweet.

Late last year the ABC had another whine about the unreasonable demands of the construction industry… “long hours, early starts and rigid schedules” and suggested putting “gender on the tender” — meaning that companies competing for government jobs must fulfill gender equity quotas.

Well, that’s already happening, particularly in Victoria which requires women to make up 3% of trade positions in government projects over $20 million and the ACT which demands 10% female employment for government projects over $5 million. The federal government’s 2024–25 Budget introduced “gender-responsive procurement,” leveraging $330 billion in annual spending to promote equality—e.g., by favouring tenders with strong DEI plans.

Four years ago I wrote about the ACT government requiring successful tenders for the build of a new school to have a 100 per cent female management team on site. Given the dire problems of getting women into the construction trades, one solution is to push women into management and office/admin. Currently females handle 17% of such roles in the construction industry.

But the most visible and controversial women in construction are of course, the traffic controllers – those high-vis heroes of the roadworks universe, standing in the blazing sun or pouring rain, twirling their giant red-and-white lollipops like bored conductors of a very slow-moving orchestra.

In Australia we call the females of the species… the Lollipop Ladies.

Recently a book was published on The Dark Legacy of Daniel Andrews, which included a chapter on workplace relations by John Lloyd, who was the first Australian Building and Construction Commissioner. His section on construction in the Melbourne Metro Tunnel revealed traffic controllers are paid $126,200 but explained that’s only the beginning. Night and weekend work attracts double time rates, plus numerous other work entitlements adding a further $540 every week to the cost of employing a single traffic controller.

According to Lloyd, it’s all thanks to the construction unions, particularly the notorious Construction, Forestry, Maritime, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU), now being “off the leash”. And that’s due to the Labor government repaying the critical electoral support of the unions by abolishing the Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC), which kept them somewhat under control.

Everyone knows about the thuggery of these unions, with widespread allegations of systemic corruption, stand-over tactics, bribery and extortion on taxpayer funded construction sites. Everyone knows such issues have driven massive cost inflation and major delays in major infrastructure projects, especially Victoria’s Big Build program. A recent investigation estimated CFMEU misconduct cost Victorians at least $15 billion.

The result is every time we drive past a roadworks site we see a couple of lollipop ladies standing around chatting on their phones or filming flirty TikToks, it’s not just a bit of everyday irritation — it’s a billboard for how we’re all getting fleeced. These casual roles, often filled by young women earning exorbitant salaries thanks to union-mandated penalty rates and overstaffing rules, are the most visible symptom of the CFMEU’s pernicious grip on construction.

While union corruption quietly siphons off billions from taxpayers behind the scenes, these highly paid, low-effort jobs sit right there in plain sight — a daily reminder that the same organisation inflating project costs to obscene levels is also propping up a workforce that looks more like a social-media side hustle than serious infrastructure delivery. No wonder people are furious: the lollipop ladies aren’t the problem, but they’re the face we see while the real rip-off happens behind the scenes.

Sometimes very glamorous faces, indeed. Look at these two, as featured on Australian social media. Here are their Tiktok videos…here and here. Of course, there are plenty of sensible women doing these jobs. But they too cop flak from an irritated public when drivers are late for work, stuck behind orange cones and forced to watch lollipop ladies chat on their phones, knowing they are earning so much more in a week than most qualified tradies.

“They are the women we love to hate,” was one of the headlines of one of the many media stories ranting about their huge wages. “Lollipop lady sparks outrage after revealing how much she earns in a typical week – and the eye-watering amount she’s paid for a 15-minute shift,” fumed the Daily Mail, discussing revelations from one traffic controller that she’d raked in $148 for just 15 minutes of work.

It’s not just the money. There are just too many of them. There are constant reports of overstaffing to meet union mandated minimums e.g., 2–4 controllers per site for shift rotations, even during quiet periods. Safety regulations require at least 2 controllers per high-risk site for safety (e.g., shift overlaps, breaks, or multi-lane coverage), even if traffic is light. This is the result of over-prescriptive rules from road authorities and work, health and safety regulators, falling over each other to pile on demands.

Australia proudly leads the world in over-regulating road traffic control, mandated by the government entities, such as VicRoads, Work Safe and councils. We boast roughly 40–60 traffic controllers per 100,000 people, roughly 2–3 times the rate in the United States, United Kingdom or New Zealand. Strict Austroads rules mandate human controllers on almost every moderate-to-high-risk site, often requiring 6 people or more per location.

The result? A very visible army of high-vis workers, many earning six-figure salaries with plenty of downtime. Yet there is no robust international evidence that this heavy-handed approach delivers fewer work-zone crashes or fatalities than countries that rely far more on signs, cones, portable lights, automated systems and common sense.

Well done, Australia—world champion in red tape and orange vests, and cost over-runs, with safety outcomes that look… pretty average.

There’s been a bunch of recent inquiries and reviews which have reached the same conclusion. The 2025 Traffic Controller Safety Survey by the Traffic Management Association of Australia, explicitly calls for accelerated rollout of digital speed displays, truck-mounted attenuators, and physical barriers, with a long-term goal to “remove all traffic controllers from live lanes” through automation.

But at the heart of this story is the great gender-diversity circus — DEI initiatives and shiny government quotas strutting their stuff, especially on taxpayer-funded projects. Sure, the real engine is still the fat pay packets, the infrastructure boom times, and a steady stream of backpackers willing to wave a lollipop sign for six figures… but let’s be honest: one reason you suddenly see so many young women holding stop/slow bats is so the big contractors can tick the “we hit our female quota” box and keep winning the next juicy government tender.

When it comes to ticking those boxes, it’s not the lollipop ladies who are actually making the difference. Women in traffic control make up roughly 1.5–3% of the total female construction workforce. It’s the female office workers and women in management who are really on the move –growing from 15% in 2023-4, to 50–55% in recent years. And to demonstrate how ideological this is, the majority of men in construction management have actual construction trade experience and qualifications, while almost none of the women appointed to these jobs do.

Fixing the lollipop lady problem—overstaffed, high-paid traffic controllers who are the most visible sign of waste in construction—means firstly going after the CFMEU by taking measures like deregistering or heavily restricting the corrupt construction divisions, stripping unions of their influence over traffic control accreditation and training. But also tackling the overemphasis on human controllers in government work, health and safety regulations, which are then imposed by builders, local councils, state road authorities and the like.

Meanwhile the rare, hard-working women who are out there learning the trades are often forgotten. Greg Cole runs NuForm Steel, a steel fabrication/installation company in Victoria and says that he, like many other business owners, is crying out for apprentices and would love to employ more women – if he could find them. But he needs kids who will show up – women suffering presenteeism problems aren’t an option.

I talked to one of his current apprentices, Naomi, 22, who’s in the middle of her 3-4 year apprenticeship in metal fabrication. When she left school there were plenty around her, including her parents, who urged her to become a lollipop girl – because of the money.

She chose the harder road. But it annoys her seeing the lollipop girls standing around, looking at their phones… “Damn it. It drives me a little nuts seeing them.” Yet she’s not sorry made the tough decision to plan for her future. “It’s a long-term vision.”

The post The Lollipop Ladies appeared first on Bettina Arndt.

The HBO television drama series, The Pitt, is brilliant entertainment. The show has won a stack of awards for its authentic, gripping portrayal of the grisly medical cases staff confront in a Pittsburgh emergency room.

In the second series we witness this constantly overwhelmed, high-stakes environment during a chaotic July 4th shift, with staff juggling life-or-death traumas amid bed shortages, diversions from other hospitals, and other crises. The heroic staff routinely cope with these relentless dramas with rough, gallows humour, sarcastic one-liners, and dark banter that keeps morale afloat amid the chaos.

But suddenly the mood changes. We are told of a new patient in triage – a “sexual assault survivor.” The atmosphere snaps into hushed solemnity: jokes vanish, voices drop, and the entire team shifts to gentle, deliberate, almost reverent tiptoeing.

Somehow, in the overflowing ER – where beds are scarce and staff stretched thin – there’s instant allocation of a private room, specialized lighting, and three dedicated professionals for hours of solemn and meticulous evidence collection.

Dana, the charge nurse, treats Ilana, the survivor, with utmost care and sensitivity as they take fingernail and mouth swabs. “You’re in a safe place now … We’re here to help and support you,” she whispers, oozing empathy.

At the culmination of the medical examination, the young nurse who is assisting announces in a tremulous voice: “You are so brave.”

Earlier in the proceeding there is a disquieting moment where Ilana disrupts preparations for the internal examination, sits up and blurts out, “I don’t want to do this anymore…He’s my friend… it was just dumb … he was drunk, he didn’t mean it. It didn’t mean anything.”

Confronted with the girl’s ambivalence, the medical staff are reassuring: “Your feelings are valid and we’re here no matter what you decide.” Having agreed to proceed with the examination, later Ilana expresses renewed concern about her friend: “He’d lose everything. It was stupid, he was so drunk. Maybe it is not worth ruining his life over something like that… didn’t feel huge in the moment.”

And what happens? The woman from the local rape crisis group intervenes: “That’s a normal feeling right now – minimizing to cope. But what happened wasn’t ok, drunk or not. You don’t have to decide alone,” she says, telling Ilana she can do anonymous third-party reporting if she wants to take action later. “Ilana, what happened to you wasn’t a mistake – it was a crime, no matter the circumstances,” she adds later in the episode.

I spent days thinking back to this plotline which struck me as both bizarre and revealing. For a start there is the tonal whiplash, the sudden shift from frenzy and gallows humour to what seems like a solemn rite, akin to a religious service.

Then, with rape elevated to ‘MOST VITAL’ status and demanding undivided attention amid the chaos, the victim’s minimization has to be portrayed as a tragic flaw rather than an appropriate compassionate instinct. There’s no room for ambiguity, let alone forgiveness, or even the possibility of mistake, in a script that prioritizes ideology over nuanced humanity.

It comes across as a laborious exercise in moral posturing, reeking of performative empathy, as the ER’s raw, unfiltered brutality is paused for a sanitized, educational interlude that virtue-signals the show’s progressive credentials.

Naturally my conerns about these aspects of The Pitt’s storytelling proved to be totally at odds with the acclaim the episodes received from all the reviewers. In a Collider review, writer Kelcie Mattson describes the rape storyline as “profoundly, searingly humane – detailing a medical procedure, assisting an overlooked patient, and confronting pervasive cultural harm with the sensitivity, integrity, and urgency it requires.”

Ilana’s ambiguity about the assault is uniformly framed by commentators as a realistic portrayal of survivor psychology, including self-blame and fear of social repercussion. Her care for her friend is viewed as a barrier to justice rather than admirable humanity.

And this is exactly the consensus you’d expect from today’s feminist culture. Our media is determined to enforce a monolithic narrative of victimhood, dismissing alternative responses like empathy for the accused as misguided, internalized oppression. This strips agency from the victim by implying her instincts are wrong, while privileging a framework that views all such incidents through a lens of systemic harm— at the expense of individual context, like alcohol-fuelled mistakes and misunderstandings between friends.

There’s something very odd about framing sexual assault as “Ultimate Trauma”. It is surely ideological overreach to assume that all sexual assault warrants immediate, exhaustive resources—despite ER overload. It imposes a rigid, value-laden hierarchy of suffering rooted in feminist ideologies, rather than objective medical or situational priorities.

But that is what happens in this mad, sad world of modern feminism which positions sexual violence as an unparalleled symbol of patriarchal harm or systemic oppression, a compulsory narrative which overrides individual agency and real-world context.

How telling that a New York Times article on The Pitt described the show as “an empathy exam”. “It’s a civics lesson,” it added.

Well, if it is a civics lesson what are the rights and responsibilities, the lessons about the rule of law, that this hugely popular television series is intent on teaching us through this particular plotline? That’s simple. The message is “Nail the bloke! Put aside any misguided loyalty to perpetrators, any concerns about ruining their lives. All accused men are villains and deserve to receive the full brunt of the law.”

Surely it is relevant that we’re usually talking about kids here – most date rapes involve very young men and women, with 15-19 the most common age group amongst accused males. And surveys show most women in this situation are, like Ilana, very unsure that these young guys deserve to be sent to prison for regret sex that so easily results from these alcohol-fuelled adventures.

That’s the bottom line here. The feminist’s prescribed punitive approach simply isn’t working. Many young women don’t want these former friends to end up behind bars and hence don’t report to police. And if they do, many juries don’t end up convicting the males caught up in these murky he-said she-said cases.

Back in 2009 Aya Gruber, a lifelong feminist, a Harvard Law graduate, a former public defender, and a survivor of sexual violence, wrote a pathbreaking Washington Law Review article which argued that feminist reforms targeting date rape are “controversial, sporadically-implemented, and empirically unsuccessful.” She pointed out the entire feminist legal framework was built around the most extreme, unambiguous cases, and then applied wholesale to every situation including messy, ambiguous, alcohol-involved scenarios. The woman who is uncertain, who knows the man, who doesn’t want his life destroyed — she was simply written out of the picture when the laws were designed. Ultimately Gruber urged feminists to re-imagine gender justice outside of the guise of criminal law.

Another prominent feminist had similar ideas. Eight years ago, I was delighted to see Germaine Greer, one of the leading lights of Second Wave feminism, talking sense about these date rape cases. Promoting a small book she’d written on rape, Greer called for the lower sentences for sexual assault and said society should not see it as a “spectacularly violent crime” but instead view it more as “lazy, careless and insensitive.”

And she mentioned an idea about how to tackle the issue in a more sensible way. Namely, restorative justice (RJ). I first came across restorative justice many decades ago, when I wrote a story on how this approach was being used to resolve disputes amongst personnel working in a coal mine. Restorative justice is all about bringing together the various parties – those directly involved plus some supporters – to collectively explore what happened, sort out responsibility for different aspects and decide on ways to make amends. This process, also known as “conferencing’, is used very successfully to deal with school disputes, youth crime and the like.

I was very hopeful when I discovered this approach was being proposed for rape cases – a genuine alternative justice system to sort through the conflicting his and hers stories seeking common ground, rather than bludgeoning men into submission. It made sense, particularly with acquaintance/date rape scenarios involving alcohol, consent ambiguities, young people, and low reporting rates. Great for everyday cases where victims/survivors don’t want the criminal system, where juries hesitate to convict without clear evidence, and where the adversarial process often fails both parties.

I should have known that there was no way feminists were going to let this happen. Despite Gruber’s words of warning, they remain intent on refashioning the criminal justice system to demolish all accused men and refuse to countenance an alternative approach.

Here’s feminist family violence researchers Joan Pennell and Gale Burford: “Restorative Justice in sexual violence is a wolf in sheep’s clothing—retraumatizing victims through coerced ‘conferences’ where abusers can twist narratives, blame alcohol or ‘misunderstandings,’ and escape real punishment. Feminists must fight this tooth and nail; it’s a vicious undermining of survivor agency, forcing women into intimate hells with their rapists for the sake of ‘restoration’ that only restores patriarchal control.”

So, for a while there was a total blanket ban on using RJ for sexual violence cases. But gradually the rules started to bend, allowing conferencing in cases where the alleged perpetrator had admitted responsibility or was already found guilty in court. The new culturally sanctioned version of RJ was proudly survivor-led, complete with victim-offender dialogue aimed at securing the perpetrator’s apology, ideally complete with the mandatory line: “I have learned so much from your courage.”

