Weaponised domestic violence orders - state sanctioned parental alienation

We talk endlessly about parental alienation as something one parent does to another. It is usually pictured as a campaign, waged in the shadow of a family court, to turn a child against a father. But there is a bigger, colder version of the same thing happening. It isn't being run by a vindictive ex. It is being run by the state, at industrial scale.

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. Nobody keeps a national count, but on NSW's rate, the true figure across Australia is likely well over 300,000. 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 and 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, except David Smith. That's the name a West Australian dad is using in his campaign 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."

Data driven is right. This extraordinary series of over 70, 13-minute episodes has pulled together evidence from every conceivable source to prove how dismally children are being let down by the current system. And every fact, every statistic is backed by solid references. Amazing stuff.

David had written to tell me about this herculean effort. We talked but I didn't find the time to do the required deep dive into his material until this week, when I happened to be pulling together information to expose the role of apprehended violence orders in aliening fathers from their children. But then I struck gold!

Weaponised, Season 2 of David’s series, covers much the same ground I was working on but he’s stumbled across some amazing research information I had never seen before. Here I’ve just included the Weaponised section from Spotify but do listen to the whole, incredible podcast series. (Or you could listen on YouTube here).

Go to his website for the rest of his series. And for those of you keen to use this valuable resource, here’s the transcript, plus the references.

So, my thanks to David for much of the data I've used here. It's long and data heavy, but crammed with vital facts people need to know – hopefully a useful resource for politicians and policy makers.

The scale of it

But back to my blog. I want to start by explaining how we got to this situation.

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, a rise of more than thirty-fold, and by the end of the year 107,830 were in force at once. About 85% of final orders run for two years or more. Queensland tells the same story. DVO applications there rose 44.4% in a decade (2008–09 to 2017–18) - a 22.6% increase even after accounting for population growth. This is not a NSW quirk, it is a national pattern.