Seven men a day. That is the quiet, unacceptable arithmetic of contemporary Australia.
In 2024, the Australian Bureau of Statistics recorded 3,307 deaths by suicide, of whom 2,529 – more than three-quarters – were male. An Australian man dies by his own hand, on average, every three and a half hours. The age-standardised suicide rate for men is 18.3 per 100,000, more than three times the rate for women, and suicides among working-age men aged 25-64 hit a record high in 2024. Suicide remains the leading cause of death for Australians aged 15 to 44.
These are not fringe statistics. They are the ABS Causes of Death data, released on 14 November 2025. Yet no Commonwealth policy response matches the scale of the problem, and our national conversation on family and domestic violence – important, necessary, urgent – has come to assume men are, at worst, perpetrators and, at best, incidental.
This article is not a contest of grief. Every woman killed by an intimate partner is a tragedy demanding the full weight of the state. The Australian Institute of Criminology’s Homicide in Australia 2024-25 report, released in February 2026, records 46 intimate-partner homicide deaths in the year to 30 June 2025, most involving female victims – roughly one woman killed by a partner every eight or nine days. It is rightly the subject of a National Plan, a dedicated Commissioner, and more than a billion dollars of Commonwealth funding.
But in the same AIC report, men made up 80 per cent of all homicide victims. And seven men a day continue to die by suicide in circumstances where one of the most frequently reported risk factors, logged from coronial data by Suicide Prevention Australia, is ‘problems in spousal relationship circumstances’ – present in more than a quarter of male suicides. We know the pattern. We have chosen not to name it.
The rhetoric problem: ‘toxic masculinity’ and the man who is always the man
Part of the reason we have not named the pattern is that the language available to discuss it has been colonised by a vocabulary that obscures more than it reveals. ‘Toxic masculinity’ is a term that many Australians – men and women alike – do not fully understand, yet which institutions, lobby groups, and advocacy campaigns deploy with increasing frequency. The phrase is almost never defined in the materials that use it. It is, functionally, a term of denigration in search of a definition.
The original academic usage, drawn from 1980s men’s-work literature, was narrow: a cluster of harmful behaviours – emotional suppression, dominance-seeking, reluctance to seek help – that cause damage to the men themselves and those around them. In that narrow usage, the concept is unobjectionable and overlaps with what any good clinician would say about men’s mental-health presentations. In contemporary public usage, however, the term has drifted. It is applied to male assertiveness, competitiveness, risk-taking, to any quality associated with traditional masculine roles – and, in the worst instances, to masculinity itself. It is a word that starts as a diagnostic and ends as an accusation.
The rhetorical structure is telling. In a culture that would never accept a phrase like ‘toxic femininity’ in general circulation – and rightly would not – a phrase that pathologises half the population is used casually, in policy documents, training modules, and ministerial press releases. Many men hear the term correctly: as a message that the problem is them. Not this man, for these acts, on this evidence, before this court. A man. Any man. The man who happens to be in the room. It is the linguistic counterpart of the procedural pattern this article describes: not all men, the formulation insists, but always a man.
The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists, among other clinical bodies, has cautioned that stigmatising language is among the most significant barriers to men seeking mental-health support. Men under-present to services – the ABS records that men account for fewer than four in ten Medicare-funded mental-health service users, despite being more than three-quarters of suicide deaths – and they are not assisted by being told, in many public-health campaigns they encounter, that their masculinity is the problem. A suicide-prevention strategy cannot rest on a vocabulary that shames the population it seeks to save. None of this denies that male violence exists, or that it must be named where it occurs. It is to insist that public policy distinguish between the conduct of individual men and the character of men as a class.
The ADVO-to-Family-Court pipeline
Our firm, Ashley, Francina, Leonard & Associates, has prepared two draft Bills addressing a specific and documented failure in the interaction between state apprehended-violence proceedings and Commonwealth family law: the Crimes (Domestic and Personal Violence) Amendment (Child-Inclusive ADVO Proceedings) Bill 2026 (NSW), and the Family Law Amendment (Enforcement, Restoration and Best Interests of the Child) Bill 2026 (Cth). Both have been sent to every Federal Minister and Senator. To date, one Federal Senator has responded: Senator Tyron Whitten (One Nation, Western Australia), who generously offered a meeting and one State MLC John Ruddick (NSW – Libertarian Party) and Matt Cross (Liberal Party Minister – NSW). Elected politicians are busy, and we accept that. But the data, and the human cost, demand the issue no longer be left unanswered.