Well, actually that’s a bit mean. There is evidence that RJ can work well even in these circumstances – and not just for the victim. Restorative justice literature consistently finds that what many women actually want is validation, a genuine apology, assurance it won’t happen again, and a voice — not incarceration. And it is certainly a better option for men than prison.

But it’s a long way from the open-ended process I had in mind which allows both parties to explore what happened without predetermined guilt. A genuine truth finding mechanism which might identify fault on both sides, especially in alcohol-affected date rape cases.

In March last year a report was tabled by the Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) on reforming justice responses to sexual violence. This proposed legislation aims to make RJ a more formal, consistent practice across states and territories—potentially as an alternative or complementary pathway to our current revenge-seeking system. This is the first time restorative justice has been seriously considered as part of any national strategy to address sexual violence.

This is a big deal, particularly as there were submissions to the inquiry which argued for an even broader model, removing the current post conviction/admission requirements. To its credit, the ALRC did recommend this model.

It’s a welcome sign that cracks are finally emerging in the long-standing, punitive, feminist-led monopoly over this territory—cracks that open the door to a broader, fairer, more humane approach to real justice. I urge you to contact your local MPs to urge the government to back this proposal – here’s a draft letter. You could also send it to your state Attorney-General. I’m really excited about this idea and hope you will help promote it.

The ALRC’s recommendation to expand restorative justice pathways really deserves our full support—not as a retreat from accountability, but as a mature step towards delivering true justice for many more people.

The post Television becomes our feminist preacher appeared first on Bettina Arndt.

Across the world, feminist legal academics are bullying politicians and legislators into adopting new measures aimed at increasing rape convictions. The result, year after year, is justice systems increasingly tilted to favour accusers, undermining the right to a fair trial for men, and increasing the likelihood that innocent men will be convicted.

Scotland judges were doing well in this macabre race to the bottom, but now they have suffered a setback. A UK Supreme Court has warned that Scottish courts are violating a defendant’s right to a fair trial. Scottish lawyers are claiming this could mean hundreds of men in prison will be lining up for appeals or possible compensation for false imprisonment.

It isn’t so much the laws which have been at fault but the way Scottish judges are choosing to interpret them – namely by denying juries critical evidence that might have been used to exonerate the accused men.

They have taken rape shield laws, designed to protect the accuser from humiliating questions about their sexual history or character, and used these to exclude evidence critical to an understanding of what actually happened between the two people.

A leading Scottish barrister, Thomas Ross KC, has been outspoken about what is going on there. He’s in a unique position to expose this injustice because, after handling over 100 rape cases, in 2022 he threw in the towel because he felt it was no longer possible to properly defend accused men. “I was just banging my head against a brick wall and getting nowhere.” Ross decided he’d be better off walking away from this territory so he could speak publicly about what is going on.

He’s now out there, describing in podcasts and interviews the ludicrous situation where defence lawyers have to submit all evidence they propose to use in court for approval prior to the trial. This includes all the questions they plan to ask, which is very useful, of course, for the complainant who has ample opportunity to adjust their own evidence to get their stories right.

Increasingly, questions the defence lawyers want to ask or evidence they wish to lead, are rejected by the court. Put simply, men simply aren’t allowed to provide juries with relevant evidence critical to their defence.

Ross mentions a conversation with a father whose 18-year-old son was facing a rape trial. “The dad was looking at me as if to say, ‘What kind of lawyer are you? This is my boy; he’s going to jail. He’s going in the sex offenders register. He is never going to get a job. I want this evidence laid out and you’re telling me you’re not going to be allowed to read it. That’s on you. This is your fault. If you’re the kind of lawyer that cannot get this evidence in, then you are clearly not up to it.”

“I just couldn’t do it anymore,” said Ross. Many other lawyers agree with Ross that the situation has become intolerable, which is why the Law Society of Scotland sought leave to intervene in the UK Supreme Court case arguing men aren’t getting the fair trials required by Article 6 of the European Convention of Human Rights. And now, the UK Supreme Court, led by the most senior judge in the country, has agreed there is something very wrong in the way these trials have been conducted.

For other reasons, the UK judges unfortunately still sent to prison the two men who were the subjects of the appeal. One of these was Andrew Keir, who was sentenced to five years in prison for raping a drunk and sleeping woman at his home. But evidence withheld from the jury included CCTV footage showing an earlier drinking session at the pub where the woman, a work colleague of Keir, kissed him, and beckoned him into a disabled toilet. When they emerged, the couple were thrown out of the pub as it was assumed they had been having sex. Yet the CCTV footage was cut by the prosecutors to exclude all evidence of this earlier sexual contact.

There was a text message from Keir saying, “We went back and continued to have sex that we’d obviously had previously.” This was doctored to read “We… have sex,” as if it referred only to the alleged rape at Keir’s house.

So here we have a justice system falsifying statements, doctoring CCTV footage and tampering with the evidence, rewriting the history of what happened that evening to suit the complainant’s story.

“It’s not justice. It’s shameful that it took five Justices in London to tell our judges how to do their job,” says Ross.

Scottish academic Stuart Waiton, writing about this in The Spectator, describes the case as one of the most egregious examples of miscarriage of justice he has ever seen.

The other case dealt with by the UK Supreme Court involved David Daly, a man found guilty of historic child abuse. Excluded from the evidence presented to the jury was the fact that the complainant told police that the rape led to her getting pregnant and having a child – a claim which was found to be untrue. The defence was not allowed to question her about this fake pregnancy because it was not deemed relevant to the rape case. So, a bald lie used by an accuser to bolster her case is not relevant?

Early last year I wrote about Marc Catelli, a Sydney gelato salesman who was accused of sexual assault by a woman who had made similar accusations about two other men in the previous two years. He was facing a jury trial where the defence team was prohibited from mentioning these false allegations under NSW rape shield laws. Luckily Catelli’s case was dropped – but only because the complainant failed to show up for various hearings.

NSW is the only Australian state/territory which prohibits evidence of previous false allegations. The state seems determined to remain a prime mover when it comes to ever more draconian rape laws. In 2022 NSW led recent moves to introduce affirmative or enthusiastic consent laws, which are proving very successful at having more men sent to prison.

Two weeks ago a man’s post appeared on Reddit, warning men in Australia to learn from his mistakes. Here was a man who had just been released after serving a 2.9-year prison sentence for having sex without affirmative consent. His “victim” was a 43-year-old female he’d met on Tinder – he was 47 at the time. He invited her to his house, asking her on the phone to come over for sex “without strings.”

“The one-night stand was nothing out of the ordinary. Lots of kissing, touching, normal sex. I grew up in an era of “No Means No”. My victim never said “No” nor did she push me off,” he wrote, explaining he assumed “everything was good,” from the woman’s positive reaction at the time.

But he’s since learnt that wasn’t good enough – he needed to check he had “positive and enthusiastic consent”. That became very clear the next day, when a squad of six police officers came to his flat, unannounced: “busted down the door with a battering ram that cost me $5,000 to repair, and took evidence – sheets, condoms, clothes, etc.”

“I was on remand in jail for close to a year, negotiating with the Department of Public Prosecutions and waiting for my trial, in horrible, smelly old jails full of roaches and scummy people. No fun at all.”

At his trial he was lucky to escape with a sentence of only 2.9 years non-parole, 4.5 years in total.

His advice to other men – record everything and constantly check your partner is ok with everything you do. (Secret recording is not illegal unless it is played to a third party and can even legally be used in court to disprove evidence given against you.)

Since discovering the Reddit post I tracked down the shattered man – now facing the prospect that he will never again get a job in the banking industry which previously employed him. But putting his ordeal in perspective was the fact that while he was in prison his five-year-old son (from a previous relationship) was with his grandfather on the day of the Bondi Massacre. His brave grandfather used his body to successfully shelter the boy from the bullets.

Meanwhile, the feminist quest to destroy the lives of men continues unabated. Many other Australian states have now joined NSW in legislating affirmative consent – Victoria, Queensland and the ACT (Tasmania has similar laws dating back to 2004).

The ACT is going great guns. A recent report in The Canberra Times claimed there were at least 20 times as many sexual offence charges laid in the last quarter of 2024 compared to five years earlier – and that their new affirmative consent laws were contributing to this success. A few days later came the embarrassing retraction. The Justice and Community Safety Directorate had erred– new statistics showed only 3.5 times more charges in 2023 than 2020. Who knows what’s really going on here, but local ACT lawyers report that the current policy is that ALL sexual assault cases are shoved through to trial. No investigation is needed. Let the court decide.

And no one gives a hoot about the impact on accused men. Look what happened in NSW when the DPP Sally Dowling called an audit of sexual assault cases after seven District Court judges had criticised meritless cases being pushed through to court. The result was a whitewash, finding 97% of cases complied with the guidelines, and only 17 cases being discontinued.

Meanwhile, our jails are full of accused men who haven’t even had a trial. Two years ago I reported that 42% of the men in prison in NSW are on remand – they haven’t faced trial. Most of these are sexual assault or domestic violence cases.

But, at least in Australia, rape shield requirements have not yet reached the absurdities exposed in Scotland. Although evidence or questions about a complainant’s sexual history/behaviour may be excluded, we don’t have the mandatory pre-approval processes seen in Scotland.

Not yet. Note that the recent Australian Law Reform Commission Inquiry looking at judicial responses to sexual violence – which released its recommendations a year ago – proposed “ground rules” hearings pre-trial which would set us on a similar path to what is happening in Scotland.

And in Canada. The crippling effects of Canadian pre-trial hearings is a regular topic on the excellent YouTube video series, Not on Record – which features criminal lawyer Joseph Neuberger and legal researcher Diana Davison, long known for her work supporting wrongfully accused men. Davison explains that Canadian defence lawyers are not allowed to talk about anything of a sexual nature unless it is approved in a pretrial motion, nor can they discuss consensual sex that proceeded or followed the alleged rape. The fact the complainant gets to see all the defence evidence and questions in advance means her evidence can be tailored and sanitized.

Neuberger recently won a recent case involving a 19-year-old student who was accused of sexual assault and violence against another student. In dismissing all charges, the judge noted that the girl had tailored her evidence after learning how the defence team planned to shoot down her claims. The judge ended up apologising to the accused: “On behalf of the administration of justice for the Province of Ontario, I wish to apologize for the significant inconvenience and expense to which you have been subjected, as a result of these proceedings”.

Across the world, wrongfully accused men deserve similar apologies. Of course, if the police and prosecution did their jobs fairly in the first place, such cases would never reach court. But the misandrist culture we are in makes this increasingly unlikely. Our police and prosecutors are clearly cowed by the feminist-dominated media, academia and politicians.

It makes it all the more important to spread the word about this momentous UK Supreme Court case – which has exposed the injustice now so widespread.

The post Shamed Scottish Judges appeared first on Bettina Arndt.

Worried about the boys in your life? Be warned. Our government is out to get them.

In early January, when our country was still reeling from the Bondi Massacre, all the talk was about violent extremism. We watched the disgraceful Albanese government ducking and weaving to avoid naming Islamic extremism as the ideology which inspired this appalling event.

How convenient that on January 7, the day before our Prime Minister finally caved and agreed to a Royal Commission, our media was diverted by a news story reporting on a Melbourne University study into what they claimed was another driver of violent extremism. You guessed it – misogyny.

“Almost 40 per cent of Australian boys support violent extremist ideologies while more than a third have misogynistic attitudes towards women,” spluttered outraged media reports. Newspapers quoted Dr Sara Meger, the lead researcher, who said her findings revealed strong and significant correlations between misogynist attitudes and support for violent extremism. Apparently “disturbingly high” anti-feminist views were held by the boys aged 13 to 17 included in the study. And that’s the real point – they say “misogyny,” but they mean disagreeing with feminist beliefs.

The timely release of this unpublished research comes as no surprise. Sara Meger has been targeting boys for many years now and this was an ideal moment to attract international attention. The feminist scholar is a lecturer in feminist international relations and international security, and this new research is simply the latest round of her ongoing project on “Misogyny and Youth Radicalisation Leading to Violent Extremism.”

More about this deeply flawed, nonsensical research later. What’s important to understand is that the feminist mafia controlling our universities have been linking misogyny to extremism for nearly a decade.

Check out the Australian Institute of International Affairs, a respected thinktank precluded under its charter from promoting ideology. Yet from 2018 onwards this organisation has been publishing articles identifying misogyny as a form of violent extremism. The most recent example, by Deakin University lecturer Dr Shannon Zimmerman, quotes the UN Security Council Resolution 1325 which ludicrously claims “conflict and war have a disproportionate impact on women and girls.” Hmmm, apart from all those dead soldiers, who are almost all men.

Zimmerman argues that it follows that “special effort is needed to be taken to ensure the protection of women and girls from violence” and this requires addressing gender-based responses to extremism – which is her claimed expertise.

There are dozens of similar examples of feminist academics across Australia pushing this line, publishing articles, speaking at conferences, and making submissions to national security inquiries arguing that misogyny is a cause, sometimes even the cause of right-wing extremism. And they are packing a punch.

Our key intelligence organisation, ASIO (Australian Security Intelligence Organisation) has fallen into line, acknowledging links between misogyny (particularly “violent misogyny”) and violent extremism, especially in the context of radicalisation among young people. Mike Burgess, Director-General of ASIO, has referenced “violent misogynists” as part of the evolving threat landscape.

This is simply the latest product of the endlessly inventive domestic violence industry. The violent extremism they are talking about is rebadged violence against women – a remake of the relentless campaign which has dominated public dialogue for the last half century, morphing from protecting women from genuinely dangerous men to claiming victimhood for women confronted with a raised voice or refusal to pay a credit card bill.

The industry’s inspired new move is to repackage violence against women as the very latest, sexiest of bogeymen – terrorist extremism. Not bad, eh? Once again, I sit back and marvel at the feminists’ incredible chutzpah and inventiveness.

Now, after nearly a decade of propaganda carefully preparing the ground for their next move, the scene is set. They are ready to come for the boys. The feminists now say the time has come for prevention, which means targeting boys in schools.

We’ve already had the first announcement. At the National Men’s Health Gathering in Brisbane last October, Ged Kearney, the Assistant Minister for the Prevention of Family Violence, introduced herself as a “proud feminist,” and announced to the assembled group of hard-working health professionals and men’s support workers that “we’re going to take you on a journey away from your destructiveness and domination,” before slipping in the news that classroom anti-misogyny training for boys would soon be introduced into both junior and senior schools. Kapow!

So here we go. Australia is scrambling to catch up with feminists elsewhere who’ve been going great guns pursuing this new agenda. In Canada, New Zealand and some American states there are moves to follow the UK and Scotland which recently announced anti-misogyny classes for boys in schools with a £20 million investment to empower teachers, families, and pupils to tackle these issues. Children as young as 11 exhibiting “misogynistic behaviours” are to receive targeted interventions. And what is misogynistic behaviour? You guessed it; whatever the feminists say it is!

Jess Phillips, who bears the ominous title “Minister for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls”, has repeatedly described misogyny as needing to be treated like “any other extremist ideology.”

Sure enough, her safeguarding has already begun. In early January, Laurelhill Community College in County Antrim, Northern Ireland suspended 19 male teenage pupils after the principal raised concerns about “toxic masculinity” on display during a school assembly. The parents of the 19 boys, along with children at the school, have spoken out against the suspensions believing them to be unfair, saying they have damaged the boys’ mental wellbeing after being made out to “be villains”. There were claims that the girls’ behaviour was just as bad, yet none were suspended, naturally.

