Open letter to Ministers for Women in Public Office

The Emergence of Ministers for Men is Not a Threat — It is a Test of Whether Gender Policy can Grow Up

Photo by Alyssa DeGarde on Unsplash

Dear Minister,

The emergence of ministers, envoys and shadow ministers for men should not be treated as a threat to women’s policy or competition for resources. It should be treated as a test of whether Australia’s gender-policy architecture is mature enough to recognise more than one form of vulnerability at a time.

Women’s and men’s safety and dignity matter. Children’s relational security matters. A serious public policy system should be able to hold these truths together without converting them into a hierarchy of moral worth and locking them into a victim-perpetrator binary.

Women’s policy has been necessary to address historical trajectories. But it has also shaped the dominant grammar through which gender, violence and vulnerability are understood. A Minister for Women now has a choice: defend that grammar as a closed system, or help build a more mature relational policy architecture capable of recognising women’s safety, male harm and children’s relational needs without treating any one of them as a threat to the others.

This letter should be read alongside the open letter to aspiring Ministers for Men. Together, they call for a civic compact on relational violence because, in the end, women and men cannot do this work without each other.

A serious Minister for Men and a serious Minister for Women would jointly commit to:

1. Women’s safety without male demonisation.

2. Male identity and dignity without denial of violence, coercion or abuse experienced by women.

3. Children’s relational security without adult ownership claims.

4. Protection, repair and restoration of family relationships where this is safe, evidence-supported and consistent with children’s developmental needs.

5. Evidence-sensitive assessment of violence, coercion, alienation and abuse on an equal basis.

6. Recognition of all victims and perpetrators, including male victims and female perpetrators.

7. Protection of masculinity and femininity as lived identities, not ideological caricatures.

8. Institutional trust, so people can seek help without being pre-classified.

What These Commitments Ask of You

These commitments do not ask Ministers for Women to compromise women’s safety. They ask them to lead the next stage of gender policy. The first stage was necessary: naming forms of violence and inequality that had been minimised, normalised or hidden. The next stage is harder. It requires Ministers for Women to recognise that a policy grammar built around women and children as victims and men as perpetrators can become too narrow to describe the relational realities now before us: male victims, female perpetrators, bidirectional abuse, alienated children, post-separation coercion, family rupture, suicide, and the loss of institutional trust.

The “Women and Children” Narrative is No Longer the Basis for Policy

The phrase “violence against women and children” names serious harms, but it also reveals the limits of the current policy imagination. It joins women and children into a shared victim category and leaves men and fathers standing as the implied perpetrator class. That is not a mature basis for gender policy. It narrows women, narrows men, and risks subordinating children’s independent relational needs to adult gender conflict.

A Minister for Men is an Opportunity

A serious Minister for Women should not treat the emergence of Ministers for Men as competition. She should treat it as an opportunity to build a better settlement: women’s safety without male demonisation; male dignity without denial of women’s suffering; children’s relational security without adult ownership claims; and violence policy that follows evidence rather than doctrinal scripts.

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.

Are You Ready?

The test is whether a Minister for Women can sit down with a Minister for Men and ask a harder question: what would it take to build a relational-violence policy capable of recognising all victims, all perpetrators, all children’s relational needs, and the civic dignity of both women and men?