He's not misrepresenting the DV policy when Turnbull makes comments like, quote: "domestic violence - which is just violence against women". 40% of DV homicide victims in Australia are male and 20% are children (52% of those kids killed by women). That's from Australian Institute of Criminology (2015) on 10 years of official National Homicide Monitoring Program data. Women aren't even the majority of DV homicide victims in Australia - and homicides are at the extreme end of gendered violence - let alone DV being exclusively against women. Yet DV funding & research in Australia is exclusively for women. ANROWS, WLS, White Ribbon, OurWatch, DV NSW & Vic (which are really Women's refuge, just renamed), etc etc. all have officially gender discriminatory chartered mandates and act accordingly. Funding isn't put towards "reducing DV" and assigned proportionately to injury or anything. It's assigned for "reducing DV against women", ONLY (or maybe 'women and their children', as if fathers simply don't exist). In NSW for instance, the DV portfolio isn't part of Health or Justice, but is officially owned by "Women NSW" (a genuine matriarchy). Now feminism is all well and good when in cases where it truly is about equal rights, fair opportunities, etc. But that's not what's going on here.
DV has become massively politicised, and if you can't recognise that, when a $30M media campaign is announced within 24 hours of a Federal election, then you're not paying attention. The DV agenda in Australia is far more about helping Turnbull look different to Abbott, because LNP was (rightfully) hemorrhaging in female voter polls. Every other party to the Left has just been trying to out-do him on that since.
If you're genuinely interested in reducing harm against women, then I recommend taking into account data like https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1854883/.
Australia is not PNG. Our DV problem is not caused by gender pay inequality etc. Neither is that the cause in most advanced economies (look at Scandinavian countries with up to 50% of women reporting DV, which having the highest rates of gender equality in pay, opportunities, etc in the world).
I agree first-wave feminism had a lot to fight for. I agree there's still issues for gender equality in Australia. But we're also completely ignoring other gender inequalities, like that 20% more women are graduating from universities today than men, while the overwhelming number of gender-based scholarships here still exclusively support women.
Australia has a long way to go before it starts truly understanding what being anti gender discrimination actually means. "The standard you want past is the standard you accept", should also imply a single standard. When we talk about violence being cause by a lack of respect in relationships, we should be dealing with that by building mutual respect, not just building more gender divides. There's no discussion at all of the impact of psychological abuse in DV relationships against men, despite there being more male suicides every week than all the women killed in DV here each year. Nor is there of plenty of other issues related to DV.
I'm aware this is particularly sensitive topic in IT, because I know discrimination against women still exists in a lot of companies. I've witnessed it more in private companies than public ones, but can attest that it varies WIDELY between companies. There's times when I've even sought to hire women over men, for the sole reason that some environments were severely unbalanced, that it was harming performance. There's also cases though where it goes the other way, including that women are generally paid more than males upon graduation in this industry (maybe the ones who make it through are better, but who knows).
Anyway, I just think the whole discussion needs to be FAR more nuanced than what we've seen across media and government.