This is obviously just the start of those targeted interventions in a population primed by the hugely successful Netflix drama Adolescence which involved a 13-year-old boy who brutally stabs and murders a female schoolmate. Prime Minister Starmer used the series to justify the intervention in schools: “Every parent should be able to trust that their daughter is safe at school…This is about protecting girls,” he said.

Never mind that the Netflix drama was fiction based on numerous flawed assumptions. Rick Bradford, who writes the excellent blog, The Illustrated Empathy Gap, points out white teenage girls are in fact the least likely group to be victims of knife crime in the UK, as he shows here:

Equally dubious is the Netflix drama’s beat-up of the risks to boys of exposure to dangerous influences online. The truth is far more complex with boys often victims of online abuse by girls, who are very actively using the internet to bully and abuse others.

• A 2021 UNICEF review of global studies found that boys often face equal or greater exposure to certain online harms compared to girls, including being more likely to be victims of sextortion.
• A 2024 Thorn survey of over 10,000 minors reported a sharp rise in younger boys being targeted for sexual messages or requests for explicit images.
• A Youth Endowment Fund 2025 Vulnerability Report, based on a survey of 10,000 teens aged 13-17 in England and Wales found minimal gender differences in participation in online discussions about harming specific groups, with 38% of boys and 34% of girls reporting involvement.
• A YouGov survey found there has been no increase in misogynist attitudes amongst young men, as compared to older generations.

But none of this fits the new narrative of vile boys being groomed online to become misogynist terrorists – a theme which has been embraced by our own eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant.

Naturally our compliant media dutifully trots out the latest feminist talking points rather than asking the hard questions. Like are these claims credible? Are they arguments based on research or advocacy founded in ideology?

Let’s return briefly to the Meger research used to support the latest claims about misogyny and violent extremism. What we didn’t hear about is the fact that this study also found more than a quarter of the teenage girls surveyed expressed misogynist views about women and girls – “minimising violence, excusing perpetrators and mistrusting their own gender.” That’s according to the Victorian Commissioner for Gender Equality the Public Sector, Dr Niki Vincent, who wrote about the unpublished study on her LinkedIn page. As I mentioned, this latest round of the Meger research is not yet published but presumably Vincent had access to the data as part of the DV elite.

So how is it possible that so many girls were lured to the dark side? Well, look at the inane questions included in the Megel project:

Sometimes a woman can make a man so angry that he hits her when he didn’t mean to.

Women often make sexual assault accusations as a way of getting back at men.

Women going through custody battles often make up or exaggerate claims of domestic violence.

It is easy to see why so many girls as well as boys would agree with these often factual statements.

Funnily enough the survey also includes questions clearly targeting the Muslim community:

A man should be able to have more than one wife but a woman should not have more than one husband.

Unsurprisingly there’s been no mention of the response of different ethnic groups to this survey. That’s the great irony. The ethnic groups most likely to score highly on these misogyny scales are precisely the same Islamic groups which have produced individuals who do pose a terrorist threat. But no one is talking about that.

There’s a New Zealand psychologist blogging on Substack as Backcountry Psychology who is doing a great job meticulously exposing this mountain of feminist “scholarship” denigrating men. Research he describes as “full of unjustified assumptions and invalid measurement, weak manipulations, or suspicious analysis” – all being used to support “all sorts of theories and claims about masculinity, patriarchy, aggression, gender norms.”

Backcountry Psychology is very concerned that these deceptive studies are being used to justify re-education of children: “The problem is that certain progressive people read shallow articles like this and then actually call for (and vote for) unnecessary interventions in schools and broad societal restructuring—all based on pretty shoddy research.”

“Almost the entire field is run by ideologues with clear bias. It’s a house of cards. A progressive propaganda machine designed only to advance a certain orthodox worldview.”

And right now, boys are in the crosshairs – a very convenient distraction from the real threat of violent extremism, and clever means of avoiding proper discussion about Islamic extremists who pose such a danger to this country.

The post Coming for the boys appeared first on Bettina Arndt.

Eleven years ago, artist Anthony Lister was riding high. The Sydney Morning Herald published this front-page article proclaiming the street artist had captured the world stage and was being exhibited around the world.

They called him “Australia’s Banksy” and described his mighty legal battles trying to stop the local council painting over his famous murals adorning abandoned buildings in his hometown of Brisbane.

You can view some of his extraordinary creations on his website here.

There’s a documentary about his early work and the impact on his family life called Have you seen the Listers which featured for years on the Netflix platform. It’s now on YouTube here. This focussed on his young family struggling to survive in a world centred around his studios full of partying people, drugs, and many, many young women keen to hang onto the coattails of this talented high-flying man. But then his life came crashing down.

In 2020 Anthony Lister’s home was raided by a 23-man task force – including police armed with sub machine guns – who had come to arrest him for sexual assault. They broke down his door before carting him off to the police station to confront hordes of media salivating over this latest #MeToo salvo. The press were given access to photos of him being locked up.

The story of what happened to Lister is just appalling. His arrest was the result of a coordinated campaign by young women determined to take him down. The charges ranged from touching a breast, to throwing a woman across the room and violently raping her. All of these accusations were ultimately discredited in court and dismissed by two juries.

Late last year a Sydney jury took only a few minutes to throw out the last of these allegations – but that decision has, unsurprisingly, been ignored by our mainstream media. The very same media which, anticipating a conviction, had published story after story reporting in salacious detail the allegations these women were making.

The witch-hunt resulted in 5 years of hell for Lister and his family. He was arrested 15 times and spent 83 days in prison. His exhibitions were attacked and closed down, his art defaced, he was debanked by two banking institutions, photographers stalked him everywhere he went. His private address was published on social media, death threats posted on his front door. A shop even promoted a “Kill your local Lister” tattoo.

I’ve made a video with Lister talking about this whole extraordinary story. Please watch it and circulate it to your networks. There’s much to be learnt from his revelations about being ripped off by lousy lawyers, how bail conditions set him up for repeat imprisonment, the horrors of our prisons, five years of hounding by the press, and the devastation of a hung jury after a 6-week criminal trial in 2024 – which led to the final trial last year.

I think you’ll find Lister’s story most compelling, and an important expose of how our justice system is being hijacked by feminist ideology determined to take down prominent men. It’s very important you help me promote it so that Lister’s innocence is well publicised.

It is simply outrageous that our media has failed so dismally to expose how the evidence of these complainants was roundly rejected by a jury. The media naturally failed to report that several complainants were confronted with proof that their version of events was untrue, in devastating cross-examination by Margaret Cunneen SC.

The one-eyed journalists – from the ABC, The Sydney Morning Herald (SMH), The Guardian and the like – crusaded against a suppression order which was imposed to protect Lister’s identity, long after the news of his arrest had been broadcast worldwide. Eventually that suppression order was lifted but the judge, Michael John King, took the very unusual step of commenting on the unbalanced coverage of the case, which failed to include all Lister’s acquittals in earlier trials. He mentioned he was so disappointed in the SMH that he had just cancelled his subscription!

Astoundingly, SMH journalist, Clare Sibthorpe, said in court she wasn’t interested in covering the verdict if Lister was acquitted. And sure enough, the paper has refused to publish the fact that the jury ultimately threw it all out. (I urge you to write to the SMH editor, Jordan Baker – here – to complain.)

The current slogan being used to advertise the Sydney Morning Herald is “Here’s to reason” – claiming to make a “powerful statement on the value of balanced, responsible journalism in a deeply polarised world.” What a joke!

There’s an interesting back story to my involvement in this case. Anthony Lister’s mother became involved in setting up Mothers of Sons, the website campaigning for fair treatment for men in our courts. She contacted us initially about another son who was confronted by false rape allegations being made in a family law battle by his disturbed, drug-addicted ex-partner – read the whole dreadful saga here.

Nearly four years later I had a phone call from this mother, telling me that now her other son, Anthony, was under siege. Worse, they were running out of money having given over half a million dollars to the major Sydney criminal law firm which had failed dismally to look after him.

In the end the brilliant barrister Margaret Cunneen SC stepped in to help him, and it was her team’s hard work and her expert handling of the jury which led to the final acquittal on all remaining charges. Here they are after the verdict:

What really saved Lister was he had the proof to show the accusations were based on total lies. That was the amazing thing. Lister records everything in his life. It started as a boy when he videoed his latest skateboard moves but then he found it helpful to keep track of progress in his art. So, the camera was always on, recording everything that happened in his studios and everywhere else he went.

It was all there – over 30 hard drives of data, including all his social media messages. Everything he needed to disprove the allegations the young women were making. Naturally, the police weren’t interested in his side of the story, and the prosecution built their case against him using the carefully edited social media messages produced by his accusers. It was Cunneen’s team that did the hard work of compiling all the proof that brought these women undone.

• Like the complainant who claimed Lister had assaulted her…but he was able to produce a message from her saying something like “that was the best day of my life… he didn’t even try to fuck me.”
• Allegations of sexual assault given in a trembling voice by a complainant dressed in pigtails were undermined when the jury watched her in an explicit video showing raunchy, consensual sex with Lister.
• Another complainant claimed to be horrified about his bag of drugs but then the next day she was shown to be snorting ketamine off the table, and then later changing her evidence saying, “Oh, forgive me for that, I was on acid at the time.”
• One woman accused him of locking her in her bedroom while he had a crew from an overseas fashion magazine visiting his home. Photographic evidence proved that the only lock on the bedroom door was in fact a simple latch lock on the inside of the door.
• Then there was the vital sequence where an accuser claimed to have been raped before parading around in a wedding dress as he worked in his studio. He was able to produce vision of her in the dress as the artwork progressed, long after she said she’d fled from the scene after the alleged rape.
• One complainant wrongly claimed Lister had offered her an internship. Messages were produced showing her begging for him to give her one. “INTERN ME!” she demanded in a text message.

That was one of the intriguing themes in the case. Here was the prosecutor claiming there was a power imbalance with this man taking advantage of his fame to bully women into sexual favours. But the reality was the women who ended up as complainants were all wannabee artists who were desperate for this man’s attention. And the evidence was there that they actively pursued him to try to help their careers – a theme we’ve all seen before, particularly in the Weinstein case. See these comments from the trial:

“I was really just going along with it, sort of the whole time I was just doing whatever and hoped that it would get me opportunities or something”.

“Well, I couldn’t imagine hanging out with him if I didn’t think it would have some sort of benefit on my career.”

So why did these doting fans turn on him? Margaret Cunneen made the case in her summing up that Lister had consensual sex with the women who had “admired” or “idolised” him because of his fame, and that some reinterpreted events after feeling “heartbroken” and betrayed by his behaviour – when it turned out he was also having sex with other women or had no interest in a proper relationship with them.

“Poor X thought that she was going to be the girlfriend, really. She thought that there was a romantic aspect to it, and that’s what she was expecting, and then she got a broken heart because there were other women and that was awful,” was how Cunneen described one such reaction.

Disappointing, yes. But it is a sad reflection on our times that these women were prepared to try to gang together to try to destroy the man who had let them down. Five, six years after the alleged events, these mid-twenties women were prepared to dress up in pigtails and clutch teddy bears to peddle their implausible stories in front of a jury. And now, even though he has been found not guilty, they are still out there lobbying in “survivor” groups claiming our courts let them down.

These women were part of a mob prepared to adorn Lister’s front door with “Rapist lives here” signs, deface his famous street art, close down his exhibitions, demand his art was removed from galleries. For year after year, they were out there, trying to destroy his life. But ultimately, they came undone.

Three cheers for the good sense of that jury which ignored the pleas of the prosecutor claiming it is “antiquated thinking” – promotion of those much despised “rape myths” – to make assumptions about how rape victims should behave. He tried to convince the jury that it was normal for a woman to keep sending Lister messages asking to see him for years after the alleged rape. Going to visit him, sending him topless pictures of herself, having sex with him in a hotel. Somehow, they were supposed to believe that didn’t undermine her story that he’d attacked her. The jury wasn’t having a bar of it and took only a matter of minutes to dismiss the prosecution case.

Such women, fuelled by our complicit, male-hating media, are a menace to our society. That’s why we have to all work hard to expose this stunning victory over their evil campaign to lock up Anthony Lister.

This talented man needs to be allowed to get on with his life and keep inspiring us with his stimulating, life-affirming art. That won’t happen if they have succeeded in permanently blackening his name.

The post Artist Anthony Lister found not guilty appeared first on Bettina Arndt.

Some months ago, Australia’s most senior judge, Chief Justice Stephen Gageler, warned of a global diminution of trust in institutions, including our courts, which he said were portrayed as “partisan, political institutions.”

Speaking at a West Australian legal event he advised the judiciary to “stick to the knitting, and only do law, and to do it in a very distinct way according to orthodox legal method.”

There’s another critical part of our judicial system where members would love to stick to their knitting and that’s our police force. Our law enforcement agencies are in trouble, losing increasing numbers of officers and struggling with recruitment, as police officers across the country complain about frustration and burnout.

The force has been highjacked. Police now find themselves working for a partisan political institution devoted to feminist ideology and involved in policing that largely has nothing to do with keeping people safe. Rather, this vital institution promotes an agenda which labels marital acrimony as domestic violence and enlists the force in the ongoing war on men.

Most police want only to return to their knitting. They want to fight crime. But police authorities are catering to the whims of politicians and the media, who are determined to keep police on the front line of their gender wars.

The speaker knows all about these pressures. He’s a former Detective Senior Constable who spent 15 years with the Victorian police trying to walk this tightrope. Ironically, his initial troubles stemmed from a period where he was under severe stress because the unit where he was working was totally gutted, as staff were moved to newly created domestic violence teams. The strain of doing his job in the understaffed unit had such an impact on his mental health that he burnt out and required a period of leave to recover. All this ultimately led to the disintegration of his marriage.

He then found himself on the receiving end of precisely the type of allegation he’d been policing for so many years. His wife enlisted the help of some former colleagues to lodge false violence allegations which ended up not only driving him out of his job but also out of the state as she set up breaches of her protective violence order which could result in him being sent to prison.

I’ve made a podcast with this former cop – I’ve called him “Adrian”. We also included an ex-police officer from NSW who has an equally horrendous story of fighting false allegations. These two men represent the dozens of police who have contacted me over the years who have been wrongly accused – including some still in the force and too nervous to be interviewed.

Here are the ultimate witnesses to a system on its knees. They have first-hand experience of the immense damage being caused to our justice system by incentivizing false, unchallenged allegations which provide women – and it is almost always women – with unparalleled power to drive a former partner out of their lives and those of their children.

These former police officers’ discussions with me shows how false allegations are tearing apart the social fabric of Australia and undermining the credibility and professionalism of our police services.

All this passes unnoticed in our culture with its feminist-controlled media, blinkered politicians and people in power all determined to pretend it isn’t happening. It is disgraceful that our media and politicians rant about the struggle police are having controlling violent house invasions and adolescent gangs in Victoria and Queensland, without a word about the dangerous diversion of resources to policing false and trivial domestic violence matters. What a farce.

Here’s the podcast of my conversation with these two police officers. Please promote it to ensure it receives the attention this important issue is due.

So, what do these falsely accused officers reveal about our troubled police forces?

One striking moment in our conversation was Adrian speaking with great enthusiasm of an earlier point in his career where he was required to attend extra training in a domestic violence risk assessment system being implemented in the Victorian police force. He was so hopeful that this new system would allow police to do proper evaluations of violence allegations to determine the truth. But instead, he found himself caught up in the current tick-a-box system which totally ignores an alleged perpetrator’s side of the story.

