THE OTHER TERRORISM
Another woman murdered, another family destroyed, another candlelight vigil held. Occasionally, politicians line up in front of cameras promising action. The media spends a day or two framing incidents as one-off, isolated events rather than as systemic issues, ignoring perpetrators’ accountability in favour of stress, substance abuse, and at times, victim-blaming. Then the outrage fades, the headlines disappear, and the killings continue.
At some point, we need to stop pretending this is a sudden crisis. It is not. It is a long-running national failure involving governments, police, courts, media institutions and a political culture that consistently treats domestic violence as something tragic but ultimately secondary to other priorities.
The statistics alone are horrifying. According to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, one woman was killed every eight days by an intimate partner on average in 2023–24, and in 2024–25 the figure was roughly one woman every eleven days. Domestic homicide now accounts for more than a third of all homicides in Australia. And those are only the deaths.
Behind every homicide are tens of thousands of women and children living with intimidation, coercive control, physical violence, stalking, sexual abuse and psychological terror. Domestic violence incidents account for around 60 per cent of police workloads in some jurisdictions, with incidents occurring every few minutes. And we rarely hear mention af what kind of adults children who grow up in these environments turn out to be.
This is not a marginal issue. It is one of the country’s biggest public safety crises. Yet governments continue to behave as though domestic violence is a social side project rather than a national emergency.
Federal and state governments announce funding packages, inquiries, awareness campaigns, and “national plans” when the heat is on, but I see them mainly as performative claptrap. The measurable outcomes remain appalling. Australians are increasingly asking a very reasonable question: if women are still being murdered weekly, what exactly has all this political theatre achieved?
That question becomes even harder to ignore when governments somehow always manage to find endless money for military spending, political vanity projects and culture war commissions. Australia is now committed to spending around $368 billion on AUKUS submarines over the coming decades. Billions more continue flowing into defence infrastructure, consultancy contracts and strategic partnerships.
At the same time, enormous sums are allocated to politically convenient Social Cohesion commissions and other symbolic initiatives while frontline domestic violence services remain overwhelmed, understaffed and unable to meet demand. Shelters turn women away. Crisis accommodation is inadequate. Waiting lists for counselling stretch for months. Legal aid remains underfunded. Rural services are often virtually non-existent.
Governments repeatedly tell Australians that domestic violence is everybody’s responsibility, but their own spending priorities suggest otherwise.
If this many Australians were being killed by terrorism, there would be emergency parliamentary sittings, permanent media coverage, bipartisan security taskforces and unlimited funding. Taylor, Cash, Hanson, and that filthy lot would be in our faces on socials, relentlessly spreading their racist hatred and blaming immigration. Instead, because the victims are overwhelmingly women behind closed doors, the issue is normalised. And I haven’t seen those three come out condemning the recent DV attacks, either.
The failures extend far beyond funding. Police responses remain deeply inconsistent across the country. Many officers do extraordinary work under difficult conditions, but systemic failures are impossible to deny. Women continue reporting that complaints are minimised, protection orders poorly enforced, and warning signs ignored until somebody ends up dead.
One of the most disturbing aspects of domestic violence homicides is how often they occur after repeated contact with authorities. Many victims had already reported abuse. Many offenders already had histories of violence. In a huge proportion of intimate partner homicides, there were prior domestic violence orders in place. The warning signs were there. And yet intervention frequently comes too late or not at all.
The judiciary also bears responsibility. Australians have seen repeated cases where violent offenders receive bail despite extensive histories of abuse, breaches of orders or escalating threats. Courts often still struggle to properly understand coercive control, manipulation and the cumulative nature of domestic abuse. Too often, the legal system treats domestic violence as isolated incidents rather than patterns of domination and terror.
Sentencing inconsistency only deepens public anger. Many Australians simply no longer believe the justice system takes violence against women seriously enough until a murder occurs.
The media’s role also deserves scrutiny. Commercial media outlets frequently sensationalise domestic violence deaths while avoiding deeper examination of structural failures. Coverage often focuses on lurid details, neighbour interviews and emotional spectacle rather than long-term policy accountability. Murders become temporary content cycles instead of catalysts for sustained reform.
Even the language used matters. Headlines still regularly soften male violence with phrases like “relationship breakdown”, “domestic dispute” or “family tragedy”, obscuring the reality that many of these killings are deliberate acts of coercion, control and rage.
Worse still, media outrage is wildly inconsistent. Some cases dominate headlines for weeks while others receive barely any national attention at all, particularly when victims are Indigenous women, poor women, migrant women or women living in rural communities.
Australia also continues to refuse to honestly confront some of the deeper drivers of violence. Economic stress, housing insecurity, alcohol abuse, untreated trauma, toxic masculinity, and generational violence all intersect with domestic abuse. None excuse it, but pretending domestic violence exists in isolation guarantees failure.
There is also a political cowardice at the centre of this issue. Governments love awareness campaigns because awareness is cheap. Real reform is harder. Properly funding shelters, counselling, behavioural intervention programs, legal services, housing support and prevention programs costs serious money. Reforming police cultures and judicial systems requires political confrontation.
And addressing male violence honestly risks backlash from sections of the media and electorate.
Public frustration is increasingly understandable because people can clearly see the contradiction. Governments insist there is no money for transformative domestic violence responses, yet somehow hundreds of billions can materialise for military projects, consultants, defence contracts and politically fashionable commissions to appease foreign or religious lobby groups..
We are being told to accept that weekly domestic violence murders are simply an unfortunate reality of modern life. They are not. They are the consequence of repeated institutional failures over decades.
Until governments start treating domestic violence with the same urgency, funding and political seriousness they apply to national security and political image management, the candlelight vigils and public statements will remain exactly what many of us now suspect they are: performative responses to a crisis the political system has never truly prioritised.
And until we start treating domestic violence as everyone’s problem and take matters into our own hands, until we flood politicians and police with demands for change, it will not happen. If just one in 100 adult Australians wrote a cranky email or made a cranky phone call to Albo, to their premier, to their police minister, or their local MP every time a woman is attacked or killed, that would be at least 220,000 cranky emails or calls every week.
Start today. Start right now.
