In a single week last month, Victoria Police attended 161 family violence call-outs in the Dandenong division alone, a suburb in the south east of Melbourne.
Officers arrested 95 alleged perpetrators, charged 58 of them with 290 offences, and more than half of those offences involved perpetrators breaching intervention orders they had already been issued. Among the incidents was a man who allegedly strangled his former partner, threatened to kill her with a hammer, then doused his front porch with petrol and tried to set it alight. Another man allegedly used a gun to threaten and rob his former partner. A third killed a family dog to terrorise the woman he was supposed to have left alone.
One week. One division. One snapshot of what is happening in homes across this country every single night.
Victoria’s Crime Statistics Agency has since confirmed a devastating picture: 106,430 family violence incidents recorded by police in 2024–25 — a new all-time high, an 8 per cent increase on the previous year’s record, which was itself a 6 per cent jump on the year before. These are not aberrations. This is a trend line, and it is climbing.
Both state and Federal governments handed down budgets this week. Both contained commitments to family violence. Neither came close to matching the scale of what those numbers are telling us.
The Victorian Government committed $100 million to continue its family violence prevention work including funding refuges, crisis accommodation, the Personal Safety Initiative, and $23 million to maintain the Central Information Point that shares perpetrator information between agencies. The federal budget committed $308.6 million over five years to ending gender-based violence, including a welcome $218.3 million for the first-ever standalone Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander family safety plan, and $182.6 million to close loopholes that allow perpetrators to weaponise the child support system against women they have already harmed.
These are not nothing. But Safe and Equal, Victoria’s peak body for family violence, said the federal investment “does not come close to addressing the scale of family violence we are seeing in Australia.” Around 1,000 women per week are turned away from Women’s Legal Services due to insufficient resources. 42 per cent of specialist family violence organisations are now operating waitlists for basic case management.
We have already done the landmark work. Victoria held the nation’s first Royal Commission into Family Violence in 2016. Every one of its 227 recommendations has been implemented. The federal government has launched its first dedicated plan to address family, domestic and sexual violence for First Nations women. These were hard-won, important achievements. And yet. The number in Victoria alone is 106,430 and rising. Senior Sergeant Jason Iles of the Dandenong Family Violence Investigation Unit was measured but honest this week: “This shows the unfortunate reality that family violence remains on the rise.”
If the royal commission, the national plans, the multidisciplinary centres, the information-sharing frameworks and the funding commitments have not bent the curve, then we have to ask harder questions. Not about the good intentions behind these initiatives, but about what is fuelling the demand they cannot keep up with.
Part of the answer is economic. When households are under financial strain, the risk of violence at home grows. Cost-of-living pressures, housing instability and fuel price shocks create the conditions in which control escalates. But part of the answer is cultural, and it is one our leaders are reluctant to name clearly. The normalisation of misogyny amplified through social media, celebrated in certain online communities, packaged as political rebellion, is not background noise. It is recruitment. The rise of men who view women’s equality as an attack on their identity does not stay online. It comes home.
We cannot fund our way out of an attitude problem. But we can stop pretending the attitude problem is not part of the equation. Prevention work that engages men and boys, that challenges the ideas feeding violence before they become violence, must be funded at a scale that reflects the emergency not as an afterthought line item.
The Dandenong data is a mirror. What it reflects is a country that has built better systems for responding to violence while allowing the conditions that produce it to deepen. We owe the women waiting on case management waitlists, the women turned away from legal services, the women in that one week in one division more than better systems for counting what’s happening to them. We owe them a commitment to making it stop.
We are a country that will spend hundreds of billions on submarines to defend our shores, yet cannot find sufficient resources to defend women inside their own homes. The threat to national security that kills the most Australians is not coming from offshore, it is happening behind closed doors, in our suburbs, every single night.
If you or someone you know is experiencing family violence, contact 1800RESPECT (1800 737 732) or Safe Steps on 1800 015 188.