this is being considered in my state of South Australia. im torn as to the pros and cons. not being a criminal myself i can see some positives but its also another example of gender segregated laws.

its also apart of a series of measures the state government is considering in response to clare's law in the UK. the article explains:

"SA Status of Women Minister Zoe Bettison said it was unacceptable that a significant number of women did not feel safe.

"As a Government and as a community we must work hard to eliminate domestic violence," she said.

"I urge South Australians to be part of the solution."

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-07-24/clares-law-to-be-considered-by-sa-public/7655898

2 years earlier the government had considered banning all men from working with children. although the article identifies roles as childcare workers, the license to work with children is far reaching and can include being a maintenance person in a school or teaching kids robotics.

http://www.9news.com.au/National/2014/07/23/10/21/SA-child-protection-set-for-shake-up

this is an example of just how generalised these laws are becoming and how much men have become vilified in my state.

if you look in to the actual report of recommendations there are also some sneaky wordings that i wanted to highlight. this one for example describes how it could be justified to a have a womens bias in social funding of services.

"…small, women-led services have to compete with larger NGOs for money... Earlier this year, I visited the Alice Springs women's shelter, the largest service in the southern hemisphere and the only service of its kind in Alice, which has been operating for over 30 years. Like so many of these services, the organisation is already understaffed and stretched, and this service was forced to competitively tender, dragging away frontline resources to prepare a complex tender application when there is no one else in the community with the skills. It simply does not make sense to us. Competitive tendering is a resource drain on domestic violence services. The preparation and development of tenders takes a great deal of time... Significant time is continuously spent on the preparation of tenders, with no certainty that it will be successful. In the meantime, during the preparation, staff at the coalface… face uncertainty and must wait to hear the outcome.

I think there are potentially two key ways of reforming this area; one is about how we talk about procurement. Already there may be bias towards South Australian employment in some forms of procurement so, for the same reasons, there could be provisions and tests put in the tendering process to take this example, that a community led service, and one led by women, would have a bias over a large male-led service for the reasons we have described, so there is a very simple procurement process."

http://www.parliament.sa.gov.au/HOUSEOFASSEMBLY/BUSINESSOFTHEASSEMBLY/RECORDSANDPAPERS/TABLEDPAPERSANDPETITIONS/Pages/TabledPapersandPetitions.aspx?TPLoadDoc=true&TPDocType=1&TPP=53&TPS=2&TPItemID=91&TPDocName=SDC+Domestic+and+Family+Violence+Final+Report+39th+Report+H+A.pdf