The problem is mechanical rather than malicious. An Apprehended Domestic Violence Order (ADVO) in New South Wales is designed to protect the vulnerable, and in the great majority of matters does precisely that. But in a minority of cases, an interim ADVO is used to secure a forensic advantage in subsequent family-law proceedings. An interim order removes a parent – typically the father – from the home. The children remain with the other parent. The ADVO sits on the Local Court list. A parenting application is filed in the Federal Circuit and Family Court, which, rightly cautious, is slow to order meaningful time for a parent subject to an unresolved protective order. Twelve months pass. Sometimes eighteen.
By the time the ADVO is substantively determined – often withdrawn, dismissed, or resolved without admissions – the child has spent a year or more in the sole care of one parent. The Family Court then confronts the status quo problem: it is generally not in the best interests of a child to disturb a settled arrangement. Even where a court accepts the father did not engage in family violence, or that any conduct alleged was not serious, the delay has done the work the evidence could not. The process has become the punishment and although not all men, it’s almost always a man.
Two cases from practice
In one matter, a father was accused of domestic violence. After almost eight months of investigation, the charges were withdrawn. Almost immediately, allegations of child sexual assault were made. A further twelve months passed, during which Federal and State resources were expended on investigation, and those allegations too were ultimately withdrawn – no finding, no prosecution, no substantiation. The family-law proceeding had been on foot throughout. By the time the matter reached a hearing, the children had not seen their father in two and half years. They had come to believe he had abandoned them, and – as often happens in prolonged estrangement – the narrative of the allegations had become internalised. Even after clear vindication, the relationship could not be simply restored. The delay had done what the evidence could not – alienation by proxy of legal proceedings.
In another matter, a man with no family in Australia was removed from his home on an interim ADVO. He had nowhere to go. He slept in his car, parked in suburban streets and public carparks; he used public bathrooms to wash; he ate alone in public parks. That was not a week or a month – that was his life, for as long as his matter took to resolve. He is not unusual. Our firm has supported many men in comparable circumstances, and we have since formed – with the support of medical networks that recognise the importance of equal mental-health care – an informal group to provide practical and clinical assistance to men in this position. We would prefer that the state’s response not be outsourced to goodwill. Until it is not, it must be.
The child’s best interests must not be captured by ideology
Section 60CA of the Family Law Act 1975 (Cth) makes the best interests of the child paramount in parenting matters. It must remain anchored in evidence, in the realities of children’s development, and in the lived experience of the families who come before the courts – not in institutional drift, in fashion, or in the language of any particular ideological moment.
Alienation is abuse. Gatekeeping – the deliberate, systematic exclusion of a child from one parent in the absence of genuine risk – is abuse. These are not contested propositions in the clinical literature. The Australian Association for Infant Mental Health, the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists, and every comparable peak body recognise that prolonged, unjustified severance of a child’s relationship with a fit parent causes measurable developmental harm. A legal system that enables such severance – even unintentionally, as a by-product of procedural delay – is not serving the child’s best interests. It is undermining them.
Our institutions will remain credible only to the extent that they recognise men, women, and children as equal and integral members of our society. The moment the family-law system is perceived as a gendered instrument rather than a neutral adjudicator, it loses the confidence of the very people it exists to serve. A system that delivers predictable, principled outcomes for fit fathers, fit mothers, and their children is the system that best serves all three.
The NSW Bill: a three-month triage rule
My recent proposed draft, The Child-Inclusive ADVO Bill amends the Crimes (Domestic and Personal Violence) Act 2007 (NSW) in a confined, procedural way. It does not weaken a single protective power of the Local Court. It creates no presumption as to the truth or falsity of any allegation. It builds on the existing framework and gives the bench a clearer, faster pathway to substantive determination.
The central reform is a three-month expedited-determination rule. Where an ADVO application involves, concerns, or materially affects a child – including because it displaces a parenting order – the matter must be substantively determined within three months of the first court return. An extension is permitted only in exceptional circumstances, for the shortest period reasonably necessary, and on written reasons. Where an interim order is continued beyond three months, the Bill introduces an evidentiary threshold: the court must be satisfied, on admissible evidence, of a real and present risk; that the order’s terms are no more restrictive than necessary; and that continuation does not unnecessarily interrupt a child’s relationship with a parent where the alleged risk cannot within a reasonable time be substantively established. New section 25F requires the court to have regard to any existing Commonwealth parenting order. Good-faith reporting immunity is preserved absolutely.
In Australian practice, this means a parent restrained on an interim basis would receive a substantive determination on evidence within three months – not a twelve- or eighteen-month continuance with no hearing in sight. A child’s relationship with a parent would not be lost by operation of calendar alone.
The Commonwealth Bill: three-strikes enforcement and restoration
The omnibus Commonwealth Bill amends Part VII and Division 13A of the Family Law Act 1975 (Cth) to do three things. Critically, it builds on – rather than displaces – the existing protective architecture. Section 60CA remains paramount. Good-faith reporting immunity is preserved. Every protective power of the Federal Circuit and Family Court is intact. What the Bill gives judicial officers is greater insight into patterns of contravention across jurisdictions, and greater power to respond to the issues practitioners see daily. Further it provides lawyers with a greater level of certainty when providing legal advice thereby assisting with client management and costs.
First, the Bill replaces the current discretionary contravention regime with a three-stage graduated enforcement structure. A first finding of contravention without reasonable excuse triggers mandatory consequences: 5 penalty units, 1:1 make-up time within six months, a costs order, and a written warning. A second finding within seven years: 15 penalty units, make-up time within four months, a judicial warning, mandatory review of the parenting order, and indemnity costs. A third finding: 30 penalty units, referral to the Commonwealth DPP for a new indictable offence of serious interference with a parenting order (up to 12 months’ imprisonment), a review that may include reversal of primary care, and supervised time at the non-complying party’s expense. Discretion is preserved only in narrow, reasoned exceptions tied to the best interests of the child.
In Australian practice, this gives a parenting order the legal character it currently only nominally possesses. Orders of the Federal Circuit and Family Court can at present be ignored with relative impunity; consequences are unpredictable and often minor (if at all). Under the Bill, consequences are known in advance by parties, practitioners, and the court. Predictability is itself a deterrent. Children – the true beneficiaries – would live under parenting orders that actually mean what they say and enforced as such.
Second, the Bill creates a restoration mechanism. Where a parent’s time with a child has been suspended or lost because of allegations that are not substantiated – where no court, welfare authority, or police agency has made a finding of harm or unacceptable risk – the court must order restorative parenting time on a 1:1 basis, to be taken within twelve months, unless contrary to the best interests of the child. Where the carve-out applies, an equivalent remedial measure is mandatory. New section 70NAC-2 provides that knowingly false or misleading allegations, embellished allegations, proved on the balance of probabilities and shown to have been a material cause of a suspension of parenting time, will attract indemnity costs and a referral to the DPP. Good faith remains presumed.
In Australian practice, this means the cases described earlier would not end in the perverse outcome of ‘cleared but still punished’. The time taken from a vindicated parent would be restored. The court would have an express duty to address the harm done by delay itself.
Third, the Bill establishes a National Parenting Order Compliance Register, cross-jurisdictional in effect, administered by the Principal Registrar of the Federal Circuit and Family Court, with a seven-year retention period and access restricted to the judiciary, acting practitioners, parties, and the Attorney-General’s Department on a de-identified basis. For the first time, a judicial officer would have a reliable, national picture of any prior findings of contravention.
The Bill is gender-neutral by express terms. Section 4 requires that no provision be construed or applied so as to advantage or disadvantage a party on the basis of sex or gender. A mother withheld from her children by a father has precisely the same remedy as a father in the reverse position. It is compatible with Articles 3 and 9(3) of the Convention on the Rights of the Child and with the paramountcy of the child’s best interests under section 60CA.
Australia is falling behind comparable jurisdictions
The United States has moved decisively. On 1 September 2025, Texas enacted Senate Bill 2794 – the ‘three-strikes’ visitation law – making repeated wilful interference with court-ordered parenting time an escalating criminal offence applicable to custodial and non-custodial parents alike. A third contempt finding triggers mandatory make-up time (doubled), prohibits suspended sentences, requires the offending party to pay the other parent’s legal costs without waiver, and permits the court to treat the pattern as a material change justifying modification of primary care. In Australia, such certainty is not apparent and leaves the field open making legal advice and decision making too broad and often unchecked.
Australia continues to operate a Division 13A contravention regime whose consequences are, in the words of successive Law Reform Commission reports, inconsistent, unpredictable, and rarely used. The Australian Law Reform Commission’s 2019 report Family Law for the Future (ALRC Report 135) identified precisely the problems our omnibus Bill seeks to cure. The Family Law Amendment Act 2023 simplified parts of Division 13A, but the structural gaps – no mandatory escalation, no restoration mechanism, no national compliance register – remain.
Our Bill is designed as a precision tool rather than a blunt instrument. It codifies parental rights as specific, predictable principles – giving judges, lawyers and clients a common framework for understanding the issues in dispute and resolving them on consistent grounds..
Equality before the law – and international obligations
Article 26 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which Australia ratified in 1980, guarantees equality before the law without discrimination on the basis of sex. Article 23 protects the family. Article 9(3) of the Convention on the Rights of the Child protects the child’s right, where separated from a parent, to maintain direct contact with both parents on a regular basis, unless contrary to the child’s best interests. Where our domestic procedures produce, in a systematic and foreseeable way, the severance of father-child relationships through delay rather than on evidence, Australia is at real risk of falling short of those obligations. The UN Human Rights Committee, in General Comments 18 and 28, has made clear that equality before the law is not merely formal: laws and procedures that operate in practice to the disadvantage of one sex may themselves amount to discrimination.
