Politicians discover men

How refreshing to hear a man in power call out the bias baked into our institutions against men. Let alone the "ideological bullshit" (his words) used to shut down proper action on male suicide.

Australia's political class has suddenly discovered that men exist, and new spokesmen are popping up everywhere. But there's one standout in the pack: Llew O'Brien, National Party MP for Wide Bay in Queensland. A former cop, O'Brien was recently named Shadow Special Envoy for Men and Boys. And unlike most of the field, he's actually on our side - telling it straight, naming exactly where men are getting a raw deal in this country, and demanding something be done about it.

In our YouTube interview, O'Brien lays bare what's actually going on inside the institutions meant to be tackling men's issues. He previously spent time on a parliamentary committee on suicide prevention, and he's scathing about how little men rate a mention in the National Suicide Prevention Strategy. "This is a national crisis. Seven men every day deciding they want to end their lives. These are big numbers," he says. "If people were taking their lives in any other demographic, there would be a huge national outcry."

What really got under his skin on that committee was the constant emphasis on women having higher rates of attempted suicide - used, he says, to justify looking away from men, while ignoring the fact that a cry for help is a very different thing from a genuine, failed attempt. "You're cherry-picking statistics, so we don't have to talk about the elephant in the room, which is the 75% of completed suicides by men."

As an ex-cop, he wants a lot more balance in the public discussion of family violence. "When you look at those numbers, and how over the past 35 years there's been something like a 70 percent decrease in the rate of domestic homicide, intimate partner homicide - it doesn't correlate with some of the rhetoric and the narrative that's being pushed at the moment," he says. "We need services to help male victims, that's for sure."

O'Brien is well aware that family breakdown and dealings with the Family Court are key triggers for male suicide. "It's a huge, huge concern," he says, pointing to the lack of services targeting men caught up in this situation. He's all for reversing Labor's changes to family law legislation, believing shared parenting should be the starting point for deciding parenting matters. And he's keen to look hard at bias within the court itself: "I think we have a lot of activist judges out there and people within the judiciary who are influenced by ideology."

He also believes in real consequences for perjury: "I think there should be consequences. Absolutely. For false complaints. You know, the argument being against that, we don't want to deter genuine victims from coming forward. I don't wear that. It's overused. It's crap, to be honest."

Contrast all this with the pronouncements from Dan Repacholi, the Albanese government's Special Envoy for Men's Health, whose main take on male suicide is that men just aren't very good at talking about their feelings. He shows his ideological colours by touring the country arm-in-arm with Ged Kearney, the Assistant Minister for Prevention of Family Violence, talking about "respect for women."

Labor treats the feminist playbook like holy writ - recite it, never question or revise it. Speaking at the Queensland Labor conference recently, Albanese sneered that One Nation dared to suggest "domestic violence is sometimes a woman's fault," lumping it in with a list of supposedly outrageous positions. The crowd erupted in mock horror, crying "shame."

O'Brien has their number. "They are an anti-male government," he told me. He's genuinely worried about the influence of this mindset on our key institutions: "I really worry that the institutions we normally rely on have been taken over by people who think men are bad, and that at the heart of every man there's some sort of abuser."

Please help me circulate my important interview with this brave, honest man willing to challenge the orthodoxies our politicians have been spouting for so many decades. That takes some doing.