The ultimate irony was that when some of his colleagues helped his wife embellish allegations she was making against him, they drew on examples taken from their domestic violence training manual to create truly horrendous accusations about his behaviour.

The other ex-cop who was part of our discussion – I called him “Liam” – also had harrowing tales of a wife who made various historic assault accusations against him. When police were called, initially the investigating officer told him that he’d determined the allegations were false and he would have them withdrawn. But when this officer returned to his police station, he was overruled by senior officers who said that because Liam was a former police officer he had to be held to a higher standard. He was charged with four counts of domestic violence assault dating back 8 years.

Eventually the matter was heard in court, and the allegations dismissed by a very experienced magistrate who was scathing about the charges, saying that they were clearly designed to gain advantage in a family law matter and should never have ended up in court. They were dismissed due to insufficient evidence – with costs made against the police.

The very next day Liam’s ex-wife went back to the same police station and made new allegations which led to another protective violence order. That too was ultimately dismissed but only after the violence order had influenced family court proceedings, denying him contact with his children. Liam is currently involved in a malicious prosecution case against NSW police. (He’s part of an organisation called Kilo4Delta which has ambitious plans for change, including a malicious prosecution class action.)

Both men are aware of many other cases of officers who have been similarly falsely accused. I’ve been talking to another NSW officer still in the force, who was married to a very violent woman who regularly threatened to destroy his career with rape and violence allegations and to make sure he never saw his son again. Once, he ended up having stitches in hospital after she threw a wine glass at him.

When eventually they split up it turned out she had been reporting to domestic violence services that he had been physically and sexual abusive during their marriage. She made a report to police claiming he had threated her with his work firearm, but he was luckily able to disprove this with video recordings from his phone and home security.

Since he was able to document her years of violence, threats and false allegations, there was such overwhelming evidence against her that she was eventually charged and convicted of a string of offences, and he ended up with custody of his son (after paying crippling legal fees using his inheritance.)

But his case is unusual. As Liam and Adrian explain, most police end up losing their careers after false allegations, with management keen to be seen as acting tough on rogue members.

Of course, our media loves stories of police officers as wife abusers. Just look at this breathless report from The Guardian gloating that an investigation had revealed “11 NSW officers had been investigated for domestic violence, in some cases more than once!” Never any suggestion that any of these allegations could have been false.

Yet on the rare occasions police dare speak out about the issue, the truth sometimes emerges. “We receive multiple false claims per year against our officers, which halts their careers and requires significant resources for defence,” said Queensland lawyer Calvin Gnech, speaking at a Senate Inquiry into domestic violence. Gnech had been doing work for the Queensland Police Union for over a decade.

Recently there has been some welcome resistance emerging in police management, with some prepared to point out that the current swamping of proper police work is unsustainable.

Domestic violence case management is not “core business” of police, declared Queensland’s Acting Commissioner Shane Chelepy at a press conference last July, announcing the findings of a 100 Day review into police operations and structure. He warned that DV is contributing to “significant mission creep” as police are forced to take on roles for which they are untrained. Besides, he added bravely, “Most Queenslanders would expect the police service to be the frontline response to violent crime.” This is a very welcome acknowledgement that policing domestic violence rarely has anything to do with genuine violent crime.

Last year an article “Law Enforcement and Public Health” in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Criminology and Criminal Justice compared policing in Australia to Canada and the UK, and noted Australia’s framing of domestic violence as a “wicked problem” which requires comprehensive police-led interventions, leading to heavier police reliance for holistic support and diverting time from acute enforcement to non-priority tasks like counselling. The other countries use more integrated interagency models (e.g., co-responder teams with health professionals) which mitigate police strain.

The evidence of a police force in trouble is overwhelming:

• Across Australia there are more than 4,500 vacancies for police officers.
• Queensland faces its worst officer exodus in five years, leaving nearly 1400 positions unfilled across the state.
• Police Federation of Australia CEO Scott Weber said the shortage was ‘the worst I’ve ever seen in my 30 years of policing’.
• The Queensland Police Union president, Shane Prior, confirmed that DV workload is “directly correlated” to officers leaving the force.
• A study of 492,393 DV events in NSW Police reports found that emotional or/verbal abuse was the most commonly recorded abuse type (33.46% of events).
• Each DV incident is taking frontline officers anywhere between four and six hours” to resolve.
• A study of Australian frontline officers showed DV-specific stress as a likely contributor to burnout.
• It is mainly mid-career, experienced males who are leaving the force and being replaced by young women.

Recently The Guardian did a major promotion of a two-year investigation into police domestic violence enforcement failures, claiming the force isn’t doing enough to protect women in trouble.

It’s certainly true that police sometimes under-respond to genuine domestic violence, responds Adrian. But he points out such media stories completely ignore the other side of the story – the over-response to allegations that are false, exaggerated or simply normal family dynamics reframed as abuse.

That over-response is inevitable in a policing culture shaped by pressure, politics and ideology. It’s crippling our police force and diverting help from those who need it most.

Campaigns by feminist groups, often bordering on the hysterical, ensure that the captured media and many politicians put unwarranted pressure on our senior police to devote increasing resources to domestic violence. This is having a very unhealthy effect on the independence of our police who feel pressured to devote scarce resources to an exaggerated problem, rather than prioritising those resources as they see fit.

We need our police forces to prioritise the most serious crimes. Domestic violence allegations, which are often based on trivial behaviour or are fabricated, are NOT our most serious criminal threat.

We must demand an end to this ideological crusade and a return to proper policing.

Finally, a postscript to my recent Telstra story, here is One Nation’s newest Senator, Sean Bell in Senate Estimates questioning ACMA, the sector’s regulator, about the whole saga. Great to have this issue on the public record.

The post Falsely accused police appeared first on Bettina Arndt.

A miracle has happened. Thanks to the lobbying efforts of all my supporters, we have had a win! Telstra has retreated from their recently announced policy of cutting off services from men whose partners allege they have been violent.

Following the flood of complaints sent to senior Telstra managers, my correspondents are now receiving a letter from one of these bosses stating that “the way this message was communicated to our customers was not clear and we are sorry this has created confusion and distress.”

She went on: “The change is designed to give alleged victims the option – if they are the verified end-user of a service—to transfer the phone number or email address into their name. Only services used by the alleged victim would be disconnected from the alleged perpetrators account and moved onto their own account. This allows the alleged victim to manage their own service in their own name. Any other services on the alleged perpetrators account will remain unchanged. This is designed to support alleged victims regardless of gender.”

Yes, sure. Except that we know male claims to be victims are rarely taken seriously. In fact, Telstra slipped up in previous policy announcements, referring to transferring “her phone number”.

But still… Here’s the brand new policy announcement from the Telstra website:

So, no more slick talk of removing services from alleged perpetrators. That’s certainly a step forward – even though there are many fundamental issues that still need to be clarified. For instance, determining who is the end user in a family business won’t always be easy. And if a woman in such a business convinces Telstra she is the end user it does appear she could be given that critical business email address or phone number, and the alleged perpetrator would lose this vital access to the business, despite the new Telstra assurances.

Amazingly, the full terms and conditions for this policy won’t be published until December 11, which is the very day the policy comes into effect. One suspects Telstra lawyers as well as their PR people must be all running around like chickens with their heads cut off – dealing with what is clearly policy made on the fly.

We are delighted that One Nation Senators are ready to ask questions about this whole fiasco in Senate Estimates in the first week of December. They will be grilling ACMA, the regulator for the sector, about the appropriateness of these various Telstra policies. Telstra used the ACMA standard to justify their previous inflammatory policy.

It’s all rather a hoot. But major cause for celebration. And all thanks to you, my brilliant Arndt Army.

Do keep up the pressure on Telstra. (This draft letter does now have the right email addresses for key executives – sorry about the glitches last week). But quite a different letter is now required, addressing the new developments.

It shows we do have power – if we ensure our voices are heard.

The post Telstra backs down appeared first on Bettina Arndt.

This week came further proof of our feminists’ insatiable quest for power and control. Telstra customers across Australia were treated to a superb example of the sisterhood’s capacity to enlist large corporations to their cause.

Look at this Telstra policy announcement, slipped in between various news items from the telecommunications giant:

As soon as the implications of this jaw-dropping announcement started to hit Telstra customers, my inbox was flooded with people venting their spleen. Now Telstra can cut off services to you if your ex alleges you’ve been violent. We’re talking not just about phones but also internet services – and associated email addresses. That could play havoc with a business, sever vital connections with friends, family and work associates. The result would be huge disruptions to your life and work.

Note we are only talking about services where the alleged victim shares the same account with the accused. In this case both phone and family/business internet services could be impacted.

Here it is – one more juicy incentive to add to the list encouraging false allegations in this country, even though, according to a YouGov survey, we already have one of the highest rates in the world.

The Telstra complaints department was quick to pass the buck, claiming they were just complying with standards set by the regulator – the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA). That’s rubbish. ACMA says nothing about cancelling an accused’s services or about transferring them to the accuser.

ACMA recently produced an industry standard for domestic violence protection after being heavied by Labor’s Communications Minister Michelle Rowland. Telstra was in the bad books following a 2018 incident where a technical outage in its GPS tracking network led to a breakdown of South Australia’s electronic monitoring of domestic violence offenders fitted with GPS ankle bracelets. This was used by advocacy groups as a “wake up call” to the industry.

It led to Telstra working overtime to suck up to the domestic violence lobby, by, for instance, donating over 50,000 smartphones to “survivors”. But ACMA reported numerous examples of telco failures to support DV victims like suspending phone services for non-payment of bills – deemed unacceptable because it is claimed these women suffer “financial abuse”. Telcos were also in trouble for suggesting victims sort out joint account issues by requiring them to communicate with their alleged perpetrators. The list goes on.

So ACMA’s new standard is all about protecting victims, making sure they remain connected at all times, the privacy and security of their phone accounts is protected, and they aren’t forced to interact with alleged perpetrators. It’s largely pretty sensible stuff.

But the Telstra policy is appalling. It is inflammatory, provocative, heavily biased, draconian, and in conflict with the intent of the ACMA standard.

• Inflammatory – Encouraging punitive action based on unverified allegations, potentially escalating conflict between the couple.
• Provocative – Telstra is encouraging one set of customers to deny its services to another, a tempting option for couples at loggerheads.
• Heavily biased – Removal of vital services on the basis of unproven allegations using procedures which deny any possibility of an impartial investigation.
• Draconian – Termination without due process

Then there are legal issues. Telstra’s policy breaches well-established principles of natural justice by denying procedural fairness – requiring an unbiased assessment and the right to be heard. Telstra could be sued for economic loss arising out of an arbitrary disconnection/transfer. Also, possibly for defamation for taking action which could reveal the identity of a person as an alleged perpetrator of domestic violence.

It is troubling that Telstra was prepared to ignore the spirit of the ACMA guidelines to push through this draconian policy. But we are talking about a company which has become increasingly woke. Note they are aiming for a 40:40:20 target for their executive leadership teams: 40% women, 40% men and 20% “any other gender.” That rather says it all, doesn’t it?

This is the culture which prompted someone in that leadership team to cook up this plan to steal accused men’s phone and internet services and hand them over to their accusers. Yes, I know the policy is presented in gender neutral terms but it’s hard to imagine the Telstra ladies who run their DV section taking complaints from male accusers seriously.

Not that survivors need any evidence for Telstra to swing into action. The ACMA standard spells out that “a provider must not require evidence or supporting material which demonstrates that a consumer is an affected person.” How’s that for ruling out any possibility of a proper investigation?

Given the breadth of the things included in the definition of violence there’s no doubt plenty of women could actually qualify as abusers. We’re talking not just about physical violence but about emotional or psychological abuse, and coercive control – areas where the Australian Bureau of Statistics data has shown female perpetrators are just as common as male.

(After publishing this 2016 data, the Bureau no longer highlights gender comparisons in this territory and muddies the waters by broadening the definition of emotional abuse).

The Telstra definition of violence also includes “monitoring of phones”. Check out social media and you’ll find much merriment over stories of phone snooping by jealous women, funny stories of attempts to track potentially wayward partners. In fact, there are psychological studies showing women, driven by jealousy or attachment anxiety, are more likely than men to engage in phone monitoring behaviours, including checking a partner’s phone, tracking calls and location.

The inclusion of this trivial nonsense has little to do with Minister Rowland’s professed desire for telecommunications to be a “safe, secure lifeline” for escape and recovery for women escaping dangerous men. The reality is, as my videos with police officers and former prosecutors have revealed, most domestic violence complaints are not based on physical violence but arise out of minor verbal conflict. It’s grossly misleading to claim that domestic violence victims are mostly women escaping dangerous men. But the use of such exaggerated claims is Feminism 101 – unfortunately now the prevailing wisdom in all our major institutions.

We can’t let Telstra get away with this dangerous move – which has only just been announced but won’t be implemented until December 11. We’ve prepared a draft email you can use to write and complain, even if you are not a Telstra customer or shareholder. It’s worthwhile for other people to voice outrage and say they will be encouraging friends and social media networks to avoid the company.

The Telstra complaint service is useless as is the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman (TIO) which responded to our complaints by stating that the “TIO is not able to handle complaints about a provider’s terms and conditions.” Classic ‘Yes Minister’ response.

The draft letter is here.

Note that we have addressed this to the CEO of Telstra and other relevant managers. We’re pleased that people responsible for this policy will directly face criticism of what they are doing instead of hiding behind complaint services. But I really need large numbers of my readers to send a letter so we are not dismissed as a tiny bunch of ratbags.

We’re working on having the issue raised in parliament, including in Senate Estimates. And please help by circulating this blog and trying to get attention in other media sources.

I encourage readers who have services with Telstra to investigate better alternatives. Here are some sites that may be helpful: Finder, Whistleout and Canstar blue.

We’ve let too many of these feminist policies just pass through to the keeper and now they are entrenched and wreaking havoc in men’s lives.

In June 2023 I wrote about debanking, where banks were introducing policies to shut down bank accounts of people (mainly men) accused of financially controlling their partners. By late 2022, the four major Australian banks had blocked 500,000 messages from across 300,000 individual accounts, as well as cancelling, suspending and/or warning more than 3000 customers of financial abuse.

Punitive domestic violence policies are everywhere – with untested allegations of violence used to advantage women and punish men.

Here’s just a few examples:

• Employment – Employers can suspend or terminate alleged perpetrators’ employment if domestic violence is deemed to impact the workplace i.e. when violence orders conflict with work requirements through no-contact rules, exclusion zones (e.g., prohibiting approach to the victim’s workplace), or surrender of weapons, for police/army etc.
• Housing & Tenancy – Alleged perpetrators can be evicted from shared tenancies or have leases terminated if the domestic violence breaches “quiet enjoyment” or safety clauses. Victims can issue a Domestic Violence Termination Notice to exit without penalty.
• Community Housing– Providers can suspend or terminate access to supported housing/services for alleged perpetrators, prioritizing victim safety. Social housing providers evict for “anti-social behaviour” linked to DV.

As with the Telstra policy, no proper evidence is required for a woman to trigger actions which can have such a draconian impact on the alleged perpetrator – just as no evidence is required for the huge list of perks generally available for alleged victims. I described these in detail some years ago when I wrote about the domestic violence gravy train.

To these we can add the latest perk – 10 days of paid domestic violence leave costing employers between $13.1 million and $34.3 million annually. And here too hardly any employers dare ask for proof of victimhood.

