The authorities actually allowed her to concoct new allegations and these lies were told in court in an attempt to keep him in prison.

The settlement came at the end of a five-year ordeal for the man – I’ll call him “Peter”.

RAPED

His former wife, a medical specialist, had told police he had raped her a few weeks after the couple had split in 2015.

The marriage fell apart when Peter discovered she was having an affair, but the couple then had a brief reconciliation which culminated in consensual sex on the day in question.

Two months later, Peter was arrested and charged with sexual assault and violence when he returned from a work trip to Europe.

He spent a month in prison and over $350,000 in legal costs before the allegations were thrown out after a 10-day jury trial.

The judge described the wife’s evidence as “demonstrably false” and said that the prosecutors had failed to take into account “clear and consistent, objective evidence” backing up Peter’s claim that he was being wrongly accused.

Peter had installed video cameras that recorded the whole encounter, giving a lie to the wife’s allegation that he had jumped her immediately following her arrival at the former marital home.

The cameras showed them fully dressed for almost an hour prior to the consensual sex which featured her cheerfully sitting on top of him. How could she be a rape victim?

The doctor has suffered no adverse consequences for her malicious lies. Peter’s efforts to have her charged with perjury have received persistent knock-backs from police, the DPP, and other relevant complaints bodies.

This is what our justice system appears to be becoming.

Women who wish to punish their partners are accusing men of rape or violence and have absolute license to perjure themselves in our courts and create elaborate mistruths which, even if proved false, will very rarely bear any adverse consequences.

FALSE

Look what happened in our family court system, where false allegations have long been rampant.

In 2006, then Prime Minister John Howard’s pathbreaking new family law legislation included advice to courts to make cost orders against those who knowingly made false allegations in family law proceedings – a measure stated to address concerns about widespread false allegations in The Family Court.

A year later, the Howard government was gone and suddenly all the talk was about risks to children from violent dads.

By 2011, former Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s team had changed the legislation to ensure there were no longer any consequences for perjury.

That’s been the case ever since. At hearings for the recent parliamentary inquiry into the family law system, a deputy secretary from the Attorney General’s department showed that between 2014 and 2019, not a single family law-related perjury matter was investigated by Commonwealth prosecutors.

The same unwritten rule applies in magistrates’ courts dealing with the weekly flood of false domestic violence allegations and the criminal courts handling sexual assault.

Everyone knows that police and prosecutors will accept the most preposterous allegations and that even if they ultimately get thrown out in court, the instigator gets off scot-free.

PERJURY

In Peter’s case, his ex-wife is still out there, despite her allegations having cost taxpayers a fortune – well over $200,000 for the trial alone, plus Peter’s settlement, let alone the years of police and prosecutors’ time.

The argument about perjury charges deterring proper victims is spurious nonsense.

Perjury charges would never be applied in cases where the allegations simply failed to be proved in court. Actual victims, or women who mistakenly believe they are victims, have nothing to fear.

It’s quite a high bar to prove someone has intentionally lied or falsified evidence, a big job to find them guilty beyond reasonable doubt of such malicious behaviour.

But in cases like this, where police and prosecutors are forced to pay out for ignoring irrefutable evidence that the allegations were false, that bar would likely be reached.

The constant silencing of public discussion about the proliferation of false allegations prevents examination of the benefits of introducing measures to deter perjury in our courts, including massively reducing demands on our justice system and increasing the resources available to real victims.

Trust in our law depends on an assumption of fair treatment.