Domestic and Family Violence and Closing the Gap

Th’ abuse of greatness is when it disjoins

 Remorse from power.

Julius Caesar Act 2, Scene 1

The National Agreement on Closing the gap sets out 17 targets and four priority reforms. Target 13 relates to domestic and family violence (link here).

Target 13 is specified as follows:

By 2031, the rate of all forms of family violence and abuse against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and children is reduced at least by 50%, as progress towards zero.

The following text is taken from the Productivity Commission dashboard:

Nationally in 2018-19, 8.4% of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander females aged 15 years and over experienced domestic physical or face-to-face threatened physical harm (figure CtG13.1). There is no new data since the baseline year of 2018-19.

The national data point of 8.4% incorporates varying jurisdictional data points rangeing from 10% in NSW to 6.4% in Qld.

If we unpack the specification of the target, it becomes clear just how meaningless it is. The benchmark data have not been updated for six years. More problematically, the AIWH (link here) cites research from 2011 that found that ‘around 90% of violence against First Nations women and most cases of sexual abuse of First Nations children are undisclosed’. [Willis M (2011) ‘Non-disclosure of violence in Australian Indigenous communities’ Trends & issues in crime and criminal justice no. 405, AIC]. Moreover, multiple instances of family violence against an individual are recorded as equivalent to one instance and thus embed the potential for systemic undercounting into the target specification.

The PC Closing the Gap dashboard section on Target specifications for Target 13 notes, inter alia:

Experiences of harm are likely to be under‑reported. Due to the sensitive nature of the questions, responses were not compulsory, and a person may have chosen not to answer some or any of the questions.

The physical and threatened physical harm data collected in the 2018–19 NATSIHS is not comparable to other ABS data sources collecting similar data, including data from: the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Survey; the General Social Survey; the Personal Safety Survey; or, Recorded Crime – Victims.

And also, in relation to Future Reporting:

Future reporting will seek to include the following additional disaggregations: remoteness areas and other small geographic areas (where available); disability status; gender; age; and Indigenous status.

Yet there appears to be no progress whatsoever in measuring the target trajectory, let alone updated disaggregation. Importantly, the PC dashboard also notes that comparable data on non‑Indigenous people is currently not available. Given that the problems with the target specification mean that the benchmark data points are essentially meaningless, this is perhaps not surprising.

The FDSV Summary on the AIHW website (updated July 2025) reports (link here) the following data on mainstream domestic and family violence:

Results from the 2021–22 PSS showed that an estimated 3.8 million Australian adults (20% of the population) reported experiencing physical and/or sexual family and domestic violence since the age of 15. It is estimated that of all Australian adults:

·         11.3% (2.2 million) had experienced violence from a partner (current or previous cohabiting)

·         5.9% (1.1 million) had experienced violence from a boyfriend, girlfriend or date

·         7.0% (1.4 million) had experienced violence from another family member (ABS 2023c).

Clearly this is substantial issue across all demographic segments of Australian society. The AIHW notes (link here) that:

Comparable national data are not available to compare the prevalence of FDV among different population groups.

This may be a deliberate policy by ABS and AIHW to avoid the potential misuse of such data to typecast and/or demonise ethnic groups in Australia. It does mean however that the fundamental conceptual basis of ‘closing the gap’, namely decreasing the variation in rates of domestic violence between mainstream population and First Nations populations cannot be applied to the issue of domestic violence.

There is a strong sense from the AIWH and ABS discussion of family violence that the rate of Indigenous family violence is higher than the rate in the mainstream. Yet there is no direct data available. One way to get a better sense of this is to consider national homicide rates. Intuitively, homicide rates are a function of numerous factors, but one of the obvious factors would be rates of family violence. Thus, by looking at the extreme outcomes of family violence, we can get a sense of the comparative significance of family violence within Indigenous and non-Indigenous contexts.

