At Senate estimates last week, my Greens colleague Senator Shoebridge asked the government whether it intends to fund community legal centres so they don’t have to turn away thousands of victim-survivors seeking help every week.
Minister Farrell, representing the Attorney-General, asked incredulously: “Are you saying we should fund every person who goes into one of these centres? Is that your proposition?”
Yes, Minister. In a wealthy country that says it is committed to ending violence against women, that is exactly my proposition.
Today, Federal and States Ministers will attend the quarterly Women’s Safety Ministers Council meeting. They have an opportunity to make that proposition a reality. Sadly, I am not expecting this will happen.
Instead, they will meet, share updates, talk about delayed projects and speculate on future plans. There will be some hand-wringing about the eight women already killed this year.
But those eight women, the 52 women murdered in 2025, and countless others deserve more than just being an agenda item. I have written to Ministers asking them to turn this meeting into a moment of action, not just another conversation.
Four years into the National Plan to End Violence Against Women and Children, the frontline is fraying. Specialist services are at capacity. Police responses are inconsistent at best, cavalier at worst. Too little is being done to tackle basic things that exacerbate violence: lack of housing, economic insecurity, alcohol and gambling.
Housing is basic life-saving infrastructure in this crisis. You can’t leave a violent relationship if you have nowhere safe to go. Women and children escaping violence already make up about 40 per cent of the clients of homelessness services; services that are turning away 350 people every day. And there is no affordable medium or long term housing for people, because government instead funds property investor tax perks, which have driven the cost of housing out of the reach of most people.
Ministers must rapidly increase investment in crisis and emergency accommodation, and properly fund and build public and affordable housing (not to mention axe those property investor tax perks).
The alleged murder of Sophie Quinn by a partner with a history of repeated violence tells another tale of failing systems and skewed priorities. Our justice system remains riddled with missed opportunities for early intervention that could save lives, particularly for First Nations women.
Governments continue to ignore frontline services about what needs to be done. In Queensland, police receive over 500 domestic violence calls per day. Frontline workers confirmed a specialist DFV policing unit was helping to ensure safe and timely responses for women. The Queensland Police have just defunded the service, saying DFV case management is not ‘core police business’. If saving lives isn’t core police business, I’m not sure what is.
Specialist units, strong links between police and frontline support services, and mandatory, trauma-informed and culturally appropriate FDSV training for all officers are non-negotiable if we want women to know they will be taken seriously when they report abuse. Ministers must reinvest in these targeted responses and demand real, measurable improvements in how police identify and monitor high-risk perpetrators.
Ministers must also step up and confront harmful activities. Alcohol is involved in around 65% of all family violence reported to police, and family violence occurs more often in suburbs with a high concentration of poker machines. After the 2024 Commonwealth Rapid Review named
alcohol and gambling as exacerbating factors, every State and Territory pledged to review alcohol regulation.
Yet more than a year later, no laws have changed (though ACT and South Australia have made some progress). There is no excuse for inaction – governments responded within days when young men were killed on a night out; they must show the same urgency when women are being killed at home. Taking political donations from the alcohol and gambling lobby clearly pays off for those industries, who continue to escape proper regulation.
Today, Ministers cannot just catalogue what they haven’t done to address gambling and alcohol risks. They must stare down the lobbyists and commit to legislative reforms we know will reduce violence: restrictions on sale times, advertising and algorithms that target vulnerable people.
These demands are not out of reach in a wealthy country. They are practical and evidence-based: housing so people can escape, specialist policing to intervene early and monitor perpetrators, regulating harmful activities, and funding so no-one is turned away.
Ministers, my letter is on your desk and my proposition is simple. Don’t just talk. Commit the funding and show political will to do what it takes to end violence against women.