The left built a machine for turning a father’s love for his children into prison time. By Bettina Arndt at Quadrant.
In New South Wales alone, more than 100,000 domestic violence orders are in force at any one time — more than double the number seven years ago. …
Mothers are mostly the ones protected, but since the children’s arrangements run through her, contact with the children stops too. A father is cut off from his children immediately, with no trial, no evidence tested, no finding made. This is state-imposed alienation. How many children it touches, nobody knows, because the government that runs the system has never bothered to count. People everywhere know it is happening and no one wants to talk about it.
Nobody, that is, except David Smith. He is the West Australian dad campaigning to expose what is going on. Boy, is this a man with a mission. He wrote three books and then created an amazing podcast series — All Kids Lives Matter — which is a data-driven investigation into “How Australia’s family-facing systems fail the children they claim to protect — and what the evidence says would fix them.” …
A legal machine came into existence:
Something changed in this country, and it changed fast. In 1987, NSW Local Courts issued 1,462 apprehended violence orders, which at the time were available only between people in a domestic relationship. In 2025, 52,757 domestic AVOs were commenced …
This expansion happened while physical violence was falling, according to the government’s own ABS Personal Safety Survey. For men, the rate fell from 10% to 6.1% since 2005. For women, it fell from 4.7% to 2.9%. Those figures cover violence from anyone, not just partners. …
A system expanding this dramatically while violence declines is not obviously tracking danger. It is tracking something else: policy settings, definitions, and a bureaucracy that keeps growing, regardless of what is happening in people’s homes. ...
Rarely any trail or testing of evidence, just bureaucratic machinery with shocking consequences:
For the great majority of cases, no one ever tests the evidence. … In NSW, an interim AVO can be made “whether or not the defendant is present or has been given notice”. Get that — the bloke doesn’t even need to be told he’s about to be done over!
One study of Victorian courts, reported by the Australian Law Reform Commission, timed the median protection order hearing at three minutes. Three minutes to decide whether a father loses his children. …
Men need to know that living with an AVO means being perpetually at risk of being charged with a criminal offence. All it takes is a breach — namely, any contact with the protected person that the order prohibits. And because children are automatically caught up in these orders, that prohibition usually extends to them too. For a father separated from his children, that means even a text wishing his own child happy birthday can constitute a breach. And a breach is a crime. He can be arrested. He can end up in jail.
This makes ordinary contact a minefield, no matter how careful a man tries to be. A determined ex-partner can turn up at his workplace with the children in tow. She can arrange for them to “bump into” him at the shops. However it happens, the moment he responds — waves, says hello, sends a text — he has breached the order. And just like that, Dad is safely out of the way. Behind bars. …
About 39,600 defendants faced criminal courts in 2023-2024 with breaching a violence order as their principal offence. … More than one hundred people, every single day, walk into a criminal courtroom because of a document no criminal court ever issued. [David Smith] explains:
“A document issued fast, in a civil court, on the civil standard, is the tripwire for mandatory prison. That is the hybrid. Civil to obtain. Criminal to break.”
That design choice — civil to obtain, criminal to break — is the hinge the whole appalling system turns on.
It’s the narrative, interpreted outrageously:
What makes my blood boil is that the public assumes this entire system exists to protect women from dangerous men. That is the story everyone has been told, and it is why almost no one questions how the system actually operates. But the reality is most of these orders have nothing to do with violence at all. …
54% involved an assault charge. 35% involved intimidation or stalking … [which] typically involves threats, intimidation and verbal abuse, not stalking in any conventional sense. And 40% involved a charge of breaching an existing order. … These categories overlap. …
Once a matter reaches the family court, the definition widens again. The Family Law Act defines family violence partly as behaviour that coerces or controls a family member, or “causes the family member to be fearful”. There is no express requirement that the fear be reasonable. The examples run from assault to repeated derogatory taunts, all under one label.
The ever-expanding label “domestic violence” is doing enormous, undifferentiated work. It covers everything from a punch to claims of a heated argument over money, and the system responds to the label the same way regardless of what actually happened. …
The biggest risk factor for delinquency and crime is a fatherless upbringing, but the system encourages it:
The moment one of these orders is made — often before the father even knows it exists — it typically comes with a standard condition: no contact at all. Not reduced contact. Not supervised contact. None. …
By the time anyone looks, a child may have already lost one to two years with a parent — on the strength of an allegation nobody ever tested. And that absence doesn’t stay neutral. Family courts routinely lean on what’s called the “status quo” — the arrangement the child has already been living under — as evidence of what’s now stable and familiar for them. The system creates the absence, then claims it serves the child’s best interests. That isn’t child protection, it’s child abuse. And it’s a system marking its own homework.
From there, the pathway often leads to supervised contact, where the parent — usually a father — pays for the privilege of seeing his children. Often seeing them in some sterile, fluorescent-lit room at a contact centre, a stranger with a clipboard sitting in, every word and gesture noted down, ready to be used against him in court. …
Shockingly, 46% of adults in NSW prisons are now on remand: legally innocent and awaiting trial — the highest proportion ever recorded … About half of the growth in remand over the past two years is due to more domestic violence defendants being held in custody before their court date, and one in three adults on remand is now there over an alleged domestic violence offence.
Imagine if this became a political issue. Only One Nation has the guts to oppose the feminists. (Pauline Hanson mentioned that men are also victims of domestic violence a couple of months ago, and was duly shouted down by the usual suspects.)
The victims of this feminist machine are mostly white men, so who cares? You can be sure it is selectively enforced — men from favored groups either don’t get charged or are punished far less. For example, this week Jeffrey Alan Brown was found guilty of raping four kids over six years in WA, but “Respected elder’s rape sentence reduced for ‘significant connection to country’” — any excuse will do. Imagine if people from any group other than white men were being treated so unfairly and then imprisoned and alienated from their children? Stolen children times 100!