Open Letter to Aspiring Ministers for Men in Public Office
Before You Accept the Title, Understand the Job
Dear aspirant,
Australia is beginning to appoint ministers, envoys and shadow ministers for men. That could matter. It could also become another symbolic accommodation: a new title attached to old policy habits, a few grants, a men’s health campaign, a promise to get men talking, and no serious reckoning with the systems that make male disadvantage politically awkward to see.
So, you want to be Minister for Men? Then, understand the job.
1. You must understand that male disadvantage is not reducible to health literacy.
Australia’s latest ABS suicide data[1] show that males accounted for 76.5% of suicide deaths in 2024, with an age-standardised suicide death rate of 18.3 per 100,000, compared with 5.5 for females. This is more than three times the female rate and represents around three-quarters of suicide deaths.
Formal access to health and other medical services has not produced equitable outcomes[2]. On many key indicators — premature mortality, suicide, preventable death, occupational injury, and engagement with care — men and boys continue to fare poorly, sometimes dramatically so.
The National Men’s Health Strategy[3]itself recognises persistent poorer outcomes for men and boys, especially for groups at highest risk.
2. You must be willing to address male identity, not merely male pathology.
Many men are not confused because they lack values. They are confused because the public meanings of masculinity have become unstable, contradictory and often punitive. They are told that older roles — protector, provider, builder, father, husband, worker — are obsolete or oppressive. Yet they are still expected to protect, provide, absorb risk, apologise for historic harms, and accept public suspicion as the price of being male.
Too often, men encounter a public language of masculinity they did not author, in which their identities are politically pre-classified and interpreted before they are heard: as privileged, potentially dangerous, emotionally deficient, or in need of correction. A Minister for Men must be willing to say that this is not a serious basis for public policy.
3. You must treat fatherhood as an essential relational and social good, not merely a legal or financial status.
The role of men and our masculinity have changed dramatically over the years. Men no longer see a job or a career as an end in itself, nor do they view their role in a family as solely about providing for or protecting it. Men want to play an active part in their children’s lives and ensure they enjoy a loving relationship with their fathers in its own right, separate from and complementing a relationship with their mothers.
The modern father is not simply a provider standing outside the emotional life of the family. He changes nappies, pushes prams, attends school events, negotiates flexible work, comforts distressed children and builds an attachment relationship that matters in its own right. Yet when relationships break down, the same father can quickly find himself treated as secondary: useful as a payer, suspect as a claimant, and dispensable as a relationship.
In too many post-separation settings, the father’s money remains administratively useful while his relationship with the child becomes negotiable, suspect, or disposable. Men are not blind to that moral corruption of family life. They want something done about it for their children’s sake.
You must also confront one of the least understood pathways into male suicide: the collapse of intimate and family relationships, especially where separation, exclusion from children, financial stress, legal conflict and identity loss converge. These deaths are not explained by health literacy alone. They are relational, institutional and existential.
4. You must insist that violence policy remains evidence-sensitive, non-stigmatising, and able to recognise all victims and perpetrators.
Men are told to be more vulnerable and more willing to seek help. But vulnerability is not enough if the system receiving it is already primed to read male distress as risk, anger, entitlement or perpetration. Naturally, many men are reluctant to approach mainstream services if they believe they will first be assessed as a threat rather than heard as people needing help.
You must also insist that programs and research into male health and male disadvantage are not quietly subordinated to other agendas in which men are already coded as risks: violence prevention, extremism prevention, behavioural correction, or therapeutic re-education. Men are not asking to be excused from responsibility. They are asking not to be treated as a threat category before the evidence is even heard.
The difficulty with the language of “violence against women and children” is that it fuses women and children into a joined victim category and leaves men and fathers as the implied perpetrator class. Men cannot be asked to join anti-violence work as equal civic partners while the dominant policy frame positions them primarily as risks to women and children, rather than as citizens, fathers, victims, workers, carers and relational beings in their own right.
As a Minister for Men, you cannot allow male health, fatherhood, suicide, family rupture and service distrust to be absorbed into a policy frame in which men appear mainly as risks to women and children, especially when men and fathers are also loving, protective and relationally necessary to their children.
Can you deal with the fact that the ABS 4906.0 Personal Safety Study identifies forms of emotional abuse, especially those that target children, that are nearly equally perpetrated by men and women? If not, your portfolio will reproduce the very blindness it was supposedly created to correct.
The dominant policy imagination of domestic violence has become too one-directional. A serious Minister for Men needs an evidence-sensitive account of directionality: one that does not overlook the different ways men and women use violence, coercion and abuse in relationships.
Men have little reason to participate as equal civic partners in violence prevention if the policy architecture has already assigned them the role of presumptive perpetrator. The problem is not only the formal wording of legislation. It is the way apparently neutral laws, programs, campaigns and risk frameworks are interpreted through a gendered violence lens that struggles to recognise male victims, female perpetrators, bidirectional abuse, and children harmed by coercive conduct outside the prevailing script.
You must be prepared to ask whether Australia’s violence-response architecture can recognise men as victims, women as perpetrators, bidirectional abuse, and children harmed by coercive conduct that does not fit the prevailing script. A Minister for Men who cannot ask that question is not a Minister for Men; they are a political token.
Can you sit down with aMinister for Women and work out a collaborative plan to respond to relational violence across gender?
5. You must be prepared to disappoint the people who want this portfolio to remain harmless.
So, aspiring ministers for men, you are facing unique challenges. It’s not enough to lobby for equitable male health funding unless you can guarantee that those health services are free from gender-based presumptions about domestic violence perpetration. We don’t need encouragement to seek help. We need to be shown that help is safe for us to seek.
Equity and equality will remain hollow unless men are permitted to define masculinity as a lived civic identity, not merely endure it as a category imposed on them by others. The task is to review laws, policies and implementation frameworks that are formally neutral but operationally gendered, and repeal or amend any provisions, guidance or funding rules that prevent male vulnerability, female perpetration, bidirectional abuse and child-directed coercive control from being recognised on the evidence.
6. The final test: Are you prepared to take a stand?
You will not reduce male suicide, rebuild trust in services, or restore civic confidence among men by throwing public money at men’s health programs while leaving the deeper architecture untouched. Men do not need another campaign telling them to talk. They need public institutions capable of hearing what they say.
The test of a Minister for Men is not whether they can secure another initiative, launch another awareness week, or repeat the familiar language of help-seeking. The test is whether they are prepared to confront the institutional misrecognition of male harm: the narrowing of male identity, the fragility of fatherhood after family rupture, the gendered coding of vulnerability and perpetration, and the policy habit of treating men as a problem to be managed rather than as citizens whose needs deserve equal civic seriousness.
We are not opposed to the office. We are opposed to a hollow version of the office.
Australia does not need rival ministries of grievance. It needs Ministers for Men and Ministers for Women who can work together on a civic compact for gender, family and relational violence: one that protects women without demonising men, supports men without denying women’s suffering, protects children without treating them as extensions of adult claims, and recognises violence, coercion and abuse wherever the evidence shows them.That is the job. Your interview starts now.
[1] Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2025, November 14). Intentional self-harm (suicide) deaths, 2024.
[2] Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. (2026). Men’s health overview.
[3]Australian Government Department of Health and Aged Care. (2019). National Men’s Health Strategy 2020–2030. https://www.health.gov.au/resources/publications/national-mens-health-strategy-2020-2030?