Addressing family violence: the wider strategic context

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,

Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Hamlet, Act one, Scene five.

In November 2025, I published a post arguing for tangible actions to address the family violence epidemic across the nation, and especially amongst Indigenous families (link here). In that post, I wrote, inter alia:

The deeper problem of course is that governments are adept at creating policy silos, commissions, action plans and advisory committees that provide a defensive fig leaf against criticism when some egregious event hits the headlines but are content to do nothing to address systemic issues facing the most disadvantaged members of the Australian community. 

In recent months there have been two further related policy developments related to family violence policy.

The first policy development was in February when the Government announced, in the words of Minister McCarthy’s media release (link here), the ‘First ever dedicated plan to end violence against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and children’. The plan (link here) is backed up by a funding package, described in Minister McCarthy’s media release as follows:

Our Ways – Strong Ways – Our Voices is backed by $218.3 million in new funding over four years. As an immediate step, the funding will invest in a national network of up to 40 Aboriginal Community Controlled Organisations (ACCOs) to deliver community-led specialist support services that help Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and families who are experiencing family, domestic, and sexual violence.

The minister goes on to note that:

This new funding [is] in addition to the record $262.5 million we’ve already invested in addressing immediate family, domestic and sexual violence safety needs of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families and communities through the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Action Plan 2023-2025, and our significant investment of $367 million to more than double funding for Family Violence Prevention Legal Services as part of the National Access to Justice Partnership 2025-2030.

There is more detail in her media release, and I am not in a position to establish the substantive value of these investments. They are surely welcome. I wonder however whether the amounts allocated are commensurate with the overall need for the types of services they fund, and whether the services are themselves effective in reducing family violence rather than assuaging its consequences. These are issues only an effective evaluation could determine, but despite rhetoric to the contrary, program evaluation is not a priority for recent Australian governments.

Unfortunately, I found the Our Ways – Strong Ways – Our Voices Plan to be a deeply disappointing document. If it had been labelled a statement of aspirations, or a statement of values to be applied in devising policies, it could be defended (though even then I consider there are strong grounds for critique). But it is not a plan, and it is definitely not an action plan. It is best described as a plan to develop a plan about a plan.

Reading through the 100 page document, I found only three substantive proposed actions: first, a proposal to develop an action plan and sector strengthening plans (which appear essentially directed to clarifying relationships and roles) outlined in the Implementation section on pages 40; second, the establishment of a Monitoring and Evaluation Framework to measure progress toward [yet to be agreed] outcomes that are to be agreed in partnerships [with unspecified partners] mentioned on page 43; and third, the establishment of a new Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peak body for family, domestic and sexual violence [which has recently been established — see below]. In my view, none of these initiatives, either separately or together, amount to an effective plan to end violence against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families.

Reinforcing my pessimism, in the section on Implementation (page 41), it is noted, without any irony whatsoever, that the plan

will sit alongside and complement the large number of existing policies and plans designed to prevent and respond to violence nationally and in each State and Territory (see Appendix 2).

Appendix Two lists around seventy complementary strategies, frameworks, plans and the like across a range of jurisdictions which will complement this latest national plan. I recommend readers study Appendix 2 closely and ask themselves the question, if the seventy existing plans have not succeeded and are still in place, why should we take any notice of this current ‘non-plan’. While this is worrying on its own, of even greater concern is that this National Plan, which has been drafted by a Steering Committee of experts, has been endorsed in a Joint Ministerial Statement by ten Ministers responsible for overseeing family violence issues across the federation (pages 14-16).

As the Ministers themselves correctly state (with my added emphasis):

Across Australia, the unacceptable reality is that the prevalence of family, domestic and sexual violence remains too high. For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and children, the impact of violence is even greater, shaped by the legacy of colonisation, dispossession and intergenerational trauma. Behind every statistic are individuals, families and communities that deserve safety, respect and healing. 

Yet collectively, these ministers are prepared to accept this reality. Their lack of substantive action, and particularly their complete silence regarding the systemic drivers of family violence, which include the insidious impact of alcohol and substance abuse magnified by loose regulation (link here), and widespread financial precarity of the most disadvantaged sectors of the community (where Indigenous families are over-represented) which are magnified by punitive welfare policies, lax regulation of gambling, and sub-optimal financial literacy support. Addressing these systemic drivers is not beyond the capabilities of governments, but effective responses are never considered let alone pursued, and instead a conspiracy of silence is maintained, and substantive action is replaced with the flim flam of (now) 71 plans to make more plans. The word alcohol appears only eight times in the Our Ways – Strong Ways – Our Voices Plan, invariably in contexts which downplay or elide its substantive significance. Clearly governments are subservient to the corporate interests involved in the alcohol and gambling industries. This failure represents in my view an egregious disservice to the wider community.

The existence of this ‘plan’, and the seventy or so other ‘plans’ in effect represents an attempt to persuade the wider community that governments are taking the action necessary to address family violence issues. That in turn ultimately leads the wider community to blame the victim, to avoid the necessity of taking individual action, and diminishes the civic values that we purport to value and cherish. If one needs to understand why the general community is losing faith and trust in governments, one could do worse that consider this case study and think about what it means over the medium and longer term when governments do not address the very real issues that are impacting very real families.

The most recent policy development was the announcement of the peak body referred to above, now known as Our Ways Strong Together (link here) and which comprises the third proposed action in the Our Ways – Strong Ways – Our Voices Plan. Minister McCarthy’s statement announcing its creation (link here) states:

The Albanese Government and the Coalition of Peaks have today launched a new Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander National Peak Body for Family, Domestic and Sexual Violence – Our Ways Strong Together. 