To our national shame, Australia now leads the world in industry-wide domestic violence mandates, with our banking policies and Telstra’s outrageous move pulling us ahead of countries like US, Uk, Canada and New Zealand which largely focus on housing and employment policies.

When are we going to call a halt to this sick corporate pissing competition using domestic violence policies for virtue signalling and public relations one upmanship? It is all a shocking diversion from the vital need to provide proper help to the real victims – women, men and children – who face real violence.

The post Telstra’s outrageous new policy appeared first on Bettina Arndt.

“Breaking news. The 3 Strikes Law is officially moving forward in Australia to hold repeat custody interferers accountable.”

This week saw this fascinating announcement from an American advocate Robert Garza who is intent on fixing the family law system not only across America but in countries across the world. Having pushed out over 400 pieces of legislation in the past few months to legislators across the United States, he now has set his sights down under.

His 3 Strikes policy aims to prevent non-compliance with custody orders, stopping parents from wrongfully withholding children. It’s all about making sure breaches of parenting orders are taken seriously, with escalating penalties beginning with fines and ultimately resulting in criminal consequences for repeat offenders that include jail time.

Wouldn’t that be a novelty for our Australian Family Court which is notorious for not enforcing its orders, leaving the wronged parent with no choice but to return to court to try to see their children?

The 3 Strikes bill Garza is proposing involves:

1. First contravention: a $500 fine plus make-up time equivalent to the period the parent has been denied the child.
2. Second contravention: a further $500 fine plus additional make-up time and/or modification of the parenting order, when there’s a second contravention within 5 years.
3. Third contravention: prosecution for an indictable offence plus consideration of reversal of custody or reduction of parenting time for the offending party, when there’s a third contravention within 7 years.

The bill is carefully framed to be gender-neutral, the strategy which is achieving great success in the USA. Garza has been talking to Australian parliamentarians about sponsoring the bill and looks like getting the green light. Our community is well aware of the shameful truth about the court’s unwillingness to enforce its orders – so it would be a popular move to draw public attention to this important issue.

Garza is a man with a mission, a real powerhouse, absolutely convinced his legislation can change the world. Currently he’s managed to push through Time Taken Time Back legislation in Texas and North Dakota. And his legislation addressing parental equality in custody determinations, parental alienation and related issues is currently being circulated to advocates across fifty states, and internationally. He’s a man who fought his own mighty family law battle, facing 43 false allegations – so he knows what fathers are up against. See his website, Facebook and this video to learn more.

Meanwhile, over in the UK, men’s groups are reeling over news of the latest feminist success in weaponizing the Family Court against men. Here’s the announcement from TheTinMen:

As TheTinMen explains, the government looks like scrapping “the presumption of parental involvement”, which means custody decisions will no long start from the assumption that involvement with both parents is best for the child. The feminists have successfully lobbied parliamentarians, arguing this “pro-contact culture” places the rights of abusive fathers over the safety and well-being of children.

And now the Starmer government has announced it will move an amendment to the legislation, dropping the presumption of parental involvement in order to “protect children from abusive parents.” Sound familiar? That’s exactly what happened in Australia two years ago when the Albanese government stripped our family law legislation of all the provisions protecting children’s right to contact with both parents. Here too it was claimed this was all about keeping children safe.

How’s that for an achievement? Our proud Australian feminists have led the way and now the UK sisterhood is playing catch-up, browbeating their parliamentarians into making the same move.

“It’s not about safety. It’s about power. It’s about silencing fathers, erasing them from their children’s lives,” says Nadine Taylor who works as a McKenzie Friend in the UK Family Court, supporting parents, mainly fathers. Taylor, who spoke at our conference on Restoring the Presumption of Innocence in 2024, says the Family Court already has every tool it needs to protect children in genuine cases of abuse: “Judges can block contact, issue safeguarding orders and take swift action when real danger exists. But those cases, involving genuine, proven abuse, are the rare exception,” she says, explaining that false violence allegations are rampant in the court, which women use to get legal aid and deny fathers’ contact with children.

These claims are rarely investigated and even if they are eventually found to be baseless nothing happens. “No accountability. No apology. Judges shrug their shoulders, fathers are left broken, emotionally and financially crippled and children cut off from decent loving fathers,” laments Taylor.

As in Australia, false allegations have long been the silver bullet which ensure women have all the power in family court battles. And now the UK parliament is planning to streamline the system even further to remove the one tiny obstacle in guaranteeing that power.

As Rick Bradfield explains in his just published EmpathyGap.uk blog on the subject, the presumption of parental involvement was a reputable presumption which includes the proviso “unless the contrary is shown.” This places the burden of proof on the party who opposes contact, usually the mother.

Not that this burden proved more than a minor inconvenience in this heavily biased family law system. But now even that reasonable burden looks like being swept away, if the legislation passes through parliament. “The ultimate aim is to empower mothers to be able to remove fathers from the lives of their children with ease and without hinderance,” Bradford writes.

That’s assuming the amendment gets through. Hopefully the UK men’s groups will do a better job than we did here alerting parliamentarians that this latest move is no more than a blatant attack on fathers.

They should heed Nadine Taylor’s fighting words: “This isn’t reform. Its revenge dressed as virtue. Unless fathers and those who support them, unite and push back now, the next generation will grow up believing dads don’t matter.”

Briefly, some good news, from parentalalienation.eu, reporting the Danish Supreme Court has ruled that a child’s right to family life cannot be obstructed by one parent’s refusal to comply with orders. In a recent case, a father who had never seen his child was granted supervised contact. Despite daily fines, the mother continued to withhold the child. The Supreme Court ordered that authorities must bring the child to 10 supervised contacts with the father and confirmed that fines will continue until compliance.

Denmark has also introduced sweeping systemic reforms which include parental alienation to be classed as psychological violence and recognised in all family court cases. “Denmark is showing Europe and the wider world that parental alienation must be met with recognition, education, and timely intervention,” says this advocacy group.

My work brings me into contact with hundreds of Australian dads who are fighting back – sadly not united but mounting individual battles to expose the injustice men are facing by making complaints to our authorities.

I first heard last year from a NSW man – I’ll call him “David” – who sent me a tragic “hostage” type video of his daughter. At that time, despite having 50/50 court orders in place, his ex-partner had moved away, cut off all communication and was hiding the 13-year-old from her father. And doing a great job alienating the girl from her dad, judging from the tragic video sent by her mother showing her spewing hatred towards David. It was heart-breaking.

Desperate to find his daughter, David contacted all the authorities, but to no avail. “I’ve sought help from the Family Law Courts of Australia, police, Legal Aid NSW, and Family and Community Services (FACS), but have been blocked at every step. Legal Aid even forced me to place a caveat on my home just to access support.”

Just recently I heard from him again. He’s now discovered his daughter and her mother are in Queensland, living in a caravan. And the mother has registered the girl for home schooling. It turns out that this is the latest tactic, being used across Australia. The parent who abducts or unlawfully withholds a child places them into home schooling — effectively preventing the other parent from locating or maintaining contact. Neat trick, eh?

David has discovered that some state home schooling departments are enabling or protecting these situations, which directly contravenes federal law and the rights of both the child and the other parent. In theory, state legislation cannot override federal parenting orders so Queensland Home Schooling should not facilitate or accept a registration that is inconsistent with binding Family Court orders.

David is conducting an impressive one-man campaign to point out the illegality of what is happening, writing to home schooling authorities and education departments in Queensland and NSW, members of parliament, ICAC, the ombudsmen in each state, child protection, the Family Court, State and Federal Attorneys’ General.

There’s endless buck-passing going on, with the various authorities trying to pretend it is someone else’s business. We’ll see how it all turns out but we are keen to hear from anyone who has come across this problem and had any success in achieving a response from relevant authorities.

On another front…I have been hearing for years from men whose ex-partners have successfully used a false domestic violence allegation to immediately destroy their careers. These are men who are required to use firearms as part of their work – in the army, police-force, security services. One domestic violence complaint is enough to have these men stood down from work and their firearm licences suspended and ultimately cancelled if an apprehended violence order is issued.

It’s happening everywhere, particularly in the police force where angry ex-partners are all too aware that the firearm issue makes domestic violence allegations a particularly effective way of rendering the men unemployed and potentially unemployable.

There’s a Canberra man currently making the case for human rights violations and legislative reform in relation to the mandatory suspension of firearms licences following the application of an interim violence order. He’s a sporting shooter who has captained his team in national titles but this year has been unable to train or compete after an interim violence order was issued following a false allegation. He happens to be an expert on risk management, so he is well placed to assess the evidentiary basis for the current mandatory suspension of firearm licences in the context of domestic violence allegations. Here is a document he has put together on the topic.

He has been proactive in seeking accountability and reform. Drawing on data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, ACT Policing, and the Australian Institute of Criminology, he found no evidence to support the assumption that licensed firearm owners present an elevated risk in domestic violence cases. If you’d like to know more contact www.familylawreform.com.au.

One final thought on Family Court reform. Everyone is talking about Helen Andrew’s brave essay warning of the way our culture is being changed by feminization, with the increasing domination of women leading to the insanity of wokeness. She’s also argued in a recent YouTube video, Have Women Ruined the World? that when institutions tip over to becoming majority female, they become hostile to men. (See 27.01 of transcript)

One of the most telling parts of her article spelt out her fears that the rule of law will not survive the legal profession becoming majority female. She writes about the Title IX courts for sexual assault in American colleges which “lacked many of the safeguards our legal system holds sacred.” Andrews points out these legal protections were abolished “because the people who made these rules sympathized with the accusers, who were mostly women, and not with the accused, who were mostly men.”

If the legal profession becomes majority female, Andrews expects to see this ethos spread. “Judges will bend the rules for favoured groups and enforce them rigorously on disfavoured groups, as already occurs to a worrying extent.”

Too right. Not just the judges, but the massive bureaucracy associated with our courts, particularly the Family Court. And the parliament enacting the laws to support it. The dangers of the feminized world Andrews warns about are on display in Family Courts in many Western countries. And fathers and children are paying for it.

Australians for Science and Freedom, the organisation which sponsored our conference last year on Restoring the Presumption of Innocence are holding another conference in Sydney on Nov 21-22. Speakers include many people who have featured in my videos – like Fiona Girkin, Augusto Zimmermann, James Nuzzo, Damian Coory and Chris Kenny – discussing important social issues. This conference will provide plenty of opportunity for meeting these people. Check out the conference program here.

The post Family Courts in the firing line appeared first on Bettina Arndt.

I hadn’t planned to March for Australia, but my Canberra visit to lobby parliamentarians in late August coincided with the August 31 march. Having watched what was happening in the UK with huge numbers taking to the streets to protest mass immigration, I was curious to see how it would pan out here. It was interesting to see how many ordinary Australians would show up after our predictable mainstream media ran around like chickens with their heads off, claiming it would be overrun by Nazi bullies.

Well, there were none of them that day in sunny Canberra as many thousands of people strode peacefully over Commonwealth Bridge and up to Parliament House. All sorts, including plenty of families with kids, women of all ages. But strikingly, huge numbers of men. Ordinary blokes, many who’d travelled from rural areas outside Australia.

The chatty, friendly crowd shared similar stories. People forced to move out of the big cities because they can no longer afford housing. Older people whose adult kids simply can’t find anywhere to rent. Frustrations with strains on infrastructure, health services, lengthening commute times, and concerns about community harmony.

But talking to many of the blokes it struck me that many of these problems are impacting most on the ordinary Aussie blokes who are already at the bottom of the pile. They have long been missing out on the perks and privileges being dished out to those rating higher on the DEI intersectionality ladder. It seems logical that it is men who are most likely to be kicked to the curb by the pressures being caused by the current high levels of immigration.

Mass immigration is a men’s issue, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio pointed out in his 2024 essay, How Mass Migration Undermined Men, which traced the erosion of men’s economic footing to a combination of deindustrialization, offshoring, and open borders policies, all exacerbating issues like job displacement, wage stagnation and barriers to family formation.

Obviously, the Australian situation is different but take a look at this interesting graph showing a huge bulge in the number of young men suddenly swelling our population, providing additional competition for jobs, housing, education, and for women.

The graph is the work of journalist and analyst for News.com.au, Tarric Brooker, who says migration has to be the driving force for this change.

It’s no wonder young men are having a particularly hard time finding jobs. Look at this graph posted online this week by Alex Joiner, chief economist at IFM Investors.

Many young people are struggling but, unsurprisingly, it is young men who are really up against it. (Male employment prospects aren’t helped by the fact that so many boys are failing or dropping out from school, as I explained in my recent blog on the boys’ education crisis. University attendance figures published earlier this month showed two of every three students starting university are now female – a fact that Education Minister Jason Clare was keen to bury, as Janet Albrechtsen pointed out in The Australian.)

Many will have seen the video of Morgan Cox, a young father on the brink of homelessness who fronted the ABC’s Q&A panel in May this year and asked politicians about their plans to cut immigration and make housing more affordable for struggling Aussies.

“I recently got a rent increase notice for an additional $180 a week, which works out to be about $10,000 a year,” Morgan began.

“I tried to find a cheaper place and there just aren’t any. What little is available, there’s dozens of people lined up.”

“Lots of them are immigrants and they have plenty more money than I can possibly get.”

The hard working dad revealed that his young family had already been forced out of Sydney by rapidly rising rent costs – partially driven by an influx of people moving to the city increasing the demand for property.

“’I’m already working two jobs,” Mr Cox said.

“One more rent increase and my family – my one-year-old baby – we’re facing homelessness and we’ve got nowhere to go”.

Of course, the enormous outpouring of sympathy for this young man stems mainly because he has a family, with a very young child. There’s little interest from the media in stories on male homelessness but the fact remains that it is men who have always been more likely to be homeless, and many times more likely to be sleeping rough. Here’s a graph of recent increases in homelessness by gender.

These are the sort of issues people were talking about on that Canberra march. We met many older parents concerned about their kids in the big cities looking for somewhere to live, the unemployed young men still living at home, unable to attract a partner. For all the efforts of our politicians to pretend it’s not happening, there is a very real problem out there and people have had enough.

That’s why some of the mums from Mothers of Sons are joining the March for Australia this Sunday, October 19. I hope you will think about joining the march at one of 14 locations across the country. Details listed here.

You might like to have a look at an ABC interview with Scott Challen, the Brisbane businessman who is organising the Brisbane event – just in case you are nervous due to the media’s scare tactics.

As I have said, the main game from my Canberra visit was talking to politicians, particularly various Senators who were willing to grill bureaucrats in Senate Estimates, about topics impacting men. It’s always a tricky business, with the government endlessly changing the schedule on the few days they have set aside for this important attempt at public scrutiny. The big parties tend to squeeze time available for the minor parties so it tends to be rather chaotic.

But we were delighted that One Nations’ senator Malcolm Roberts did manage to have a go at the Australian Institute of Family Studies, spelling out some key areas which demonstrate anti-male bias in their research. Here’s the full video of his session.

Plus, we’ve put together a light-hearted skit sending up the feminists’ reaction to Roberts questions – thanks to Ben Alcott for his hard work. Its important people know what this major tax-payer funded organisation is up to and I would love you to get this funny little video out on social media.

There’s more Senate Estimate questioning on men’s issues in the pipeline, now set for a hearing next month.