The Australian Institute of Criminology report Homicide in Australia 2023–24: Statistical Report 53 (link here) reports 55 intimate partner homicides nationally of which 46 were women (page 11) in 2023-24. The following extracts have been selected to shine more light on the potential significance for comparative rates of family violence, and bold text added for emphasis. The authors note (page 11):

The [national] female intimate partner homicide rate in 2023–24 was 0.43 per 100,000 female population aged 18 years and over. This is a marked increase from the rate of 0.32 per 100,000 recorded in 2022–23 and the second highest rate of female intimate partner homicide in the last 10 years.

In terms of geographic location, they note (page 14):

Excluding Western Australia, the homicide rate for incidents in regional and remote areas exceeded the national incident rate for 2023–24 (1.08 and 3.51 per 100,000 respectively vs 0.98 per 100,000), while the rate of incidents in major cities was lower than the national rate (0.77 per 100,000) [emphasis added].

In terms of Indigenous status (page 20):

Of the 277 homicide victims in 2023–24, 44 (16%) were Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and 226 (82%) were non-Indigenous (see Table 13) ….. Between 1989–90 and 2023–24, 14 percent (n=1,407) of homicide victims were Indigenous and 85 percent (n=8,637) were non-Indigenous

In relation to Indigenous victims (page 24):

The homicide victimisation rate of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in 2023–24 was 4.31 per 100,000 relevant population (see Table 17), a decrease from the rate of 5.36 per 100,000 recorded in 2022–23.

On page 26:

Around two-thirds of Indigenous female victims from cleared incidents were killed by an intimate partner (64%, n=9; see Table 20), almost double the proportion of Indigenous women killed by an intimate partner in 2022–23 (38%, n=5). Between 1989–90 and 2023–24, over two‑thirds of Indigenous women victims of homicide were killed by a current or former intimate partner (69%, n=337). In 2023–24, Indigenous women experienced an intimate partner homicide victimisation rate seven times greater than the rate for all Australian women (2.84 per 100,000 relevant population vs 0.43 per 100,000 respectively).

In relation to non-Indigenous victims (page 27), the authors note:

The homicide victimisation rate of non-Indigenous Australians was 0.88 per 100,000 (see Table 22), an increase from the rate of 0.74 per 100,000 recorded in 2022–23.

In relation to offenders, the authors note inter alia:

The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander homicide offender rate in 2023–24 was 6.87 per 100,000 relevant population). Males comprised 78 percent of Indigenous homicide offenders (n=43) with an offender rate of 10.80 per 100,000. A fifth of Indigenous offenders were female (22%, n=12) with an offender rate of 2.99 per 100,000 (page 37).

Two-thirds of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander [primary homicide offenders] … and 46 percent… of non‑Indigenous primary homicide offenders (excluding New South Wales) had a known history of domestic and family violence (page 44).

The AIC evidence that Indigenous female homicides occur at much higher rate than in the mainstream is consistent with the hypothesis that there is a very strong correlation between prior domestic violence and later homicides. While every homicide is a tragedy, my purpose here is to focus on family violence and the strong suggestions that it occurs as much higher rates within Indigenous households than mainstream households. The gap exists; we just do not know its depth and width.

Given that the current Closing the Gap target 13 is both only intermittently measurable, likely to be grossly under-reported, and deeply flawed conceptually, there is  an overwhelming case for the parties to the National Agreement on Closing the Gap to revise it into a form that both reflects the lived reality of Indigenous people’s lives and which allows progress or regression to be measured so that the results of government efforts to reduce the enormous adverse impact of family violence on Indigenous women and children will be transparent.

