Australia's failed suicide policies

- Male body count set to increase due to recent feminist takeover.

Seven men die by suicide in Australia every day. In May 2026, the peak body for men’s health endorsed a plan to address this by teaching boys about gender equity.

There is a moment in any institutional capture when the pretence falls away. For decades, men’s health advocates have been politely told their concerns about the neglect of male suicide were heard, that change was coming. But in May 2026 the politeness ended — replaced by something more sinister. In a coordinated move involving government ministers, federally-funded suicide bodies, and the domestic violence industry, the sector delivered a blunt message to anyone still fighting for the men doing the dying: get on board or get out of the way.

This is dire news, people. Glen Poole, the previous CEO of The Australian Men’s Health Forum — the peak men’s health body — has left the organisation and the acting CEO, Filipe Gama e Silva, is now showing his colours. He has taken the extraordinary step of urging his member organisations to “organise across differences” behind a single shared agenda — a distinctly feminist agenda, as was made brutally clear in an open letter circulated alongside his email.

That letter was written by Ben Vasiliou, CEO of The Man Cave — the smiling front man of a new cabal taking control of male suicide prevention. The Man Cave has spent twelve years teaching 100,000 teenage boys to express their feelings and apologise for their masculinity. Their Healthy MaTE schools program attracts $4.4 million in government funding — money administered not through any men’s health budget but through the National Plan to End Violence Against Women. The Man Cave is, in other words, a delivery vehicle for feminist ideology — using suicide prevention as its public justification and domestic violence funding as its cash source, while its actual business is remaking the minds of teenage boys. There is no credible evidence it has prevented a single suicide.

Look at the manifesto Vasiliou now wants the entire men’s health sector to embrace. Its first principle is the safety of women, with the goal defined as producing men “who do no harm.” It insists that “promoting healthy expressions of masculinity goes hand-in-hand with advancing gender equity” — explicitly framing male suicide as a product of gender norms. Not family court. Not loss of children. Not financial ruin. The situational drivers that the evidence consistently identifies as one of the primary causes of male suicide do not get a mention.

Just in case the message wasn’t clear, May 2026 also delivered a brilliantly staged propaganda exercise spelling it all out. Healthy Men Community Conversations were launched with great fanfare by Dan Repacholi, Special Envoy for Men’s Health, alongside the Assistant Minister for Prevention of Family Violence, Ged Kearney — a pairing that tells you everything about whose agenda this actually serves. Look here at the song and dance routine from these two, promoting their new project.

As a reward for his loyalty, Vasiliou’s Healthy MaTE schools program received a bonus $861,000. Meanwhile the programs genuinely trying to help suicidal men navigate situational crisis received nothing in the recent budget. Given the ideologues now controlling levers of men’s health funding, that is unlikely to change.

The Australian Men’s Health Forum, like all men’s organisations receiving government funding, has spent years walking on eggshells, terrified of biting the hand that feeds it. But its previous CEO, Glen Poole, did manage to publish one inconvenient truth — namely a 2021 analysis showing four in five clients of government-funded suicide services are women. Hardly news the government wanted the public to know.

The government no longer publishes the information required to update that analysis but there’s no question that most of the suicide prevention funding is still going to women. This is locked in — for one utterly amazing reason.

Lived Experience

What comes next reads like satire. It isn’t.

Australia’s suicide prevention policy is now guided by a principle called “lived experience.” The idea is straightforward: people who have personally survived a suicidal crisis are best placed to decide how to prevent suicide. Peer workers, advisory committees, grant panels, peak bodies — all must now include people with this lived experience. It sounds reasonable. It is, in practice, a mechanism for ensuring men’s suicide prevention policies remain strictly in female hands.

The logic is simple and devastating. Women attempt suicide more than men. Men die more than women. The people with the most direct lived experience of the crisis — the men who complete suicide — are unavailable for comment. The selection mechanism for who gets a seat at the policy table is survival, and survival is gendered. The result is a female-dominated workforce making decisions about a male-dominated catastrophe.

These women making policy are not villains. But their lived experience is not the lived experience of a middle-aged man who has just lost his children in the family court, lost his house, lost his income, and is sleeping in his car. Programs shaped by female survivors look like what we have now: talking about feelings, reducing stigma, building emotional connection. Programs shaped by his experience would look entirely different — emergency housing, legal advocacy, financial crisis intervention. Those programs don’t exist, because the people who would demand them aren’t in the room.

The peak body for this lived experience movement is Roses in the Ocean, federally funded and female-dominated, now effectively setting the national agenda for suicide prevention. Their definition of lived experience — “having experienced suicidal thoughts, survived a suicide attempt, supported a loved one, or been bereaved by suicide” — is broad enough to include almost anyone touched by suicide who is still with us. But men who survive an attempt would usually prefer not to be known as someone who tried. The result is an organisation dominated by females setting the agenda for a crisis killing mostly men.