We were pleased to see Senator Alex Antic taking on the boys’ education issue – see here, starting at 1.24.40. Not easy, even for this smart former lawyer, to try to tackle these slippery bureaucrats who are desperate to pretend there’s no crisis in boys’ education.

For a final positive note, here is Senator Antic, speaking to parliament last week about what’s happening to our young men. He absolutely nails it! Antic is finding that every time he speaks out in public defending men, he attracts a huge audience. It shows how much ordinary Australians are yearning for the gender war to be over.

The post March for Australia appeared first on Bettina Arndt.

Over a decade ago, Sheryl Sandberg had a big hit with her book, Lean In – Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. The former Meta executive enthused about the impact of female leadership, claiming women’s superior relationship skills would mean that once women were in charge the result would be kinder, more collaborative workplaces. “They will create “environment where everyone shines,” she said.

Oh yeh? Well, that hasn’t quite worked out as planned, according to stories regularly exposed in the media. Have a look at the kinder, gentler world created by having women in charge. Women like:

• Kamala Harris: “It’s an abusive environment. It’s not a place where people feel supported but a place where people feel treated like shit.” A series of recent media stories revealed Kamala Harris as a bully who inflicted “constant soul-destroying criticism on her office staff.”
• Julia Bishop: “A pattern of threats, intimidation, and bullying.” That’s how a member of the university staff described the workplace behaviour of the former Australian Foreign Minister and current Chancellor of the ANU during a Senate inquiry into the university.
• Julie Payette: “Bullying and harassment at its worst.” So concluded an independent review into former Canadian Governor General, who was accused of creating a “toxic” workplace through yelling, belittling, and public humiliation of staff. This led to her 2021 resignation.
• Liz Truss: “It was a toxic regime, pure bullying that drained the life out of the team.” The former UK Prime Minister was accused by ex-aides of a “soul-destroying” bullying style during her 49-day premiership, including berating staff over policy failures and fostering a fear-based culture.
• Dorinda Cox: “Engaging in psychological put-downs that left employees feeling belittled and devalued.” This is one of many descriptions of bullying by the Greens Senator, who has faced multiple bullying allegations from staff and colleagues since 2024.

We mustn’t forget Australia’s best known “Mean Girls”, Senators Penny Wong and Katy Gallagher, and former Senator Kristina Keneally. The trio were referred to as the “cantankerous cabal” by the husband of the late Senator Kimberley Kitching, who died after a suspected heart attack, not long after having been ostracised and bullied by this group.

For an excellent example of these mean girls in action, see this video of sneering Wong and Gallagher attacking Senator Linda Reynolds. The decision in the recent defamation action by Reynolds absolutely supports her version of events, including the fact that she ended up in hospital due to the disgraceful attack by Wong and Gallagher who falsely claimed Reynolds failed to support alleged rape victim Brittany Higgins. Yet here they blatantly lie about what happened, oozing contempt, and condescension.

For every female-led workplace demonstrating the much-heralded harmonious, cooperative working environments, there are others where mean girls rule the roost, causing pain and disruption. The results are there for all to see. Study after study has shown relational aggression is a major cause of women leaving jobs, like this University of Nebraska-Lincoln research involving 200 plus leaders which found 62% of women cite “toxic interpersonal dynamics” as a key reason for departure. Another study by American psychologists found 70% of women report low job satisfaction due to relational aggression.

Yet evidence of powerful women poisoning their workplaces is usually kept well hidden. Our carefully controlled public narrative will never acknowledge that women’s relationship skills aren’t always being put to good use. It’s like coercive control, which our society is desperately pretending is a uniquely male form of vice. Yet our community knows full well that women are extremely adept at using emotional abuse to control their relationships.

The best Australian example of our society keeping a lid on the mean girl effect was the Set the Standard inquiry, which followed the furore about Brittany Higgins’ allegations that she was raped in Parliament House. The inquiry, looking at sexual harassment, bullying and sexual assault in the parliamentary workplace, found far more bullying than harassment or assault – 42% of women had been bullied, compared to 24% experiencing harassment and 1% actual or attempted sexual assault.

So, bullying was the major problem in this workplace. And who were the main perpetrators? Not men. The inquiry reported that women were responsible for 61% of one-off bullying incidents, and 76% of the repeat offences.

Naturally this interesting finding was totally buried. Not one of the 28 recommendations in the report targeted the high levels of bullying by women and there has been no follow-up on this issue, with most recommendations focussed on increasing gender equity and the like. The media almost uniformly ignored this toxic behaviour, apart from a few warnings mentioning the bullying result must be framed cautiously to avoid “pitting women against women”.

What makes relationship aggression so damaging is that women regard workplace relationships as critical to job satisfaction. Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2025 Report found women are more likely than men to prioritize supportive social climates and relationships: Specifically, 72% of women (vs. 58% of men) report that a “supportive social climate” (including strong colleague relationships, recognition, and belonging) is a top factor in job satisfaction and staying with an employer.

This means the behaviour of mean girl bosses is making a lot of women very miserable indeed. In fact, in female-dominated professions like nursing, the problem is so widespread that there’s a running gag about nurses eating their young, dating back to a 1986 article by Judith E. Meissner which describes bullying, hazing, or horizontal violence (e.g., withholding information, gossip, intimidation) directed at new or less experienced nurses by more senior colleagues.

Years ago, I played a weekly bridge game with a regular group which included a very experienced executive who found herself in a top job in nurse education. Week after week we heard stories of outrageous behaviour by her new colleagues, a lesbian mafia which played favourites, adjusted the rules, and carved out jobs for their underqualified mates.

The lesbian mafia is a well-documented part of the mean girl story. Solid research such as this study from Creighton University education professor Barbara L. Brock found that in female-dominated fields like education and nonprofits, lesbian women sometimes engage in relational aggression, using exclusion or gatekeeping to secure scarce leadership roles.

Here’s a classic story from one of the many online chats on this topic: “A lesbian clinic manager in a women’s health centre hoarded resources, excluding junior lesbian staff from trainings by spreading rumours of ‘unreliability.’ She’d berate them privately for ‘not pulling weight,’ then publicly praise her favourites—leading to two resignations in a year. It was queen bee syndrome, using her position to control the ‘sisterhood.’”

Of course, there are many lesbians who don’t behave like this but it is hard not to conclude that the influence of such women in our senior bureaucracies may be driving anti-male policies which allocate almost all health funding to women, and show zero interest in targeted male suicide policies, or in boys’ education. Of course, there are plenty of heterosexual male-hating feminists also contributing to this policy prejudice against men and boys.

But the bottom line is the key victims of these mean girls in our workplaces are other women. There’s a certain irony in the fact that our feminist-controlled culture claims to have the interests of ordinary women at heart yet ignores this serious problem in order to promote the eternal virtuous women façade.

There’s one person who knows more than most about what’s going on here – Dr Fiona Girkin.

Regular readers will be aware of the stormy weather faced by this former University of Tasmania lecturer after she featured in a video with me a few months ago, describing her work teaching police the facts about two-way domestic violence. Local feminists launched an attack on Fiona, using the ABC to make this a national news story. The end result has been that Fiona has now moved on and set up her own consultancy – offering help to people dealing with mean girls in the workplace.

This is actually one of Fiona’s original areas of expertise. She did a PhD on Female Primary Psychopaths in the Community Services Sector after years spent working in these female-dominated workplaces doing counselling and working in various management positions. In the process she encountered a woman she later came to identify as a “female psychopath”, a disorder characterized by callousness and lack of empathy, where women use verbal abuse, manipulation, and relational aggression to bully and intimidate others.

Talking to others in this female-dominated workforce, Fiona realised her experience was far from uncommon and went on to do her PhD research examining the prevalence of female psychopaths in community services and the impact on male and female colleagues of their behaviour.

I’ve had another video conversation with Fiona about this fascinating topic where she explained the destructive role played by these bullies in their workplaces, particularly on their female colleagues, given that women place such value on their workplace relationships.

It’s great to know Fiona is now out there, willing to lend her expertise to people who find themselves dealing with this type of workplace bully. She plans not only to work with individuals needing help but also to offer seminars on managing toxic behaviour of women in workplaces and in relationships.

It’s important she gets the message out that it is women suffering most from our refusal to address the vile behaviour of this type of bully.

We need to call out the feminist protection racket which is allowing mean women to get away with toxic behaviour which shouldn’t be tolerated. Once again Fiona is showing her courage in taking on a topic many are keen to keep under wraps. She deserves our support. You can contact her here.

The post Female psychopaths poisoning workplaces appeared first on Bettina Arndt.

Reeling from news of the murder of Charlie Kirk, I found myself thinking back eight years to when I was out on campuses, trying to expose feminist lies about a rape crisis at our universities. It was daunting facing the wrath of the young ideologues as they screamed their hatred of me and my ideas. My campus tour led to new campus free speech codes, which our universities seem determined to ignore.

But Charlie Kirk spent over a decade using campus discussions to try to promote civilised discourse – invariably showing courtesy and good humour during hostile encounters with people who often violently disagreed with him.

And now he is gone. “They killed the guy whose mantra was, ‘let’s talk about it,’ writes Jeff Childers of C&C News, explaining if there were one thing Charlie Kirk was most famous for, it was his willingness to patiently and respectfully debate his ideas with anyone.

“They don’t want to debate. They want to end debate, with a bullet,” Childers concludes.

We can’t let that happen.

By chance, I happened to be writing this week about one ordinary bloke’s determination to be heard on a mighty contentious issue.

Drive five or six hours west of Sydney and you’ll find yourself in a little outback town called Trundle, population, 568, surrounded by cattle, sheep and wheat country.

Principal of Trundle Central school is John Southon, who’s worked at the school for 34 years. He’s a real fixture of the town, nominated in 2021 for Australian of the Year for his work on youth mental health in rural areas.

You’d have thought the man would have his heart in the right place when it comes to the boys and girls he’s looked after all these years. But not according to Australia’s media.

Last year he found himself in the news, with newspaper stories and The Today Show reporting on the controversy he had caused.

What had he done? Well, in his regular newsletter John happened to mention the stereotyping of young men in public discussions of domestic violence:

“The media labelling all men as violent is causing many beautiful, gentle young men problems with identity formation and maintaining positive mental health. If you saturate young people with the message that being male is being violent, eventually some will believe this and question their identity.”

Apparently, a young woman, a domestic violence victim, took offence at this and she spoke to the press. That was enough for the fanatics controlling our media to concoct a news story. Shock horror, someone was telling the truth about domestic violence. Shut them down!

They ignored the fact that John was right. It has widely been reported that boys are feeling “defensive and disenfranchised” by the way they are portrayed in the media (Supporting Young Men Online report, 2025). Prominent domestic violence campaigner Jess Hill in her Quarterly Essay entitled Losing it discussed how blame-heavy strategies alienate boys, making them feel demonized and “exacerbating shame and isolation”.

But still the media found John’s comment offensive, also finding fault in comments he made about coercive control laws which had just been introduced in NSW. Namely:

“From an educator’s perspective, it is not clear what behaviours and at what level constitute an offence under this law so we cannot accurately inform and educate children.”

Here too John is right. That’s exactly what happened. When coercive control laws were first proposed legal groups expressed concerns that the behaviour was too hard to define, making the laws unworkable. And sure enough, in the first nine months, only five people were charged, and one convicted in NSW.

Yet the media seized on the comments of one domestic violence survivor to claim John’s comments were outrageous. This led to quite a kerfuffle, including a reprimand from top dogs in the Education Department. But John is determined to keep speaking his mind:

“If I’m not allowed to open debate in my community for the fear of being ostracized and disciplined, it reduces my ability as an educator to inform young men and empower them. We need to have an open debate about these complex issues. We just can’t say that men are bad, women are victims. I’m passionate that we need to allow our young men to develop an identity without this stigmatization around violence.”

I’ve made a video with this brave man. Please help me circulate it.

John Southon’s story is revealing. That is how the feminists operate. Shutting down any challenge to their warped narrative and seeking to isolate and shame people who speak out. Fiona Girkin is the other example, who had to leave the University of Tasmania after activists recruited the ABC to protest about the video she made with me about her work at UTAS teaching police about the prevalence of two-way domestic violence.

The domestic violence narrative in this country is controlled by flat earthers – ideologues absolutely wedded to antiquated feminist ideology dating back nearly half a century. They refuse to give up their belief in the 1984 Duluth framework which claimed domestic violence was all about men asserting patriarchal power and control over women.

These dinosaurs are engaged in a mighty battle to deny 50 years of research findings showing most family violence is two-way, involving both male and female perpetrators. They work hard to keep a lid on the constant challenges to their orthodoxy, with new research studies regularly published confirming women’s role in family violence. Here are just a few recent Australian examples:

• The 2022 ANROWS study of Adolescent Violence in Australia which found a larger proportion of females (23%) than males (14%) reported using violence against a family member.
• The latest Personal Safety Survey (2023) from the ABS which showed 35.7% of Australians experiencing violence, emotional abuse, or economic abuse by a partner were male.
• The 2024 report from the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research (BOCSAR) showing that the number of females charged with domestic violence by police increased by 40% over the 10 years to 2023, compared to 17% for males.
• A large study published in the Medical Journal of Australia in May 2025 which found 45.5% of the 6934 people reporting having experienced intimate partner violence were male.

(I hope you will keep details of these studies handy so you are well armed to join public discussions, helping break down the gatekeeping on this issue from mainstream media.)

But it is not just research studies which are undermining the public’s confidence in feminist domestic violence dogma. There’s a constant stream of criminal cases which challenge the assertion that only men are violent – or that only men use coercive control.

Back in 2023 a story broke about a former Tasmanian Beauty Queen, Labor MP Kathryn Hay who appeared in court charged with 46 offences of abuse of her male partner over the course of a decade.

Hay allegedly assaulted her partner on numerous occasions by throwing a bowl of cereal at him, pushing him, punching and slapping his face and punching his upper body.

She called him ‘worthless and useless’, a ‘c***’, a ‘piece of s***’, ‘lazy’, ‘pathetic’, ‘dumb’ and ‘unfit to be a husband or a father,’ and told him to kill himself because ‘the world would be better off without him.’

The case ticked all the boxes for coercive control. Yet mainstream media for two years reported on this case and the only time the term was used was in an ABC report of Hay being convicted of “emotional abuse” in March this year, which mentioned the prosecutor had labelled the behaviour as coercive control.

Talk about two tier justice. If a man had been convicted of this type of behaviour, the media and the courts would have revelled in showcasing this textbook case of control and intimidation.

Similarly, we have just seen our famous mushroom murderer, Erin Patterson locked up for the rest of her life for the murder of three people.

Hundreds of articles, news stories, podcasts have been published about this extraordinary case, yet it was only when she was finally sentenced this month that anyone publicly mentioned coercive control. Claire Harvey, writing in The Australian, called out the media’s hypocrisy: “Her patterns of behaviour – control, withholding of affection, isolating estranged husband Simon Patterson from his family, name-calling, disparagement, brainwashing the children – are signs of abuse we are used to diagnosing when men are the perpetrators. But because she’s a woman, for some reason our society struggles to see it.”

Harvey lists all Patterson’s efforts to use her dominance in the relationship (she was independently wealthy) to exclude and marginalize her ex-husband, mocking his faith and family, her subtle or overt manipulation to maintain power. The woman three times tried to poison her husband before the fatal lunch where she succeeded in murdering his relatives. Not a bad way of controlling a relationship through fear, eh?

People aren’t stupid. When they hear about the way these two women behaved, our community draws its own conclusions, namely, that this shocking behaviour is no different from that we are now being taught is men’s coercive control of women.

