Funding certainty needed to address family violence

We are already at capacity and simply cannot afford uncertainty.

We are not alone.

Family violence organisations right across the nation have been calling on governments to walk the talk and commit to increased and secured funding for the sector. Specialist family violence organisations like CNV work, often outside of the spotlight, with thousands of individuals each and every year to provide programs and services that directly improve and increase safety. The work we do with victim survivors to increase safety and wellbeing and with perpetrators to take responsibility for their use of violence, works.

We are calling on our Commonwealth leaders to support us to do the work it takes to end violence against women and children.

Our specialised workforce deserve fair and secure pay conditions.  The programs and services that we deliver to our community deserve fair and secure funding to be able to operate at full capacity, and our work in preventing the violence before it begins requires dedicated funding.

We are in a national crisis. Last year a woman was murdered as a result of gender-based violence every four days. 2025 is proving yet again, to be another year where women and children are being murdered in entirely preventable circumstances.

It is not ok that as a frontline service we constantly need to make program decisions based on insecure or inadequate budget conditions rather than on the need. And need for our services has never been greater. We are seeing a marked increase in the number of victim survivors and people who use violence accessing our service. In particular we are seeing greater numbers of children requiring specialist family violence support. We cannot operate in a budget vacuum. Especially when we know that in Australia, the cost of violence against women and their children is estimated at $26 billion a year (Commonwealth of Australia, 2022).

Last year, our staff across the Orange Door Loddon (TOD) and CNV offices provided over 50,000 hours of specialist support for victim survivors. The number of victim survivors that our specialist -family violence staff worked with in TOD increased by almost 10 per cent. Similarly, CNV saw a distinct increase in the number of direct referrals to our service with over 2,400 victim survivors accessing much needed support. Not only are we seeing a rise in the number of people seeking support, we are also seeing a rise in the number of complex and high-risk cases requiring intensive management. By way of example, of the 3520 MARAM assessments (how specialist services and police assess family violence risk) we conducted this year, 27 per cent of victim survivors had 10 or more lethality indicators. When someone has five or more, they are considered to be at imminent risk of lethality or serious harm.

We cannot afford to turn people away from much needed specialist family violence support.

While we have wholeheartedly welcomed the Federal Government’s commitment to ending violence against women and children through the National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children 2022-2032, the most recent budget hand down has failed to bring the family and sexual violence sector out of crisis mode.

The National Plan identified that one of the key pillars to achieve generational change was to strengthen the capacity of specialist family, domestic and sexual violence services (Commonwealth of Australia, 2022). However, without significant, and ongoing funding to the specialist sector, the National Plan has no way of achieving this objective.

Each and every year, the sector faces extraordinary uncertainty in budget allocation all while each and every year, the demand for our services increases. In the Loddon Region alone, we are seeing a significant spike in the number of family violence incidents.  We know that these figures are reflected right across the states and territories.

It is a confronting message to not only the sector but also to the community, that the lives of women, children and diverse communities – who are at the highest risk of harm from family violence – are further jeopardised by line items on a budget.  We need to be adequately resourced to do our job, because without us, there is no safety net in place for the thousands of victim survivors that walk through our doors every year.

An investment in the family violence sector is an investment towards a future society that is free from gendered violence.

For further information:

Dr Clare Shamier
Head of Business Development and Advocacy
e: [email protected]
m: 0488 281 528

For general media enquiries:

e: [email protected]