Last week, the Australian Government’s Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence Commission handed down its Yearly Report to Parliament (link here). The report includes a number of recommendations relevant to First Nations (Recommendations 11, 12, 15, 1617 and 18). The report identifies the data shortcomings related to Closing the Gap target 13 but doesn’t criticise its inherent limitations as a policy target. It mentions some extraordinary statistics, for example, that in 2023-24, Indigenous women were 27 times more likely to be hospitalised for family violence than non-Indigenous women (page 33). Yet despite a detailed account of the issues confronting Indigenous families (pages 78 to 89), its recommendations were bound up in process: the establishment of more advisory bodies, more funding, and commitments to work with organisations implementing various action plans and the like. In short, more of the same.

While the DFSV Commission is clearly well-intentioned, there was no cut through policy agenda proposed despite the discussion appearing in a section headlined Priority Areas for Action. There was minimal discussion of the role of alcohol and drugs in creating the preconditions for family violence to occur, and no discussion of the desirability of constraining access to alcohol across the community at large. To be clear, I am not suggesting that alcohol use is the only cause of family violence, but it clearly of such importance that reducing and /or constraining access to it is a necessary if not sufficient policy action in addressing the epidemic of family violence in remote Australia, and probably beyond. If the argument for doing so requires further strengthening, then its complicity in contributing to Indigenous hyper-incarceration (link here) provides a rationale in its own right for taking action.

I discussed the systemic underpinnings of the domestic violence crisis in remote Australia in an earlier post this year (link here). That post argued that the domestic violence crisis in the NT is a symptom of a wider crisis, and that alcohol is a key element of that. In an even earlier post from 2023 discussing the withdrawal of alcohol controls  following the lapse of the Commonwealth Stronger Future legislation (link here), I pointed to the clear statistical links between alcohol and domestic violence:

To take just one data point, alcohol related domestic violence assault offences spiked in Alice Springs, Katherine, and outside major centres in the 12 months to March 2023 (link here). The only location where there was a decline in these offences was in Darwin. Across the NT, there were almost 1000 extra reported assault offences over the year coinciding with the nine months of reduced [alcohol] restrictions. With the majority of NT electorates in the Darwin region, it is not difficult to develop a hypothesis for why the NT Government may have been intent on removing alcohol restrictions in the bush. In the light of the issues outlined above, the unqualified confidence of the Committee (set out in para. 3.66) in the capacity and political willingness of the NTG to manage alcohol related harm astounds me. [note: the hyperlink above is to a web page that has been updated since 2023]

While alcohol is likely a key driver of the high rates of domestic violence across remote Australia (and possible more broadly) it may not be the only driver. Nevertheless, I suggest that in the absence of greater controls, domestic violence and other social dysfunction will continue unabated, and in turn this will open the flood gates for more punitive social and economic policies.

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. The fact that we allow governments to pursue these fake strategies without holding them to account makes all of us complicit in creating and sustaining the existence of the conditions that engender violence against women and children.

Summing up, I see two specific policy opportunities which would make a tangible and substantive positive impact on the family violence crisis engulfing remote communities (and likely on communities beyond remote Australia). First, revise and reframe Target 13 in the Closing the Gap policy framework to replace the current unworkable and deeply flawed target with a target that is measurable and reflects the real world. Second, initiate a comprehensive policy shift based on the policy approaches recommended by experts and the World Health Organisation (WHO) to constrain and reduce unfettered access to alcohol in communities and regional towns (and ideally major cities). The adverse health impacts of alcohol use are well known, and the WHO now advises (link here):

There is no form of alcohol consumption that is risk-free. Even low levels of alcohol consumption carry some risks and can cause harm.

While the politics of controlling access to alcohol induced harm, and the consequential impacts such as family violence, are challenging, the objective case for doing so requires governments to take action even without considering the wider individual and societal costs of dealing with the fallout. These wider costs include the adverse impacts on the life opportunities of children born into families affected by alcohol abuse, family violence and whose parents are incarcerated, and the economic costs for taxpayers of excessive hospitalisations, and avoidable incarceration. Finally, what does it say about us as a nation when we can adopt without apparent remorse policies that create so much pain and harm. That truly is an abuse of our democratic power.

 

6 November 2025