Weaponised domestic violence orders - state sanctioned parental alienation

Note, these orders go by different names across the states - AVOs in NSW, different labels for protection orders elsewhere. They work the same way everywhere.

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.

Defenders will say the orders helped drive that fall, and some undoubtedly protect real victims. But the men's decline came from fewer assaults by other men, mostly outside the home and more often by strangers than by people the victim knew, which no domestic order touches. And between 2016 and 2021-22 the ABS found no significant change in physical violence for either sex, while the orders kept climbing.

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.

Almost none of it is ever tested.

Here is the number that should be nailed to the door of every family violence unit in the country: 609. That is how many of NSW's 44,537 AVO applications in 2023 were dismissed after a defended hearing, where evidence was tested and found wanting. Roughly one in seventy.

The Court doesn't publish how many cases went to a defended hearing at all, or how many of its 35,621 final orders were made by consent. Nobody does. But everything else we can see points the same way: for the great majority of cases, no one ever tests the evidence.

Most of these orders are made as "interim" orders - a supposedly temporary, stopgap measure imposed before any hearing, meant to hold the situation safely until the matter is properly heard. 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.

In practice, across Australia, the "temporary" order is often as far as a case ever goes.

Western Australia is the starkest example: under its Family Violence Restraining Order system, if a respondent doesn't return a form within 21 days, the interim order simply becomes the final order. He is never heard. Other states arrive at the same outcome by a different route - not through inaction, but through pressure to consent. In Victoria, even among respondents who actually turned up to court, 69% of final Family Violence Intervention Orders were still made "by consent" rather than contested. In NSW and Queensland, the law lets a respondent consent to the order without accepting that any of the allegations against him are true - consent "without admissions." He isn't saying he did it. Often on his lawyer's advice, he decides it isn't worth the fight - because fighting costs money, time, and the risk of losing anyway.

It is often lousy advice. An order made "without admissions" still carries the same real-world consequences as one that was contested and proven: