Feminist Media Manipulation, By Bettina Arndt

[Bettina Arndt's latest Substack essay is a mixture of established fact, documented legal controversies, and strongly argued opinion. While some of her interpretations will be contested, many of the events she discusses are matters of public record. Her broader argument is that contemporary media and legal institutions often apply markedly different standards depending upon who is accused and whether the allegation fits an accepted ideological narrative. Whether readers ultimately agree or disagree with that conclusion, several observations from her article deserve consideration.

Bettina needs to be given the Australian of the Year Award, which would really get the Left going!]

… What interests me isn't really the story about melons, or Kylie Minogue, or a PM having a midlife crisis, but rather how "believe women" and "call out sexism" turn out to have an asterisk next to them — *unless it's politically inconvenient.

That asterisk has shown up everywhere I've looked this past month — not only in the reflexive media outrage machine, sitting selectively idle when it comes to Albo's inanities.

There was also Jenna Price's provocative column in the Sydney Morning Herald entitled: "Think the family court is a disaster now? Hanson would make it worse." Price, an old-school, ranting feminist, seems rattled that Pauline Hanson's One Nation party is surging in the polls. Hanson is one of the very few politicians in Australia willing to say out loud what feminism has done to our Family Court — where a tsunami of domestic violence allegations is used, mainly by mothers, to gain the upper hand in custody proceedings. I've spent years documenting exactly this, through interviews with police, law professors, former Family Court judges, prosecutors and lawyers - most recently in my Substack piece on the Domestic Violence Triage System.

Price is convinced Hanson's policies would bring "far more stress and pain" for families. Here's her idea of balanced commentary on the issue: Hanson's push for equal time with kids, Price writes, "would be fine if they stopped beating the mother of those kids." Note the "if" — which amounts to an unproven allegation against every father in Australia. That's not analysis. That's bigotry.

And what's her evidence for dismissing Hanson's assertion that domestic violence orders get used tactically to cut fathers out of their kids' lives? None. Price doesn't rebut it. She just declares it doesn't exist — case closed.

This is the Sydney Morning Herald, mind you — the paper whose current marketing slogan is "Here's to Reason." That's a process which usually requires considering evidence. I spent over a decade writing for this paper, and that used to mean subeditors who queried every controversial claim. These days, apparently, all you need is a byline and a grievance — no factchecking required.

Judges are being quietly punished not for getting the law wrong, but for suggesting that evidence should matter before someone's life is upended.

While Price was insisting there's no evidence regarding tactical DV allegations, The Australian was reporting a live story that says otherwise — with journalist Ellie Dudley breaking scoop after scoop, and Janet Albrechtsen adding commentary.

Meet Roger Clisdell, a NSW Local Court judge with 18 years on the bench. Hearing a DV matter last year — a father trying to get access to his own children — Clisdell said out loud what family lawyers already know: tactical apprehended violence orders (AVOs) were "very common." This case, he said, had "all the hallmarks of what's alleged. They've separated, they've got shared custody and suddenly, she starts saying, 'Oh, there's coercive control and I want the children not to go near him.'"

Clisdell heard her evidence — where she admitted "I have no fears of physical harm" — before ruling there wasn't enough to keep the father away. "These are always difficult situations," the judge said. Referring to the couple's earlier shared custody arrangement, he added: "I have got to somehow restore that at this stage because there is no physical threat to the children and though there is some concern about psychological harm, these (interim) orders are primarily designed to provide protection from violence."

For that — for applying the evidence in front of him, carefully, and reaching a considered conclusion — Clisdell had a complaint upheld against him by the NSW Judicial Commission. We only know about that because a journalist went looking — by law, the Commission itself is gagged from ever telling us. And when the same AVO matter returned to court this year, police withdrew it entirely — whatever "evidence" existed hadn't survived proper scrutiny.

Clisdell isn't a one-off. He's part of a wider pattern in the NSW legal system: judges being quietly punished not for getting the law wrong, but for suggesting that evidence should matter before someone's life is upended.

The clearest example is unfolding right now, in a separate but related scandal involving NSW's chief prosecutor, Sally Dowling. A NSW parliamentary committee has just handed down a 75-page report finding it was likely Dowling authorised leaking confidential information to a radio station — retaliation against District Court judge Penelope Wass, after Wass had publicly raised concerns about weak, evidence-light rape cases being pushed to trial. The committee found Dowling gave "false evidence" to the inquiry and "seriously obstructed" its work. Her response was to deny it all. The legal establishment's response was to close ranks: prosecutors from every state signed a joint letter vouching for her "integrity," while the Public Service Union insisted the committee's findings weren't "based upon any evidence" — a claim hard to square with, well, the 75-page report full of it.

Judge Wass wasn't alone in raising the alarm, and she wasn't alone in paying for it. District Court judge Robert Newlinds was pulled off criminal cases entirely after calling for an end to "lazy and perhaps politically expedient" referrals of weak rape cases to trial — told he could only return once a chief judge decided he'd completed enough re-education. Judge Peter Whitford, who'd raised the same concerns, faced the Judicial Commission's wrath too.

None of this is about custody or access to children — that's Clisdell's territory, not theirs. But it's the same underlying instinct on display: when a judge points out that an allegation hasn't been backed by evidence — whether it's a rape charge that shouldn't have gone to trial, or an AVO used to keep a father from his kids — the system doesn't examine the claim. It goes after the judge.

Which is exactly why Price can claim in her Herald article that there's no evidence of tactical AVOs — because officially, there isn't much. Not because they don't happen, but because our authorities very deliberately choose not to fund the research that would prove it. The Clisdell saga shows precisely why: when a judge with 18 years' experience says the quiet part out loud, the system's response isn't to investigate whether he's right. It's to secretly punish him for saying it and count on the silence that follows to keep the "no evidence" claim technically true.

Put it all together and a pattern emerges. It's not that anyone picked up a phone and orchestrated any of this. Nobody needed to. When the people running our media newsrooms and the people running our legal institutions share the same feminist assumptions — that women don't lie, that every allegation deserves belief, that scepticism itself is the real danger — they don't need a conspiracy to arrive at the same destination. They just need to keep looking away from anything that complicates the story. And by that measure, they're doing a remarkably good job.

Before I move on: I'm delighted to announce I'll shortly be recording a video interview with Pauline Hanson on exactly this — her plans to reform the Family Court, and to tackle the domestic violence racket that now dominates our magistrates' courts. Hanson has her own family experience with these issues and has spent decades listening to the stories of people caught up in them. If One Nation ends up holding real power after the next election, this will be high on her agenda.

Back in 2023, the Victorian Liberal Party tore itself apart over her appearance at a rally that was gate-crashed by neo-Nazis — she'd been invited to speak, they hadn't been invited at all, and she instantly condemned their presence. She was expelled from the party room anyway, sued then-leader John Pesutto for defamation, and won: a Federal Court judge found he'd defamed her, awarded her $300,000, and Pesutto resigned [Pesutto initially resisted demands to resign but subsequently lost the Liberal leadership.] Genuine vindication.

This background is what makes the most recent chapter so perplexing. In June, Deeming accused fellow Liberal MP Matthew Guy of grabbing her in a violent headlock. Police reviewed CCTV and found "no offence detected" — the footage showing Guy sitting at a table, placing his hand on Deeming's shoulder to pull her in and say something over the noise, then doing the exact same thing to the man sitting next to her moments later. Hardly the picture of a predatory headlock.

Guess which part of this story got wall-to-wall coverage, and which got a shrug. The original headlock allegation ran everywhere. The CCTV finding that demolished it barely rated a mention — and Guy's own response to it, a genuinely heartfelt statement about what it's like to be presumed guilty on an accusation alone, got almost none: "The Premier and the Attorney-General yesterday told every Victorian male over 40, they don't have your back. They never believe you. In [their] eyes, you're guilty before proven innocent."

It's a different mechanism to the one driving the Albo and Price stories — Deeming isn't politically protected by anyone, quite the opposite. What happened here is simpler and, in some ways, more revealing: the allegation fitted a story editors already believe. The exoneration didn't. So, one got covered, and the other got buried.

Most of the media manipulation I've been describing pushes the same subtext: men are dangerous. That's what worries me — not the individual stories, but the effect. Women absorb this stuff day after day, story after story, until "women good, men bad" stops being a media reflex and becomes how they actually see the man standing in front of them.

Witness the "man versus bear" debate that went viral last year — women were asked whether they'd rather be stuck in a forest with a strange man or a bear, and most of them picked the bear. It's pretty funny as a thought experiment. Considerably less funny once you watch that same instinct show up in real life, shaping how a woman reacts to an actual roadside rescue.

Which brings me to a recent ABC story promoted as a "terrifying roadside assistance ordeal!" It involved a young woman driving in the country whose car broke down and she called for help. A contractor turned up in an unmarked car — routine enough, given that her roadside assistance firm, the NRMA, regularly subcontracts to cover rural areas when it doesn't have its own people nearby.

Yet the ABC reported her terror as self-evidently reasonable, and the resulting push to force NRMA contractors into uniforms and carrying ID as an unambiguous win. Nobody paused to ask about the bloke on the other end of that unmarked car: out on the road late at night, in whatever miserable weather, doing a helpful job — and greeted as if he was the bear.[ The ABC story, with more complexities is here: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-06/act-terrifying-roadside-assistance-ordeal-sparks-national-change/106885192.]

That's why these stories matter. The selective outrage, the buried evidence, the silenced judges — all in service of protecting the feminist narrative, not the truth. And that needs calling out. Loudly.

https://bettinaarndt.substack.com/p/feminist-media-manipulation