None of this denies what the data also show. Women remain disproportionately the victims of lethal intimate-partner violence. That is true. It is also true that more than three-quarters of homicide victims overall are male. The ABS 2021 Census recorded male homelessness at 55 per 10,000 – materially higher than the 42 per 10,000 for women – and 62 per cent of respondents in the University of Melbourne’s Journeys Home survey cited family breakdown or conflict as the main reason for their first episode of homelessness. When a father is removed from his home on an interim order, he is frequently removed to a friend’s couch, to his car, or to the street. There is no parallel national network of male refuges, male crisis accommodation, or male family-support services. The asymmetry is not ideological. It is a funding and legislative choice.
This is not a competition
The central argument of these Bills is not that resources for women should be diminished. They should not. Every dollar of the billion-plus committed under the National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children is defensible and necessary unless there is clear evidence of wrongdoing, waste and abuse as we have seen in the recent NDIS service providers.
Women’s refuges save lives. Specialist female-victim services save lives. The argument is simply that men’s health, men’s suicide prevention, and men’s access to their children after separation should no longer be treated as matters of residual concern, subordinate to a gendered frame that cannot explain why seven Australian men die by their own hand every day.
The Bills are gender-neutral in text, operation, and intent. A mother withheld from her children by a father will benefit from the three-strikes regime in exactly the same way as a father in the reverse position. A father who makes a knowingly false allegation will face the same consequences as a mother. These reforms are not a men’s-rights agenda. They are procedural fairness, applied evenly, in an area where the law’s current operation produces systematically unfair outcomes – and where that unfairness is now reflected in a mortality statistic we can count.
An election issue no side can honestly attack
There is no partisan face to male suicide. The Northern Territory’s age-standardised rate of male suicide – 30.3 per 100,000 – crosses every electoral boundary. Queensland, Western Australia, and Tasmania each report rates above the national average. Working-age men in technician and trades occupations account for more than a quarter of male suicides: the people who build the nation’s housing, its infrastructure, its mines.
The Coalition cannot oppose reforms that strengthen the enforcement of court orders without contradicting a generation of its own rhetoric on personal responsibility and the rule of law. Labor cannot oppose reforms that protect children’s relationships with both parents without contradicting its commitments under the National Plan. The Greens cannot oppose reforms grounded expressly in the Convention on the Rights of the Child. The crossbench has already shown, in Senator Whitten’s courtesy, that engagement is possible. These are, in the strict sense of the word, bipartisan proposals – they ask nothing of any party that contradicts the party’s own published principles.
The case for reform is administrative, evidentiary, and humane. It is not culture-war. It is about a seven-day-a-week preventable-death statistic; a housing system in which an exiled parent has no door of his own; a court system in which delay has become a decision; a public vocabulary that treats masculinity as a pathology; and a Commonwealth policy agenda that cannot acknowledge men’s distress without first qualifying it.
What now?
We have asked every Minister and Senator to consider our Bills – which are publicly available, professionally drafted, and accompanied by statements of compatibility with human rights and financial-impact statements. We will brief any parliamentarian, of any party, on any aspect of the drafting. We are not asking for adoption without amendment. We are asking for the conversation to begin.
Australia prides itself on a fair go. The men who build our homes, teach our children, defend our borders, and are buried every year at the rate of seven a day deserve one too. So do their children, who have the right to two parents wherever it is safe to have them. The process should not be the punishment. The silence should not be the policy. The vocabulary of public health should not be the accusation. And this should not be, in 2026, an issue on which a single senator replies.
By: Tony Nikolic- Ashley, Francina, Leonard & Associates (Solicitors)
If this article raises concerns for you or someone you know, Lifeline is available 24 hours a day on 13 11 14, and MensLine Australia on 1300 78 99 78.
Sources
ABS, Causes of Death, Australia, 2024 (released 14 November 2025); ABS, Intentional self-harm (suicide) deaths, 2024; AIC, Homicide in Australia 2024–25 (released February 2026); AIHW, Suicide & self-harm monitoring; Suicide Prevention Australia, Stats & Facts (2025); Australian Men’s Health Forum (November 2025); ABS, Estimating Homelessness: Census 2021; Journeys Home (University of Melbourne); ALRC Report 135, Family Law for the Future (2019); Texas SB 2794 and HB 3181 (both effective 1 September 2025); Guardianship of Infants Act 1964 (Ireland), as amended by the Children and Family Relationships Act 2015; Children Act 1989 (UK) s 1(2A) as inserted by Children and Families Act 2014 s 11; UN Convention on the Rights of the Child; ICCPR.