The largest direct service program is the Way Back Support Service, receiving over $150 million. Way Back supports suicide attempt survivors. Sixty percent of its clients are women. Three quarters of suicide deaths are men. Nobody in the policy system finds this worth remarking on.

The sector’s party line is that women attempt suicide more often than men, making them equally deserving of resources. This sounds reasonable until you look at what those attempts actually represent. Psychiatric literature is clear that a significant proportion of female suicide attempts are parasuicidal gestures — cries for help that are not fatal by design. That is not a dismissal of their distress, which is real and deserves support. But a parasuicidal gesture and a completed suicide are not the same thing, and they cannot be weighted equally when setting policy priorities. Designing a suicide prevention system around attempt rates rather than death rates is not a neutral technical choice — it is a decision to prioritise the group that survives over the group that dies.

And how did this system design itself? The health department asked the sector what was needed. The sector — peer workers, lived experience advocates, healthy masculinity evangelists — answered. Naturally they recommended more lived experience, more healthy masculinities, more of everything that had already failed to move the dial. Australia’s suicide policies are failing. From 2000 to 2021 Australia’s suicide rate fell by just 1%, while the global average declined by 36%.

Yet the people running the system have decided this means more of the same is needed — and with the feminist capture of May 2026 now complete, the healthy masculinities agenda is no longer lurking in the background. It is front and centre.

The department currently running this show is the Health Department — and that is another part of the problem. Not only is the department overwhelmingly female at the policy level, but housing suicide prevention inside Health guarantees the entire focus remains on mental illness and emotional distress rather than the situational drivers — family breakdown, financial ruin, legal crisis — that the evidence identifies as significant primary precipitants of male suicide. Australia’s previous National Suicide Prevention Adviser Christine Morgan recognised this in her 2021 final report, identifying the disproportionate impact of suicide on men as an issue that “must be called out as a priority for whole-of-government action” – which means getting it out of the Health Department. That advice was ignored. Suicide prevention remained in the hands of the Mental Health mafia, and the men kept dying.

What the money doesn’t buy

What does this feminist capture mean for the organisations currently scrambling for funding to help suicidal men? Most of them are already in the wrong business — encouraging men to seek help, which in practice means the poor bloke ends up suffering through a female psych exploring his feelings. Helpful, perhaps. But not for the man whose problem is he hasn’t seen his kids in six months. Or has been thrown out of his house and has nowhere to live.

For that man, a psychologist’s office is not the answer. He doesn’t need his feelings validated. He needs someone who understands what is actually happening to him and can help him navigate it. The organisations that do this are few, small, and chronically underfunded. Dads in Distress is the most significant — peer support groups and help lines run by men who have been through the family breakdown system themselves, who understand the specific devastation of losing your children, and who don’t pathologise the men who walk through the door. And Men’s Sheds, which tackles the major problem driving elderly men to suicide — loneliness — by offering regular companionship built around the simple but powerful act of making things together.

These programs share a quality that the funded sector seems almost allergic to: they meet men where they are, take seriously what men say is wrong, and don’t begin from the assumption that the man is the problem. In a policy landscape dominated by toxic masculinities evangelists and lived experience bureaucrats, that makes them radical. It also makes them, for the men who find them, lifesaving.

The men dying by suicide in Australia are not dying because they haven’t learned to cry. They are mainly dying because they’ve lost their children, their homes, their reason to keep going — and the system built to save them is too busy advancing gender equity to notice. Seven men today. Seven tomorrow. The feminist capture of suicide prevention is not an abstraction. It is a body count.

Now for a somewhat amusing postscript to this very grim story….

We’ve had One Nation Senator Tyron Whitten in parliament this week, asking questions in Senate Estimates of Health Department bureaucrats about Australia’s suicide prevention policies. Boy, was that a farce.

The smug, evasiveness of these high-ranking public servants was sickening. Their glib, deceptive answers to Whitten’s straightforward questions spoke volumes about why our Australia’s suicide policies are failing.

Asked why men — three quarters of all suicide deaths — are not listed among the 15 priority populations in the National Mental Health and Suicide Prevention Agreement the deputy secretary tied himself in knots for four minutes before conceding the Senator was correct, then assuring him that men are “embedded” in the broader strategy. Asked about Australia’s catastrophic performance compared to the global average, the head of the National Suicide Prevention Office stunningly admitted she had no data on international comparisons. Asked why none of the federally funded programs address the situational drivers of male suicide — family breakdown, loss of children, financial ruin — the deputy secretary had the effrontery to start talking about domestic violence services.

It was quite a performance, these self-satisfied, blinkered bureaucrats so calmly batting away questions about why they choose not to protect the most vulnerable men in our society. They just don’t give a damn.

At the end came the best moment of all. Smiling sweetly, one of the top cats chimed in, recommending to Whitten the “wonderful work” of Dan Repacholi’s Healthy Men Community Conversations — the feminist propaganda exercise this article exposes.

These are the people responsible for it all. Ideologues with government salaries, feminist agendas, and little concern for the seven men who will die today.