Australia's failed suicide policies

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.