Common sense is winning through. A large survey in 2021 showed 41% of respondents believed that domestic violence is equally committed by both men and women. The survey – National Community Attitudes towards Violence against Women Survey (NCAS) – was conducted by the key feminist domestic violence organisation, ANROWS, and they clearly weren’t thrilled by the result. One suspects they are loath to repeat it because chances are even more people will show they have seen the light.

Most people now get their information on such subjects not from the discredited mainstream media but from the wild world of social and alternate media, where feminists are finding control is slipping through their fingers. There we see a very different conversation taking place about domestic violence, as normal people give voice to their own experiences.

A very good example is Hannah Pearl Davis, known online as “Pearl”. This young female influencer has over 2 million followers on YouTube precisely because she is so explicitly and outrageously anti-feminist.

She has built her reputation on challenging the narrative of male-perpetrated abuse. In a Pearl Daily episode in April 2025 – titled “Feminism is IMPLODING: Women Are Turning on Each Other” – Pearl argued that women often exaggerate DV claims for attention or to manipulate men, stating, “Women are not getting abused left, right, and center… [In] most abusive situations, the parties are abusing each other…It’s not a one-way street. Some women provoke or start fights, then cry victim when it backfires.”

Here she is on X:

This woman, who has been called a “female Andrew Tate,” does some great work, chatting to women about false allegations, interviewing men’s advocates like Janice Fiamengo and Mike Buchanan, and backing up her views with sound statistics. But she pushes the envelope and sometimes blurts out some really crazy, unhelpful stuff.

Yet having women out there starting proper conversations about these issues is changing our cultural dialogue, which usually results in feminist myths about domestic violence being blown out of the water. Pearl has spawned dozens of other young women seeking their moment in the sun by taking on similar issues.

In alternate media it is far harder for feminists to spout their usual hogwash.

Richard Reeves, is the author of Of Boys and Men, a book which covers many important issues, whilst working hard not to tread on feminist toes. He recently appeared on Chris Williams’s hugely popular podcast – Modern Wisdom, which also has over 2 million followers – where he was utterly dismissive about the notion of symmetrical two-way violence.

Last month I interviewed George, the UK based digital creator who posts under the label TheTinMen. George has also been on Chris Williams’ show discussing precisely this issue and has now taken Reeves on, with this highly informative post. Do read it through.

This is great stuff. Proper public discussion of the facts… real research, accurate statistics – exactly what should be happening in mainstream media but isn’t. The combined reach of these two podcasters/YouTubers exceeds our whole mainstream media audience many times over.

Charlie Kirk’s goal was to show the world that there are diverse ideas which we can and should debate openly. He lost his life doing just that. We all must have the courage to ensure, through his cherished promotion of civilised discourse, that diverse views flourish.

The post Taking on the Thought Police. appeared first on Bettina Arndt.

“We can no longer allow the partisans of girls to write the rules.”

This is Christina Hoff Sommers, writing in her book, The War against Boys, which showed how feminists were controlling American education and distorting research findings to suppress how badly boys were doing in school.

That was a quarter of a century ago and still the partisans of girls have a very firm grip on American education, with boys falling even further behind. Hoff Sommers’ efforts to wrestle back control from the ideologues sadly have had little impact.

The same dire state of affairs applies in Australia. In this country we have thousands of blinkered partisans of girls working as education bureaucrats, academics and policy makers. These femocrats are doing a remarkable job suppressing evidence of boys’ ongoing education crisis whilst continuing to promote measures to enhance girls’ performance.

Across Australia our education departments publish annual reports which list achievement gaps – by indigenous status, socio-economic status, disability, geolocation and language background – but never by gender.

Yet the data is there showing girls are streaking ahead of boys in almost every subject in final year exam results. There’s now hardly a subject where boys come out on top, apart from a couple of advanced maths and physics units.

Yet far more important than who is top of the pile is the deteriorating position of the boys at the bottom. The latest NAPLAN school tests show twice as many boys as girls seriously failing in writing and numeracy at every level – years 3,5,7 and 9. Almost half (47%) of all year 9 boys fail grammar vs 36% of girls.

Nearly half (44%) of boys in year 7 failed to reach minimum writing standards. In reading boys are around 13 months behind similar girls. And almost as many males as females are seriously failing the NAPLAN numeracy test at every grade level.

This should be a huge story, with almost half of this generation of children likely to end up barely literate, unable to perform the basic reading required for post school success. We constantly are exposed to media stories highlighting boys in trouble, the massive numbers now on Ritalin and other drugs for attention problems, the one in six boys receiving disability funding for autism or developmental delays. More boys being suspended or expelled, and failing to complete their schooling, dropping out early, fewer making it to university.

Yet our education bureaucracy just doesn’t want to know.

Back in the 1990s I wrote a great deal about boys’ education, reporting on the efforts of the public servants who run our education departments to deny there’s a problem.

“Boys’ disadvantage?” one gender equity officer said to me, “Well, it’s disadvantage complete with carpeting and air-conditioning.”

The bottom line is they aren’t interested in a fair go for boys and girls but, rather, in using education to provide a leg up to girls they perceive as being unfairly treated in our patriarchal society. Ironically, this was the position promoted by a former Sex Discrimination Commissioner, Susan Halliday, who, in a submission to a boys’ education inquiry, argued against boys as a group being given specialised attention. She exhorted the inquiry to look at the position of males and females in society generally and “not artificially limit their consideration to the few years at school in which girls enjoy comparative opportunities to boys”.

That’s the mentality driving the feminists running our education departments. Over the past forty years they have defeated every effort to get boys’ results onto the public agenda, derailed policy efforts put in place following various boys’ education inquiries and kept a firm lid on results that could be used to expose the plight of boys. Just look at these recent examples of government authorities doing the bidding of the feminists by ignoring the failure of boys:

• A Productivity Commission report on educational equity failed to include any gender-specific data on literacy gaps.
• The Australian Education Research Organisation’s (ACER) report on student writing deficits which failed to include the highly unequal outcomes for boys despite the NAPLAN data showing massive gaps in literary results.
• A Grattan Institute exploration of gender gaps which prioritized girls trailing in maths while ignoring literacy gaps disadvantaging boys.
• The Federal government STEM Equity Monitor aimed at boosting girls’ participation in maths and STEM. There are no equivalent datasets or incentives tracking boys’ aspirations or underperformance in humanities or literacy-heavy subjects.

Oh yes, the ideologues are firmly in control and every educational organisation toes the line. We are told by academics that it’s “a career ending move” for a PhD student to tackle why boys are dropping out from school or failing in record numbers. The data is there to start asking the right questions, but no one dares touch it.

The cowardly compliance of our entire education sector makes me despair. Surely some of these people are parents of sons. How can they sell out generation after generation of innocent boys? The education system’s cruel bias is on display for anyone who cares to look. What’s missing is the courage to act.

I’m just back from some time in Canberra, lobbying the few members of parliament prepared to speak up for men and boys. These are grim times with Labor firmly back in power, supported by the vile, anti-male Greens. Once again, femocrats are rubbing their hands in glee, finding fresh ways to promote girls’ education and ignoring the plight of boys.

That’s been the pattern for nearly the last forty years, ever since Bob Hawke’s government in 1986 launched the National Policy for the Education of Girls in Australian Schools setting the spotlight firmly on girls’ achievement. The government coffers poured out support, including millions for gender equity in curriculum reform- which had nothing to do with equity, of course, but rather trying to get girls to beat boys in everything, particularly maths and science subjects. Boys only featured when their behaviour interfered with girls’ progress, with a new emphasis on sexual harassment.

They threw over three million to schools to encourage them to get girls into top courses and poured money into the Girls in Maths and Science project; the STEM Equity Monitor; and program after program aimed at boosting the achievement of girls.

I was writing for our major newspapers at the time, reporting on growing disquiet in the community as parents noticed all the high achievers were suddenly girls. A mother from Cooma sent me newspaper cuttings from her children’s school speech days. “Twenty years ago, you would find a mix of boys and girls but now they are all girls. What’s happened to the boys?” she asked.

It took over a decade and a change of government for any attempt to answer that question. When the Howard government set up a parliamentary inquiry, it was flooded with submissions from concerned parents and teachers. The resulting report: Boys: Getting it Right – made it clear education departments were getting it very, very wrong.

“How could education have got so out of kilter? How could so many educational professionals fail to recognise the emergence of a serious problem of alienation and disengagement from education of so many boys?” asked the Deputy Chair of the parliamentary inquiry, Rod Sawford, when he presented the report to parliament.

The report came up with various initiatives to try to address boys’ educational needs – targeted literacy programs, teacher training and revisions to the Gender Equity Framework to prioritize boys. But dealing with eight Labor education ministers at the state level proved a major obstacle and, when Howard lost power, any interest in boys’ education returned to the back burner.

(The same happened in NSW in 1994 when backbencher Stephen O’Doherty led a similar inquiry. The resulting boys’ education action plan was shelved when the Labor gained power.)

When the Howard government inquiry was in the news, I interviewed a former head of education in Victoria, Melbourne University professor Peter Hill, who pointed out that they were observing “a gender gap in the opposite direction far bigger than anything we saw in the past.” He said the case for addressing low achieving boys was overwhelming.

Yet, here we are, over 20 years down the track and the problem has only got worse. And what does the Albanese government do? Earlier this month they announced major increases in funding for women in STEM (now a $47.5 million commitment), which includes $2 million for the Girls in STEM Toolkit and more money for the STEM Equity Monitor now worth $3.8 mill. And so it goes on…

Last year a national investigation by Catholic Schools NSW found Australia is facing “a growing crisis in boys’ education” with boys overrepresented amongst the most academically vulnerable school students. Their excellent paper – The Echoes of Disparity Report – highlighted “the social justice issue nobody is talking about.” Naturally the report sank without a trace.

A funny footnote to this worrying state of affairs was that late last year Australia was found to have ranked dead last in the field of 58 counties participating in a long-running international maths and science test and now has the world’s biggest gender gap in favour of boys.

Australia has been participating in the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) every four years since 1995, and about 14,000 year 4 and 8 students took the exam in 2023. Last year, for the first time, Australian boys outperformed girls in both subject and year levels.

What a hoot. How’s that after 40 years of pouring resources into trying to help girls pull ahead in precisely these subjects?

“The chase towards gender equity in STEM and especially in Maths has been an expensive and counterproductive venture,” says Glenn Fahey, Director of Education at the Centre for Independent Studies. He points to an interesting paper by an expert in the field, psychology professor David C. Geary who makes the case that we are undermining our country’s STEM capabilities by pushing girls into STEM who lack the predictors of success in these fields.

So, what do we do to promote success for both boys and girls? Fahey says there is no better option than getting the fundamentals right for all students, starting with good teaching, a sensible curriculum, and ensuring classroom time is productively used.

The evidence is firmly in on what works in the classroom for students to succeed, according to Fahey: teaching that is explicit and actively led by the teacher. This is especially helpful for boys, who on average demonstrate lower levels of attention – therefore disproportionately struggling with the kind of fashionable teaching approaches that leave a lot more agency to children than adults.

So, what we are talking about is a good education for everyone, irrespective of gender.

But it is not going to happen unless ordinary people – parents, grandparents, everyone who cares about the future of all our children – start to speak out.

We have Senators lined up to speak on this in parliament and ask questions in Senate Estimates. I urge you all to do your bit by sending this draft letter to key politicians, both state and federal, and use school parents’ groups to voice your concerns.

Boys deserve a fair go.

A sad postscript about Fiona Girkin, the brave lecturer at the University of Tasmania who was teaching police the truth about domestic violence – until I interviewed her for my YouTube channel.

As a result of the fuss created by local feminists who complained to the ABC, Fiona is no longer working at the university. She is now consulting and creating educational materials on toxic female behaviour at work and in relationships. Please support her new endeavours: Podcast: Leadership Shenanigans | YouTube: @DrFionaGirkin. Her website is www.drfionagirkin.com.

The post Selling out our boys appeared first on Bettina Arndt.

In a saner world, the recent verdict in the Hockey Canada rape case would mark a pivotal cultural moment. After seven years of relentless public shaming five young hockey players have been found not guilty and their accuser exposed as a lying, manipulative woman.

The complainant – known as EM- admitted she took on the “persona” of a porn star when she went to a hotel room with members of this elite team. Witnesses reported she masturbated in front of them, repeatedly demanding the players have sex with her and calling those who refused “pussies.” “Can one of you guys come over and fuck me… is there anyone going to do anything to me or do I have to do it all?” she sneered at them.

There were two “consent” videos on one of the young men’s phones where she unreservedly admitted she had enjoyed it, “Ya I’m okay with this’’… “I enjoyed it. It was fine. It was all consensual.”

Police initially examined all the evidence and decided not to charge the men, but the accused men ultimately faced two jury trials which fell apart. It then turned out that Hockey Canada had paid an undisclosed settlement to EM after she sued them for $3.5 million.

Finally, the whole saga ended up in a judge-only trial. In her 90-page judgement, Judge Maria Carroccia does a great job spelling out the huge numbers of holes in EM’s story, concerns about her reliability and credibility and the gap between “her truth” and the actual truth.

Despite this, Canadian feminists are seething and seeking legislative change trying to ban consent videos from evidence in such trials. The rare sympathetic media coverage still admonishes the hockey players for immoral behaviour and suggests they should have treated EM with greater care. In her excellent blog on the case, Janice Fiamengo offers an impassioned response to this suggestion:

“What kind of ‘care’ did this woman deserve? I’m drawing a blank. Especially given that some of the players were as young as 18 years old, why is EM not criticized for her failure to attain their consent to the sexual activity? Did she not owe it to them not to sexually harass, berate, and shame them while they were inebriated and vulnerable? Did she not owe them the basic ‘care’ of not lying about them, persistently and criminally over years, to Hockey Canada investigators, police, lawyers, and the judge?”

What madness is this? Instead of leading to a reckoning, proper accountability for lying women making false rape claims, this case is simply the latest and most prominent example of how our culture refuses to acknowledge how many men are being falsely accused. The believe-women cult is now so entrenched that even when such lies are exposed in court, complainants retain their heroic survivor status. Our legislators continue to tinker with our criminal justice system to support women’s version of the truth in these cases; making it almost impossible for many accused men to receive a fair hearing.

Look at this Sydney case for a prime example of how this is playing out. A few years ago, a couple met on a dating app and quickly discovered they were both into raunchy sex. They fell into a comfortable relationship based on irregular get togethers designed for sexual adventure. She was up for anything, and they’d tried all sorts of exotic techniques from anal sex to bondage. One day he messaged her to tell her he was bringing a surprise for their next date. Her response suggested she was thrilled with the prospect. All started well, he waited until she was very hot and heavy before introducing his surprise. It was a butt plug – a very small dildo chosen from a collection of varied sizes, which he carefully inserted into place.

Well, when she realised what was going on she had a total meltdown. Leapt out of bed, got dressed, stormed out of the room, and rang her mother to say she had been raped. Fast forward two years and a jury was faced with determining whether consenting to a sexual surprise included a butt plug. It proved too much for them and the hung jury meant this young man’s life was in limbo for another year until the prosecution finally decided to drop the case.

This is the garbage taking over our justice system. We are witnessing vital police and court resources being diverted so women can have their moment in the sun, playing victim over the most bizarre, nonsensical “rape” allegations, many of them totally manufactured.