Our Ways Strong Together brings together Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community-controlled organisations including specialist family, domestic and sexual violence services, peak bodies and the broader community-controlled sector. 

By amplifying the perspectives and experiences of community-controlled organisations and the communities they serve, Our Ways Strong Together will also play an invaluable role in shaping government policies and programs.  

Our Ways Strong Together also contributes to the Government’s work towards Target 13 of the National Agreement on Closing the Gap, to reduce family violence and abuse against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and children by at least 50% by 2031.  

The Coalition of Peaks and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander sector leaders worked alongside government to establish the new peak body, drawing on their deep expertise and leadership across their sectors and communities.  

The proposed leadership of the new Peak Body is very experienced and highly regarded, a sentiment I share. I sincerely hope that they can guide the organisation to a position of real and sustained influence. That said, it concerns me that there is, as yet, no detail on the funding for the peak body (membership is free), nor its constitution and its staffing profile. The question that arises then is just how much influence and independence will the government grant this new Peak Body? And how will it sustain its own legitimacy with its Indigenous constituents if that autonomy is compromised? Imagine the response of a firms in a major industry, say chemists or farmers, if the government decided it would establish a new peak body to represent the voices of firms in those industries, and offered some firms or relevant chambers of commerce funding to establish it, funded a secretariat, and asserted the new entity would henceforth be influential in shaping government policy on regulation of pharmacies or agriculture. Deep scepticism would be pervasive. How would individual chemists or farmers be sure that the new peak was in fact truly representing their interests and not being unduly influenced by government?

A second concern related to the Peak Body is that Closing the Gap Target 13 is seriously flawed and in need of revision. I went to some lengths to demonstrate this in my previous post in November last year (link here). Yet the Minister blithely proceeds to argue that the new Peak will contribute to the Government’s efforts to meet this target, presumably by participating in the bureaucratic sludge of planning to plan.

Over and above the deliberate downplaying of the structural and systemic drivers of family violence, one further obvious gap in the whole approach outlined in this ‘First ever dedicated plan to end violence against women and children’ is any focus on system wide policies and initiatives aimed at changing men’s behaviour (noting of course that family violence is not only perpetrated by men). If the new Peak Body is to make a substantive difference in the pervasiveness of family violence, and play an influential role in shaping policy, it will need to engage proactively with the systemic drivers of family violence and find ways to counter the attitudes of entitlement that encourage or allow men to see resort to violent behaviours as being acceptable.  In other words, to succeed, the new Peak body will need to step beyond the limited policy imagination of governments and the Our Ways – Strong Ways – Our Voices Plan.

Conclusion: the wider strategic context

I have long been a supporter of the potential of the Coalition of Peaks as a major addition to the institutional landscape that constitutes the Indigenous policy domain (link here). However, its major internal flaw is that it is not independent of governments and indeed is almost entirely reliant on government funding. Its first convenor, the recently retired Pat Turner, did an amazing job in standing the organisation up from a zero base. In doing so, she almost singlehandedly drove the most significant institutional reform within the Indigenous policy domain in a generation. It represents an extraordinary achievement. To do so she presumably made a conscious decision that to find the necessary funding and obtain the access necessary to establish the legitimacy and credibility of the National Agreement on Closing the Gap and to create the opportunity to work constructively with the Federal Government, she would have to accept the loss of financial independence given that there was no obvious alternative. She had the bureaucratic experience and skills, and the charisma, to work around that constraint. Moreover, she would not be the first successful policy innovator to pragmatically accept the necessity to work with the contradictions that are inherent in engaging with governments in order to gain a strategic foothold or traction on an issue or set of issues.

Unfortunately, her successors may not share her capabilities and will likely be constrained by the major limitation of working from the inside, namely, that the first and only rule is that one must never publicly rock the boat.

The strategic problem however is that eventually, the limitations of working on the inside will become apparent to the Coalition of Peaks constituency — the broader Indigenous population — and the support necessary to sustain it will wane and ultimately disappear. Perhaps of more pressing significance, there is an external threat linked to the internal contradictions of Closing the Gap emanating from the lack of commitment from governments to driving substantive change (link here). The threat is that a change of government or some other trigger will lead to governments walking away from the National Agreement. When that happens (I assess that it is near certain at some point in the coming decade) the Coalition of Peaks will lose its raison d’etre, and the funding essential to its long-term survival will dry up. For both these reasons there is an imperative for the Coalition of Peaks to begin the process of finding ways to become financially independent of government.

The bottom line is that the new Peak body must look ahead, decide how it would like to operate, and devise a strategy consistent with its aspirations and strategic choices. To the extent that it decides to seek to influence policy only from ‘inside the tent’, the prospects of driving the systemic change necessary to make a real difference to the crisis in family violence will be severely circumscribed. Unfortunately, even if the Coalition of Peaks can become more independent, and/or if the Indigenous leadership writ large is prepared to focus its advocacy on reforming these systemic drivers of family violence, the road ahead will be long and hard. And every day, every month, every year for as long as that journey takes, many Indigenous families are at risk of, and subject to, the trauma of family violence. As the Ministerial Statement included within the Our Ways – Strong Ways – Our Voices Plan observed:

Behind every statistic are individuals, families and communities that deserve safety, respect and healing.

 

13 April 2026