Male politicians blame female teachers for our angry boys. They’re right about one thing

September 4, 2026 — 12:11pm

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As police investigate an alleged sexual assault involving Sydney Swans players, and in the week after a survey found 78 per cent of Australian teachers had experienced misogyny at school, Nationals leader Matt Canavan went on national television to unmask the root cause of the country’s boy problem.

Boys, Canavan said, are “sick and tired of getting lectures about how bad men are at school”. They feel “patronised, not cherished”. The solution, he argued, is more male teachers and less “feminisation of the curriculum”.

It was those pesky women.

The first two factors I mention in that opening are matters of fact and evidence. The third came from a man who describes himself as “a father of four boys” as if that constitutes expertise.

By the following morning, Opposition Leader Angus Taylor had effectively endorsed Canavan’s position by declining to disagree with the call for more male teachers, accusing some teachers of “running agendas” and also offering his own children’s experience as his thesis on the subject.

Similar to how a broken clock is right twice a day, Canavan did have one thing right in his misinformed rant. We do, desperately, need more male teachers.

The decline in number of male primary school teacher numbers in this country is alarming. In the 1950s, about 41 per cent of primary teachers were male. Today that figure has fallen to 18 per cent for the first time in history.

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© The Sydney Morning Herald