Three years into the National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children, the fourth pillar “Recovery and Healing” remains named but unfunded. The 2026–27 Budget had the opportunity to change that. It didn’t take it.
Government budgets are more than spending plans; they are political statements. Every line item signals what a government believes matters, what it thinks its voters care about, and where it has chosen to act.
The 2026–27 Federal Budget committed $308.6 million over five years to address family, domestic and sexual violence. That is $61 million a year, for a crisis that kills a woman in Australia on average once a week. In the same budget, the government committed $14 billion to defence over four years and $53 billion over the next decade. The fuel security package alone, to protect against oil price shocks, ran to $14.8 billion. The government found the money for the things it decided were urgent. Women dying in their homes did not make that list.
The sector agrees. Safe and Equal, the peak family violence body, responded directly: the investment “does not come close to addressing the scale of family violence we are seeing in Australia.” National Legal Aid called it a missed opportunity, noting that around 86% of its family law grants already involve a risk of domestic and family violence. Demand that is rising, not falling.
For a Labor government that has built its identity around supporting women and working families, this is a contradiction worth naming. It says, loudly, that this issue didn’t make the cut. Budgets don’t lie. When a government fails to fund something properly, it isn’t an oversight, it’s a choice. And when that government is Labor, and that issue is violence against women, the choice stings twice: once for what it fails to fund, and once for what it reveals about who they believe is watching.
Then, four days after the Budget was handed down, a 46-year-old mother and her two sons, aged 12 and 4, were found dead in a Campbelltown home. Her 47-year-old husband has been charged with three counts of murder. Police described the scene as particularly violent. The three were found in different rooms. There were no records of prior domestic violence disturbances at the home.
She is the 29th Australian woman killed by violence this year, according to Australian Femicide Watch. Her sons are the 8th and 9th children lost to violence this year. Five women were killed by violence in the six days before her body was found in Campbelltown. A woman is killed every thirty-six hours, on average, in a single working week. The Counting Dead Women project run by Destroy the Joint, which tracks domestic and family violence homicides specifically, recorded seventy-eight in 2024. The tallies vary depending on what is counted. The volume does not.
For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women, the picture is starker again: First Nations women have consistently been murdered at three to thirteen times the rate of non-Indigenous women, year on year, for two decades.
These figures are not hidden. They are pinned to LinkedIn posts every week by Sherele Moody. They are read out at the Stop Killing Women rallies that have moved through Australian capitals since 2024. They sit beneath the National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children, launched in 2022 with a one-generation deadline. They are the subject of the Victorian Royal Commission into Family Violence, of parliamentary inquiries in every state, of two decades of women’s writing, marching, and frontline service evidence.
We are not failing because we don’t understand the problem. We are failing because the structural response has not caught up with the analysis.
In 2022, Dr Anne Summers AO published The Choice: Violence or Poverty, drawing on previously unreleased ABS data. Her central finding was that ninety thousand Australian women wanted to leave a violent partner and felt unable to do so — and a quarter of them named lack of money as the main reason. Sixty per cent of all single mothers in Australia had experienced partner violence. The title of her report was not metaphorical. The choice, for hundreds of thousands of Australian women, is between violence and poverty. We have been making women choose, for decades, between being assaulted in their homes and being unable to feed their children outside them.
In 2025, Jess Hill published Losing It in Quarterly Essay 97. Her finding, after years of investigating the National Plan, was blunt: men are murdering women at an increased rate, coercive control is becoming more severe, and the funding, innovation and resources required to deliver the generational commitment have not materialised. We promised an end to gendered violence. We have not built the system that ends it.
Sherele Moody’s call for a Royal Commission into Femicide was publicly dismissed by the Prime Minister as a waste of money.
This is the gap. Not a gap in knowledge. A gap in spend, in policy architecture, and in political will.
For two decades, the public conversation on intimate partner violence has matured. We no longer tell women to “just leave”: we understand that two in three women killed in a domestic violence context are killed by an ex-partner or at the point of separation. We understand coercive control. We understand financial abuse. We have legislation in NSW, Queensland, and beyond. We have campaigns. We have language.
The National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children 2022–2032 names four pillars of action: Prevention, Early Intervention, Response, and Recovery and Healing. The fourth pillar is not missing from the framework. It is missing from the budget. Three years into the First Action Plan, Recovery and Healing remains the least funded, least operationalised, and least politically defended of the four. The architecture acknowledges that what happens after a woman leaves a violent relationship is a national responsibility. The spending does not.
And economic recovery, the part of healing that determines whether a woman can remain away from her perpetrator, is the most neglected component within an already-neglected pillar. The income in her own name. The employer who will hold a role through court dates, school transitions, and the months of medical and legal logistics that follow leaving. The bank account, tax file number, credit file, and superannuation balance that a perpetrator spent years dismantling and that nobody at the refuge has the funded mandate to rebuild. The trauma-informed coaching that holds her through the first eighteen months in a role, which the data and the lived experience of survivors both tell us is the period in which she is most likely to lose the job, and most likely to be pulled back.
And this is not only a women’s safety question. It is a children’s safety question. The two boys in Campbelltown are part of a national pattern. A mother with economic agency is not just a woman who has left. She is a household that does not collapse back. She is a child who grows up within their family unit.
This is the work Arise Foundation Australia was built to do. Economic security is not a footnote to women’s safety, it is the mechanism by which women stay safe. Australian research reveals a devastating cycle for victims of domestic abuse: it is the leading cause of homelessness for women and children, forcing more than 7,600 women a year to return to a violent partner simply because they have no money and nowhere else to go. Employment changes that calculus.
Arise’s Employment Ready Program supports women who have already reached safety to rebuild the financial independence that makes leaving permanent. The results are stark: of every woman who has completed the program and secured employment through Arise, not one has returned to her perpetrator. Not one.
To date, 280 women have completed the program. 30% find meaningful work or structured training within three months of completing the program. That rises to 47% by six months, and 60% by a year. The program carries a 90% completion rate and a 100% satisfaction rate, metrics that reflect not just outcomes, but the trust women place in a model built specifically around their reality.
Australia has spent a generation funding the crisis end of this system and almost nothing on the recovery end. Anne Summers gave us the data. Jess Hill gave us the diagnosis. Sherele Moody gives us the weekly toll. The 2026–27 Budget had the opportunity to change that calculus. It did not take it. The Second Action Plan under the National Plan, due to take effect from 2027, must fund Recovery and Healing as the pillar it was named to be, with a dedicated budget line, a measurement framework, and an accountable portfolio, not a vague aspiration trailing behind Prevention, Early Intervention, and Response.
Three bodies in Campbelltown should not be a news cycle. They should be the moment we stop pretending that the fourth pillar is somebody else’s job to build.
The women we work with at Arise know exactly what they need to live. They have been telling us for years. It is time the country built what it has already promised.
If this article has raised concerns for you, contact 1800RESPECT (1800 737 732) or in an emergency call 000.