Domestic violence delusions

- Feminists pull the wool over our eyes

“You can’t hand out domestic violence orders like parking tickets.” Well, that’s exactly what they have in mind for residents of our Deep North.

The speaker was Terry O’Gorman from the Queensland Council for Civil Liberties, protesting on television news about the latest domestic violence madness taking over his state. Under sweeping “reforms” announced earlier this month, police officers will be able to hand out 12-month Police Protection Directives on the spot – bypassing current court processes.

The Queensland Police Union has been running a grim television campaign featuring a full screen shot of a closed fist and a vicious, snarling man – making the case that police are drowning in domestic violence cases, which they say comprise up to 90% of their workload.

Between 2012-2024, the number of calls for service to domestic violence incidents increased from 60,000 to more than 192,000, an increase of 218 per cent. Queensland Police received almost 200,000 domestic violence related calls in 2024, which means they are responding to these cases every three minutes.

“Policing has been crumbling under this pressure,” says Police Minister Dan Purdie, explaining the current situation is unsustainable, with officers unable to address issues like burglaries, car theft and road safety.

Yet if we take a step back, we can see that the rate of actual violence is going down in this country – according to the official data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Between 2005 and 2021-22, the 12-month prevalence rate of physical violence declined for both men and women:

• Men – from 10% in 2005 to 6.1% in 2021-22

• Women – from 4.7% in 2005 to 2.9% in 2021-22

Homicides are also going down, even between intimate partners. Last year The Australian Institute of Criminology released the latest figures which demonstrated a 30-year decline in intimate partner domestic homicide – “The female intimate partner homicide rate decreased overall by two-thirds (66 per cent) in the 34-year period between 1989-90 and 2022-23.”

And according to our best official domestic violence data, The ABS’s Personal Safety Survey, less than one percent of women report physical violence from their partner or ex-partner in the previous year – and that too is decreasing.

We are not seeing any real increase in threats to women’s safety. Yet alongside the mercifully small numbers of cases of genuine violence towards women, we are witnessing an epidemic of false allegations, or complaints based on unpleasant but essentially trivial behaviour – a raised voice, slammed door, unpaid credit card. These are now construed as coercive control, financial abuse, threats of violence or any of the long list of behaviours which set men up as perpetrators of domestic violence.

Feminists have pulled the wool over our eyes with a dystopian fantasy of a country quaking in fear of the male fist when the true power is firmly in female hands.

Last year I published an interview with two Queensland police officers voicing their anguish about being forced to spend their time dealing with complaints they know to be manufactured or grossly inflated. They described the widespread cynicism amongst their colleagues at the ideological, male-baiting spin driving the whole domestic violence industry and their resentment at being the ones required to enforce unjust laws targeting men.

They mentioned police leaving the force due to widespread disquiet at what is going on. Turnover of police officers in Queensland used to run at around 2.7%. It's been twice that in recent years - 5.3% according to latest figures. And new recruits are hard to find - in late 2022 police had to cancel recruit training due to the lack of new recruits and the authorities are still missing recruitment targets.

Within the police service it is well recognised that false or trivial domestic violence allegations are a contagion undermining the critical role they play in our justice system. But heaven forbid any main player who dares to publicly give voice to this concern.

The head of the Police Union, Shane Prior, who is spearheading the current campaign, was in trouble four years ago when his union made a submission to a domestic violence inquiry pointing out that false allegations of domestic violence are regularly used to gain advantage in family law disputes and that members of the police force are finding themselves on the receiving end of false complaints.

At that time Prior received a walloping from the domestic violence lobby groups who lined up to dismiss his claims as ‘factually incorrect’. This year he’s going overboard, lobbying for all domestic violence allegations to be treated as criminal offences. It is clearly safer to appease the feminist ideologues than to speak out against unjust laws.

What this appears to be about is police trying to find a way out of the 4.6 hours they currently spend dealing with each domestic violence report. The proposed Police Protection Directives would mean they could just issue a 12-month on the spot protection direction instead of having to go through all the processes required to get a court to issue a violence order.

Funnily enough, the PPD proposal immediately ran into problems with lobby groups worrying that women could be dragged into this new efficiency net scooping up offenders. “It could cause further damage to victim survivors as police regularly misidentify who the perpetrator is,” said Aimee McVeigh, CEO of the Queensland Council of Social Service. In fact, the Queensland police I interviewed last year said their investigations often found evidence that women were perpetrators, but they were under enormous pressure from their bosses to only charge men.

An interesting case was reported earlier this month where a female magistrate refused an application by the Queensland Police Commissioner for access to domestic violence records involving a female officer. The female cop had made violence accusations against her husband who in turn lodged a cross-application against her – which led to the Police Commissioner seeking her records to see what was going on. Magistrate Janelle Brassington refused access to the documents claiming she was protecting the officer’s confidentiality, voicing her concern that “victims could be deterred from seeking protection because of the fear of reprisal applications triggering similar investigatory action.” That suggests no one is allowed to even investigate if violence could be two-way.

Feminists have very effectively infiltrated institutions across the country ensuring women are protected from proper scrutiny, let alone actual charges. The Police Union’s proposed reforms include a recommendation that “supervising officers must conduct a 100% audit of charges/police protection directions where the respondent is female.”

