In 2014, Ms Rosy Batty turned her son’s dreadful murder into a crusade against family violence reform. Her advocacy has focused on:
- Better protection for women and children experiencing family violence.
- Improving coordination between police, courts, schools and child protection agencies.
- Raising public awareness about coercive control and domestic abuse.
- Reforming laws and government systems to better protect victims.
Any civil society would agree with these outcomes. However, as implemented, the subsequent policies have failed catastrophically.
The failure is not Ms Batty’s. She didn’t make the policies. Dan Andrews is responsible for that.
Population adjusted is more difficult to chart, but you get the idea.
You can read about my family’s experience of being violently attacked and nearly murdered by the very services that were meant to protect them from violence here and here.
There are several obvious reasons why the reforms have failed so badly. Today, I want to focus on one feature.
Following Batty’s advocacy, a coronial inquest found the Common Risk Assessment Framework (CRAF) had failings and, in 2015, the Andrews government established the Royal Commission into Family Violence.
Along with new information-sharing regulations, the Royal Commission suggested revamping CRAF into the Multi-Agency Risk Assessment and Management Framework (MARAM).
In short, MARAM was reformed to integrate intelligence from all frontline services, in theory enabling them to better anticipate domestic violence and offenders. MARAM allowed frontline services to access each other’s records.
Most people did not ask questions during the MARAM rollout through parliament. But they should have.
MARAM is a civil rights catastrophe.
- What happens if a domestic violence offender has access to MARAM?
- What happens when grievances arise in organisations that have access to MARAM?
- What happens when a criminal is inside the system (say, a bad cop, or a bad mental health nurse) and gets access to MARAM?
- What happens when MARAM access protocols are widely shared and skirted over time?
- What happens to clinical judgement when all information is centralised and becomes a source of moral suasion in the diagnostic process?
I will answer these five questions with the blood of my children, all of whom have been diagnosed with severe PTSD, though my family, unlike many others, is lucky to be alive. Why? Because we were privileged to receive high-end advocacy and support from senior police, KCs, and ministers. Others with less access to fight MARAM corruption are in the grave.
What happens is this: bad actors inside MARAM have immediate, unfettered access to your public records to do with them as they please.
To surveil you. To place false records. To distort your records from one area in your life to impugn another unethically.
To violate your confidentiality at will and turn you into whoever they want you to be.
In my case, a psychopathic mental health nurse in a MAJOR hospital (and long-term family stalker) lost her mind post-COVID.
Sadly, this coincided with my wife being drugged and assaulted in Carlton.
When the psychopath read my wife’s rape statement via MARAM, she pounced, using it to track every attempt we made to seek help.
She then used MARAM, along with personal influence, to corrupt every helping institution we attended, including the Centres Against Sexual Assault system, to create a false narrative that my wife and I were psychotic and had made the attack up.
She then went on to lodge five consecutive false complaints to make us look completely nuts at AHPRA, DFFH and Orygen in early 2025. All of these are now dismissed and struck out as false in the Magistrate’s Court of Victoria and the Children’s Court of Victoria.
We can’t tell yet how all of these were planted. Some were via manipulation, others via impersonation, some by nepotism, and others were planted directly.
What we can say is that all were spread via MARAM like wildfire across every helping service, resulting in gross violations of confidentiality through false reports across every frontline service.
Ultimately, MARAM was completely inverted and turned into a violent assault on my family’s home. My wife was told she had made up the rape. I was dragged off as crazy. My three children were ripped from their home for three months (and also deemed crazy). Our wider family, schools, my wife’s clients, and the community were all wiped out and still exist in a fog of trauma.
None of this would have been possible without MARAM.
It was the key surveillance tool for the psycho in the system. It was also the key mechanism for disseminating false records and narratives. And it was the access point to corrupted information.
This process created the last and most important flaw in the MARAM panopticon.
Many frontline workers I came across during the crisis – especially police – immediately recognised that neither my wife nor I fit the freak show description that MARAM was pumping out as our profiles.
After all, I am a leading national intellect and a successful national-interest policymaker at the highest level.
And my wife is a leading psychologist with nationally recognised forensic experience, who has been headhunted at various times by ASIO, Justice, and businesses to resolve highly complex psychological conflicts.
We had never committed any wrongdoing. We hardly even drink.
Yet by the time we were accosted, MARAM had turned us into, and I quote, “fat, filthy, scruffy, substance-abusive, paranoid psychotics”.
Yet all those frontline workers who could see (and even acknowledged) that a miscarriage of justice was underway did nothing to stop it (except for two veteran police officers who knew us well enough to see the lies and saved our lives).
The point is, MARAM has substituted frontline workers’ judgement of human beings with a misinformation service that conflates all areas of your life through a warped, singular lens of institutional judgement: your potential for violence. This lens, astonishingly, branded me the Joker and my wife the Harley Quinn of Melbourne.
Just in case fifteen years of my truth-telling on this blog are not enough to convince you of the veracity of the above, let me just slip in that our case has already been through the Children’s Court of Victoria and Magistrate’s Court of Victoria, both of which have wiped out, struck out and disgraced all allegations brought against us. The pending Supreme Court case is about damages and justice.
Finally, let me provide you with the Victorian government’s own assessment of MARAM, which has cost $5bn plus untold billions of dollars resulting from suicides after ten years in operation. The array of problems reflects a rushed deployment and embedded structural issues across a misshapen concept by a hapless government.
| Too complex | Many practitioners find the framework difficult to understand and apply consistently, particularly those who are not family violence specialists. |
| Inconsistent application | Different organisations interpret and use MARAM differently, meaning similar cases may receive different assessments. |
| Heavy documentation burden | Workers reported that completing MARAM assessments can be time-consuming, reducing time available to work directly with clients. |
| Training gaps | Many workers felt initial training was insufficient, particularly for complex cases involving children, older people or perpetrators. |
| Information sharing difficulties | Despite reforms, staff remain uncertain about what information can legally be shared and with whom. |
| Technology problems | Many agencies use incompatible IT systems, making information sharing slow or requiring duplicate data entry. |
| Referral bottlenecks | Identifying high risk does not necessarily lead to timely services because specialist programs often have waiting lists or insufficient capacity. |
| Uneven implementation | Some sectors have embedded MARAM well, while others are still at an early stage of implementation. |
| Need for more cultural guidance | Practitioners requested better guidance for Aboriginal families, culturally diverse communities, people with disabilities and LGBTQIA+ clients. |
| Misidentification risk | Practitioners wanted stronger guidance to reduce the risk of incorrectly identifying a victim-survivor as the primary aggressor. |
Look at the last one, FFS.
Don’t fool yourself into thinking my family is the first or last victim of MARAM. MARAM is a panopticon of mental health destruction on an industrial scale. Its next victims are rolling into the mincer as we speak. The only difference is that they won’t survive it to tell the tale.