Look at this fine young man – Christopher Kay – pictured with his Sydney barrister, Margaret Cunneen SC. A few months ago, a jury took two hours to throw out allegations that three years ago the then 18-year-old schoolboy had raped, choked and assaulted his girlfriend. He was found not guilty on all 18 charges.

Cunneen summed up the incongruity of a young man of his character – a private school boy, great student, well known as a “sterling gentleman” – being claimed to have “suddenly turned into a horrendous monster.”

The allegations only emerged after Kay tried to extract himself from a relationship with his difficult, demanding girlfriend. Here was a woman Cunneen described as “just so much work,” “so highly emotional, so obsessed with herself and obsessed with him.” The jury was presented with 22,000 pages of messages from her to him.

Very enthusiastic messages: “You make me unexplainably happy… you have allowed me to feel safer in your arms than I’ve ever felt anywhere else ever.”

Very sexy messages: “Baby, I’m so horny. I need my daily dose of daddy’s dick … I really need you to please my pussy, daddy”.

Initially, the defence was denied all the evidence of this positive side of the story – all the loving and explicit sexual messages were kept hidden by a police officer, who failed to provide full evidence from Kay’s phone, including a video of enthusiastic sex taking place after the alleged rape.

Messages sent the day after she claimed he sexually assaulted her showed her desperately trying to see him, suggesting they study together. “I don’t know what’s happening to me, I’m so horny”. “I’m fucking addicted to the idea of your face in between my legs right now”. “I literally came to the bathroom to watch the video of me bouncing up and down your massive cock because I’m down so bad for your cock, baby.”

Is it any wonder the jury tossed the whole thing out after her truth was exposed by Cunneen as a pack of lies? They witnessed her lying under oath, denying she had hidden a bracelet she claimed he had stolen, and that she’d scratched her own chest to claim he’d attacked her.

Kay’s life will forever be haunted by media exposure which included his name and face, his career prospects were damaged, the clever student missed out on overseas scholarship and exchange opportunities. But, naturally, for the unnamed fabricator there were absolutely no penalties.

It is just extraordinary how blatantly our police and prosecutors now work to do over accused men. Our Mothers of Sons group frequently hears from families who are astonished that police showed no interest in proof that their sons couldn’t have committed the act in question – video evidence, work logs, text messages, all sorts of exculpatory material showingthey were set up, that the rape never happened.

This week I spoke to a Queensland lad whose tinder date ended up with accusations that the 20-year-old had drugged, beaten and raped her. It took years before he found himself in front of a jury which in less than 20 minutes determined him not guilty on all charges. The judge spoke out about the failure of the police to do any investigation to verify her story before charging him. No effort to check out her false claims about where they met, to investigate why she refused a drug test, to examine phone message etc. The evidence was there to exonerate him, but our system didn’t bother to look for it. Or worse, it actively concealed it.

Note the next instalment in the Bruce Lehrmann saga has stalled in the Queensland court where he is facing another rape charge – I wrote about his Toowoomba gold-digger here. The court has now been told that a hard drive containing material critical to the case had “malfunctioned” and been “destroyed” by police. Give me a break!

A few months ago, a judge in the NSW Court of Appeal accused a prosecutor of engaging in “horrible and deceptive behaviour” when he tipped off a complainant as to gaps in her evidence. This was during a meeting where he told her he was dropping the case – which involved sex with two men in a hotel toilet at a Mardi Gras parade. The complainant then made a second complaint to police which “resolved issues contained in her earlier allegations”. There’s now a permanent stay on the proceedings due to the “impermissible coaching” by the prosecutor.

Another sexual assault case in rural Queensland recently fell apart when witnesses were found to be colluding outside the courtroom, discussing what they would say in court and how they could align their stories. Police had also lost crucial evidence including Snapchat messages and CCTV footage during their investigation. The complainant turned out to have made similar rape allegations on two previous occasions. This case has also been permanently stayed.

These are innocent men who have been set free after exposing the excesses of our biased system in court. But their experiences represent the tip of a putrid iceberg. Every week in Australia many men are finding themselves in court dealing with false rape allegations, up against zealous police and prosecutors prepared to do anything to win brownie points from their bosses who are under political pressure to push up conviction rates. And these innocent men are being sold out, day after day.

Many are ending up in prison, often on charges based on ludicrous accusations. I’ve come across a number of recent cases where men have been imprisoned when an ongoing pattern of enjoying half-awake, early morning sex is suddenly deemed rape. Waking up to find your partner trying to arouse you is now seen as sexual assault, according to mad affirmative consent legislation now becoming law across the country. And we have sexual consent courses across Australia making sure schoolgirls know they have this weapon available, should they choose to use it.

A Sydney man was released from prison late last year after a horrendous 15 months in jail after he was accused of having sex with his partner while she was asleep. She claimed he knew she wasn’t awake, he thought she was because she “made noises” and “reacted”. The couple had lived together for a month and had frequently had consensual sex after he aroused her awake through sexual touching. Complicating the case was “tendency’ evidence showing in other relationships he had also touched other women while asleep, trying to interest them in sexual activity. This influenced the jury and most likely contributed to the original conviction, but the appeal judges said this tendency evidence should have been inadmissible.

The judgment from the appeal court which gave the poor man his freedom even acknowledged that with couples “who cohabit and routinely share a bed, it could not be regarded as unusual or notable that the man would, on occasion, sexually touch the woman without prior discussion, including when the woman is sleeping.”

So, we do have reasonable judges making good decisions, saying sensible things, even protesting about the flood of cases reaching court supported by insufficient evidence. But the tide is still flowing against them, led by our frighteningly biased media and legislators only interested in locking more men up.

The result is many men facing false allegations of rape in Australia find themselves at the mercy of a legal system utterly stacked against them – truly a place where justice goes to die.

The post Lying women crying rape appeared first on Bettina Arndt.

It was a great idea – a charity started by a couple of Aussie blokes who persuaded men to grow moustaches to support the Prostate Cancer Foundation. Twenty years later, Movember has grown from that small group of men sporting hairy upper lips to become the major male health charity in the world.

Every November, in country after country, blokes fondly imagine they are doing their bit growing a Mo to support men’s health. As one of the very few events where men’s issues make it onto the public agenda, men with Mos and their financial supporters bask in the glow of raising funds they think will improve the welfare of other males.

Little do they know that this huge enterprise, run by a feminist and supported by mainly female staff, is increasingly committed to diverting men’s health dollars away from real male health concerns towards woke projects promoting anti-male ideology.

Last year Movember formed an alliance with UN Women. Movember’s CEO Michelle Terry became one of four global “Champions” feted at the HeForShe summit, designed to mobilize the world for gender equality. Here she is on video boasting of raising $1.1 billion over the last twenty years through Movember’s 6 million supporters.

Terry made a series of commitments to UN women including that Movember would promote “healthy masculinities” – which generally means publicly denigrating men and taking boys to task for their toxic masculinity.

Terry also promised Movember would implement “inclusive hiring”, develop mentorship programs for women, and maintain gender parity in her senior leadership group – goals which few would see as relevant to a men’s health charity.

But Terry has certainly nailed the female leadership issue. Her leadership group is now 70% women. Take a look at the Movember team at a recent conference on the French Riviera.

It’s the weirdest thing that these women don’t see it as inappropriate to boast of taking over a men’s charity. Can you imagine the fuss if the genders were reversed? It’s always a tricky business to include any men in prominent positions in organisation raising funds for women – their role is usually very well hidden.

But look at this brazen pair, shown in a 2020 Movember feature celebrating that their workplace had hit 51% women. Here’s the headline: Mo Sisters #BreakTheBias this International Women’s Day!

The entitlement is breathtaking. Clearly it never occurs to them that this is in any way inappropriate.

And when it comes to their goals, it’s not surprising that this mob would have a rather different agenda to the blokes who started the whole thing off.

Look at this graph showing Movember’s expenditure in recent years, particularly since Michelle Terry took over in 2020. The big drop – see blue line – is from the initial major focus on prostate and testicular cancer research, which declined from 30% of the total spend to only 7%.

The major push now is on “Mental Health & Suicide Prevention” – see the grey line – which has shifted from 18% to 37% of Movember’s spend – $13.5 to $34.4 million.

Nothing wrong with that, you might say. Yes, naturally we are applauding Movember’s increasing interest in male suicide, which surely is the most critical of all the health issues. Given that our suicide prevention bodies are still callously ignoring men, which should be their major target group, this is a real breakthrough.

This is particularly important given the hostility of the anti-male Albanese government to spending money on men’s health. I wrote recently about how they brought together all the key men’s groups prior to the last budget, seeking funding strategies for men’s health. They then turned around and announced $160 million for women’s health and zero for men in the budget.

So it’s great that we have Movember, which had an annual income in 2023-24 of $137 million, willing to throw money around on mental health and suicide.

But the problem with Movember’s approach to this territory is how they spend it.

One of the key initiatives Movember is supporting – to the tune of $2.35 million – is the WayBack Suicide Prevention Service, run by Beyond Blue, a charity tackling depression. What’s disappointing is that while 3 in 4 suicides involve men, 60% of the people helped by WayBack are women. That’s to be expected, say the health bureaucrats because WayBack aims to reduce the likelihood of suicide – or a further attempt, for people who have made a previous suicide attempt – and women make more unsuccessful attempts than men.

Ok then. So Movember discovers the program they are funding to reduce MALE suicide isn’t actually helping all that many men because males are more likely to be successful when they try to end their lives.

You might have thought that someone in Movember would have had the bright idea to look at the factors triggering male suicide and see if there is some way of intervening to actually reduce the risk? Look at the efforts made in our society to support women who are vulnerable to post-partum depression, reducing risk of depression and suicide during that period.

When it comes to male suicide, we have solid data showing relationship breakdown is critical – coroner’s report data published by the Australian Bureau of Statistics showed that among men 25-44, the biggest cause of suicide is now “problems in spousal relationship circumstances”.

It is possible to support these men and prevent them taking their lives. That’s what Parents Beyond Breakup (PBB) has been doing for decades. And it works. Here’s a recent video featuring CEO Pete Nicholls explaining the results of a recent survey they conducted with 500 of their clients showing 66% of men surveyed reported suicidal thoughts when they reached out for help from PBB which reduced to 10% after receiving support.

These are men helping men. The PBB support groups and help lines are run by men who have been through similar ordeals to the men who seek help – parental alienation and the loss of their children, false allegations, loss of home and assets, massive legal costs, homelessness. The organisation is now registered as a suicide prevention charity – Keeping parents alive and in their kids’ lives – and is one of the few that appears to be actually achieving that, for men.

But the sisterhood from Movember aren’t going to get down into the gutter dealing with the real life experiences of broken men under attack in the Family Court. There’s never any mention of any of these issues in all their glossy publications. They are determined to push suicide as a mental health problem rather than a response to situational distress – as is true of most of the organisations currently receiving funding aimed at male suicide prevention.

Even though it might make sense to have men supported by other men, Movember takes a different tack. Given that the suicide prevention sector is female dominated – with over 70% of mental health nurses, psychologists and other support people being women – the focus of much of Movember’s suicide prevention work is training these women to talk to men. Stop men slipping through the cracks, says their promotion, claiming they provide the latest strategies to teach these women to talk to vulnerable men.

This means they blame men for being unwilling to reach out to a friend for “fear of being judged or appearing vulnerable or weak.” Here’s where Movember’s healthy masculinities ideology seeps in and the program becomes one more way of fixing men rather than helping them. They push the standard feminist narrative, claiming men are defective and if they are suffering it must be their own fault.

It’s easy to prove that’s utter nonsense. One recent study found that 91% of male suicides had actually sought help. And there’s good evidence that most male suicides are not linked to mental health issues.

It’s not only the Mo sisterhood which is pushing this line. There are males who are key players in the charity, like Australian psychologist Zac Siedler who, as their Global Director of Men’s Health Research, is responsible for all these programs.

Self-described feminist Siedler has become the leftist media’s favored source for pronouncements about toxic masculinity and other male deficiencies. Recently he wrote an article assuring ABC readers that parents shouldn’t be concerned about sons being falsely accused of sexual misconduct. “The number of false accusations that stick is negligible,” Siedler opined. “If your son does not cross the line, if he doesn’t teeter on the ‘edge of consent,’ if he doesn’t misuse his power to control or belittle others, he will be just fine.” Oh yeh?

In such hands it is hardly surprising that blaming men has become Movember’s key strategy. In 2023, they launched the Movember Institute of Men’s Health, investing $1.5 million in a partnership with the Clinton Foundation to explore “how different masculinities shape men’s health outcomes.”

Last year I wrote about Movember providing $3.2 million to contribute to the National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children – running a program for the government to help young men and boys “foster healthy, respectful relationships as part of efforts to end gender-based violence.”

Since then they have generously increased that funding to $5.5 million over 4 years.

So it goes on. Yes, Movember does run some sensible programs for tackling diet, weight and heart issues, promoting mental fitness and social connection, as well as work on prostate and testicular cancer.

But it is alarming to see that this much celebrated male charity has been captured by feminists and is diverting funds to women and anti-male programs. No wonder the Albanese government is ultra happy to hand over responsibility for men’s health to this mob.

Every day I am contacted by desperate men seeking help. Abused men, fathers who have lost everything in legal fights to see their children, men escaping violence, sleeping in their cars. We have nowhere to send them, so very few resources.

That’s what makes the monstrous wealth of Movember so infuriating, knowing that they are profiting from the goodwill towards men in our community and exploiting it to promote anti-male propaganda.

In recent months I have been delighted to discover that across the world someone else is tearing their hair out over exactly the same issues. Listen to this:

“Nobody cares about men”, is something I hear all the time. And understandably so; it’s hard to look around, at the neglect, and the dwindling funding, and not feel this way.

But I want you to know, people do care; for years people have run thousands of miles, paddled across oceans, climbed mountains, and put their bodies through immense suffering, to raise money for men’s health and male suicide.

The issue is that this enormous pile of money, courageously raised, is so rarely spent on men, and instead stays in the bank vaults and back pockets of large charities.

Meanwhile, so many smaller, wonderful charities for men are going under, closing shop and sinking into bankruptcy, because they get nothing.

They are buried beneath the SEO-savvy, glossy behemoths; whose million pound marketing departments squash out competition, hoover up donations, and colonise the market.

It’s not right.

This impassioned cry is from George, the UK based digital creator who posts under TheTinMen. I mentioned his work in my last blog, when I showed his excellent post on the misrepresentation of women as the only victims of online abuse.

George has been posting recently about Movember – asking questions about where the money is going (According to his calculations Movember seem to be sitting on huge sums of reserves – GBP54 million in the UK.)

But he has also been asking why Movember avoids getting involved in controversial issues, like family law and suicide and male victims of abuse. So many of the key issues that actually trigger men to take their lives.

Issues we talked about in our long, fascinating video conversation we recorded this week, in which we compared notes about the frustrations of trying to expose the injustices men are suffering, in a world which doesn’t care. Please promote the video and showcase George’s excellent work to a new audience.

I hope you will also share my blog and get the word out about how Movember is going off the rails. We have to persuade people to direct their generosity elsewhere.

When it comes to donating, George is urging everyone to think local – do your homework and find out which men’s services in your area are genuinely tackling real issues faced by men. Local Parents Beyond Breakup or Men’s Shed groups should point you in the right direction. Donate to services which actually relieve male suffering.

The post Movember rips off men’s health dollars appeared first on Bettina Arndt.