At the coalface, it isn’t hard to find police officers alarmed at this hijacking of their proper policing role. But the public narrative has been well and truly captured. Last month I published my important interview with Stuart Lindsay, a former Family Court judge, speaking out about judges being forced to “bend the knee” to the feminist ideology which he said was being imposed throughout the Family Court system. Domestic violence allegations are at the heart of that ideology, being used to the detriment of the best interests of children and giving women enormous power to manipulate the system.

So domestic violence is being used to create havoc, not only in the Family Court system but also in policing. Everywhere there are people in power - politicians, bureaucrats, police chiefs, managers - being forced to “bend the knee” and pretend that there actually is an epidemic of violence in this country, rather than simply a scary display of women’s willingness to distort the truth about their relationships to gain the truckload of rewards that comes with victim status.

It is just extraordinary that feminists have managed to pull the wool over our eyes with this dystopian fantasy of a country quaking in fear of the male fist when the true power is firmly in female hands.

Yes, I’ve been talking about the latest happenings in Queensland, but this contagion is everywhere. All governments are on board but the Albanese Labor mob is embracing this lunacy with particular enthusiasm. The current Federal government has spent an eye-watering $3.4 billion on domestic violence since gaining power – which equates to $4 million a day.

And on what? It would be nice if the bulk of that money went to women’s refuges offering protection for the women legitimately seeking escape from dangerous men. But the reality is that the billions that have been showered on the domestic violence industry, from governments, NGOs, sporting bodies etc, have been poured down a very large drain – in pursuit of a goal now exposed as totally misguided.

Last month an extraordinary essay hit the streets – published in Quarterly Essay, a journal with intellectual clout in mainly Lefty circles. Losing It – Can we stop violence against women and children, was written by journalist Jess Hill, who built her career pushing the feminist line on domestic violence.

As I noted some months ago, she’s now straying to the dark side, daring to challenge the beloved feminist narrative that the driver of domestic violence is gender inequality. That’s where many of those billions have actually gone – into television ads, and programs in schools and workplaces trying to change misogynist attitudes. Late last year the Albanese government threw in $3.5 million to teach schoolboys about “healthy masculinity”

As Hill points out it has long been known that this plan was a dismal failure. Not only did the first national domestic violence plan based on this theory fail to achieve their promised “significant and sustained reduction in violence”, but what they regard as misogynist attitudes are actually thriving – with large numbers of men and women believing equality for women has gone too far – according to Australia’s Gender Compass. Hill blames this on a global gender “backlash” network, which she claims involves not only world leaders like Trump and Putin, and “anti-rights groups driven by Russian oligarchs,” but also disaffected young men recruited as foot soldiers by Andrew Tate. How’s that for a wild conspiracy theory?

She admits saying “yeah, sure” to the cadet’s persistent demands for sex but the Canberra jury still found him guilty because the consent was given in “not a very enthusiastic tone.”

Such madness aside, Hill has fascinating revelations about the “fifty-year turf war” that’s been taking place amongst femocrats responsible for setting domestic violence policy. She describes battles between two camps in the Department of Social Services, between die-hards convinced gender inequality was the key policy driver and the “numbers” group who dared to suggest this theory was unsupported by the data. She mentions skirmishes over the “Nordic paradox” – the awkward fact that Nordic countries, the most gender-equal countries on the planet, still have persistently high rates of gender-based violence.

Eventually, DSS tensions came to a head and the two factions had to be moved to separate sides of the office, reveals Hill. What a hoot! There’s a marvellous video of former Senator David Leyonhjelm grilling a very irritated female bureaucrat about inconsistencies in some of this data. I’d love to know where this sour puss lined up in the turf war.

Now we have Jess Hill presenting herself as on the side of the angels when for years she dutifully toed the gender equity line in all of her writing. It’s infuriating to see her now take credit for revealing some of the complex risk factors long suppressed by the ideologues – like the link to alcohol abuse. “It’s like, don’t mention the war!’ jokes Hill about the feminist determination to keep alcohol out of the picture.

She now happily quotes Peter Miller, a former professor of violence prevention and addiction studies at Deakin University speaking about the “lost decade” and lives lost through the failure to address this issue. Yet, back in 2015 I wrote about Miller’s frustration after he gave evidence on all this to the Victorian Royal Commission and was totally ignored not only by the Commission but by Hill and the rest of the sisterhood determined to promote the gender-equity party line.

Hills’ confused meanderings are worth reading for their revelations about the policy end of the domestic violence industry. It’s highly entertaining to note her masterful evasion as she manages to write over 25,000 words on domestic violence, never mentioning false allegations and barely a word on women as perpetrators. She does include the sad story of Celina who was beaten black and blue by her mother. “I’m just so scared no one will ever care about kids abused by their mums,” the young woman told her. Hill barely skips a beat before she’s back to her usual man-bashing tirade.

So many evasions and inconsistences…not the least being the problem of measuring policy achievements in an area where they keep moving the goalposts. How can feminists achieve a decline in violence against women when they endlessly expand the definition of what is included in the definition of domestic violence?

There was a dreadful news story this week reporting on the rape conviction of an army cadet in Canberra. The complainant admits saying “yeah, sure” to the cadet’s persistent demands for sex but the ACT jury still found him guilty because the consent was given in “not a very enthusiastic tone.” That’s what happens when you have new enthusiastic consent laws and a duly indoctrinated ACT jury.

I noted Hill’s enthusiasm for the new sexual consent education to be rolled out across the country this year – backed by $83.5 million from the Albanese government. What a great idea to teach sexual consent whilst the definition of what in the hell that means has become even more elusive.

Well done, ladies. You are doing your ideology proud.