The first involved a senior doctor working in the health bureaucracy in Queensland who suddenly found the national Child Support Agency (CSA) had stolen half his wages overnight – to pay for a child who didn’t exist.

Child support officials simply refused to believe it was a mistake and piled on the torture, rendering him technically insolvent, potentially wrecking his credit rating and his marriage.

MYTHICAL

When he first wrote to me, he was sleeping in the spare bedroom – his wife found it hard to believe that he’d never fathered this mythical son.

The other case involved a 15-year-old boy who’d been suspended from his school after a girl in his class made a bizarre allegation that, three years earlier, in the middle of a crowded classroom, he’d suddenly reached under the desk and thrust his fingers in and out of her vagina. She also claimed he repeated the process two days later.

Four months after the suspension his distressed mother wrote to me, describing the family’s fear that the school’s investigation was going nowhere, critical evidence was being ignored and their son seemed set up as the sacrificial lamb, to be summarily tossed out of school to appease the alleged “victim” and her followers.

After long conversations with both these troubled people, my advice was similar. Take them on.

Go in all guns blazing, right to the top of the food chain, armed with substantial threats about guaranteed severe consequences if they fail to address the issue properly. It worked.

Both issues have been resolved. It took three days for the doctor to have his income restored, his confiscated money paid back, and the garnishee notice removed.

He even received a grovelling email from a senior bureaucrat who wrote: “I would like to unreservedly apologise for the Agency’s errors and the frustration you experienced in having the errors corrected.”

That’s worth framing, isn’t it? The perfect badge of honour to hang on a toilet door.

Amazingly, the teenage boy has been welcomed back to school. His accuser is now being home-schooled, claiming she doesn’t feel safe back in class.

We suspect she’s simply embarrassed that her allegations failed to stack up.

The boy’s parents are relieved but still contemplating whether they will take further action.

So, the lesson is to fight back – hard.

So many of these institutions – government departments, bureaucracies, schools – are run by petty, gender-biased bullies who can’t be bothered to ensure proper rules are being fairly applied.

They prefer to target men and boys, winning brownie points from their feminist colleagues in the process.

Usually, they get away with it – because we let them.

Let me tell you more about the doctor’s story – I’ll call him “Alan”.

SHOCK

It came as a huge shock when this mild-mannered man checked his bank account and discovered half his salary had been held back. He quickly learned the culprit was the CSA which has the power to garnish wages.

Alan then suffered through a two-hour phone call with Owen, a smug child support officer, who assured him that it simply wasn’t true that they had the wrong man.

“No, no, we have the right person,” Owen assured him, giving “Robert” as the name of his alleged son, explaining they proposed to garnish Alan’s wages until he’d paid off the money they claimed he owed.

He added cheerfully that they were imposing an order prohibiting international travel.

I advised him to send a legal letter to the big boss, the Secretary of Services Australia, threatening action under CDDA (a body that compensates people for defective administration by Commonwealth agencies).

The letter to the secretary was sent, and within two days, he learnt he officially no longer had a child called “Robert,” nor a child support debt, his legal expenses would be reimbursed, and a full investigation was being made into CSA’s handling of the matter.

It would seem perhaps Owen’s career advancement is not looking too healthy.

Yes, we realise this all happened because Alan was enough of a big shot to look as if he could cause real trouble, and he still could hock himself to the hilt to pay the bills for his lawyer to handle the whole thing.

I have many hundreds of letters from ordinary blokes who shouted from the rooftops over the way they were treated by the CSA and similar bodies, all to no avail.

Men who spent their last dollar and then some on lawyers and got nowhere.

But the fact remains that many people don’t seize the reins when they find themselves being terrorised by these bureaucrats. And if they do employ a lawyer, they often end up with pen-pushers who are lazy, inept, or afraid of rocking the boat.

STALLING

When the mother of the suspended 15-year-old boy first contacted me, the family had employed a lawyer who was supposed to find a way of stopping their son from being thrown under the bus.

But the school was still stalling, the prospects didn’t look good.

The school claimed to be conducting an investigation into the girl’s allegations but hadn’t interviewed two teachers present in the classroom when the incident apparently occurred.

The accuser had another Snapchat account where she attempted to solicit explicit photos from boys, including their son, in order to blackmail them, but that never seems to have been investigated by the school.

So much potential evidence being ignored. All in all, there was a good and justifiable reason for the parents to fear their son was being framed.

It wasn’t hard to find a way of forcing a resolution. Luckily, the boy was in a private school, with a school board full of fat cats who wouldn’t be at all keen on their fancy school attracting adverse publicity over a sordid lawsuit about an alleged sexual assault in one of their classrooms.

We arranged for the parents to instruct their lawyer to approach the school board, informing them they were planning legal action over the case.