The domestic violence triage system

And it works a treat. They call it the "silver bullet" - because of how completely it stacks the deck in favour of the alleged victim. Usually, the process is well in hand long before anyone gets near a courtroom: a quick word to police with the right allegations, and dad's out of the house - sometimes for years, and if he's lucky, paying through the nose for the privilege of supervised contact just to see his own kids.

By the time it does reach court, the status quo argument finishes the job. The longer dad has been kept at arm's length, the harder it is for him to claim any real, ongoing relationship with his own children - and mum, having been the one left holding the fort, becomes the court's obvious choice as full-time carer.

Fathers occasionally play the same card, though with less frequency and generally less effect. And for those seeking maximum impact, there are even more powerful silver bullets available: allegations of sexual assault against the mother, or child sexual abuse - accusations so serious that they can remove a parent from a child's life almost instantly, sometimes for years, long before anyone has tested whether they're true.

Amazingly, with violence allegations the system usually doesn't even bother to test the evidence. The case just winds its way through procedural hearing after procedural hearing, month after month, until it finally lands on verdicts for the parenting and property matters that actually needed deciding. And having done their job - keeping dad out, tilting the status quo, shaping the outcome - the violence allegations simply drop by the wayside, unexamined and unresolved. It's sickening.

The silver bullet entitlements used to come with a bonus: guaranteed legal aid. But here's where the constant feminist reengineering of the system turned around and bit them. The sisterhood decided victims shouldn't have to be cross-examined by their alleged perpetrators, so a law was introduced banning it outright. Trouble is, someone still has to do the cross-examining - which meant funding legal aid lawyers for every self-represented man facing a DV allegation. Then those lawyers needed time to read the brief. Mission creep set in, and with it, runaway cost. The result: a legal aid system now in funding crisis, swamped by accused men suddenly entitled to free representation.

Own goal, ladies. Own goal.

Here you have it - a full-scale takeover of the family court system, achieved over three decades of relentless lobbying, at staggering cost. The Commonwealth has tipped hundreds of millions into DV triage infrastructure and risk-screening bureaucracy that grows every year. All funding a system that processes allegations, most of which are never tested, never resolved, simply left to do their work and quietly dropped. Meanwhile parents' legal bills burn through savings that should be feeding and housing their children, rich family lawyers retire early, and damaged kids watch it all from the sidelines.

The human cost dwarfs the financial one. Children routinely lose fathers - not because a court found him dangerous, but because the system was designed to make that the path of least resistance. And what of the estranged dads, cut off from their children by allegations that were never tested? Some simply don't make it. The suicide rate among men going through family court is not a statistic anyone in Parliament seems eager to discuss.

All of this is done, we are told, in the name of keeping children safe. What a joke. The DV capture of the family court hasn't made Australian children safer. It has made it easier to weaponise trivial, sometimes fabricated allegations to push fathers out of children's lives - and deliver mothers a bigger slice of the marital cake. That's not child protection. That's a system that has been gamed.

And now they're exporting the model. In October 2025, the UK government announced it would repeal the presumption that children benefit from having both parents involved in their lives after separation - the same presumption Australia scrapped in 2024. The Courts and Tribunals Bill, currently at committee stage in the House of Commons, will remove it entirely. Courts will no longer start from the assumption that contact with both parents is good for a child - every case will be assessed on its own facts, with domestic violence a mandatory first consideration.

Australia did it first. Britain is right behind. And somewhere, a small army of feminists is nodding with satisfaction - no crane required.