In April 2024 Albanese described violence against women as a “national emergency”. The Albanese Government introduced a $4.7 billion plan to end violence against women and children in a generation, 2022-2032.
We are now halfway through. But this year 52 women and 21 children have already been killed in family and domestic violence homicides and sexual assault rates are at their highest level in 33 years.
Far from ending gender-based violence, under Albanese, things are getting worse, fast.
Cost-of-living pressure cooks the family
The cost of raising children has risen 30 per cent faster than wages, with a third of that increase going to paid childcare costs for under-fives. Surveys are showing that 45 per cent of parents are now experiencing moderate psychological distress and 12 per cent high distress.
While economic necessity forces mothers to work longer hours sooner after childbirth, they are still, on average, losing 55 per cent of their income in the first five years of each child’s life.
The struggle to make ends meet, constantly juggling work and parenting responsibilities also drives social isolation.
These economic pressures and social isolation are super-charging domestic and family violence. NSW Police statistics for 2025 show a 49 per cent increase in domestic violence reports including a “serious threat”, echoing the ever-growing requests for help to the frontline services covered by Domestic Violence NSW.
Inflation also makes escaping violence much harder. Financial abuse, made easier with the proliferation of electronic surveillance, is a key element of coercive control, threatening access to the funds needed to escape a violent relationship. Research by Anglicare found that the costs of fleeing abuse have grown by 71 per cent over the last decade.
For those who are able to access emergency refuge housing, there is no affordable accommodation to move them into afterwards. For all the talk about Albanese’s housing package, there are no affordable rentals and stocks of public housing are lower than ever.
While Minister Tanya Plibersek talks up the $700 million the Labor government has spent since May 2025 on Domestic Family and Sexual Violence (DFSV) services, on the ground there is an “avalanche” of women seeking support, with wait lists of 6-12 months in Western Australia, three months in NSW, and up to three years in Tasmania.
Sexual violence and toxic misogyny
The horrific seven-hour gang rape by Cornell University fraternity students in the US has brought the savagery of sexual abuse back into the headlines.
Here, the spate of high-profile sexual assaults involving the Sydney Swans, and two separate gang-rapes by Sydney private school boys, forced Albanese to again take the issue to National Cabinet in August.
Much of the increase in sexual assaults is being perpetrated by young men and boys against girls and young women.
This correlates with the frightening new research with school children finding that one in three Australian boys believe gender equality has “gone too far” and that 40 per cent of teenage boys agreed with the idea that women lie and domestic and sexual violence.
Among boys aged 13-17, 30.1 per cent believe men have more of a right to a job than women when jobs are scarce. Almost 25 per cent believed feminism is “damaging to our society and should be resisted with violence if necessary”!
At the same time, Gen Z girls were twice as likely as millennial women to believe marriage entitled a husband to sex even if his wife did not want intercourse.
The children polled have been through four years of “respectful relationships” education that is the “prevention centrepiece” of Labor’s Plan.
But it is clear that Labor’s horror at online misogyny and its futile attempts to control social media access and regulate algorithms has done nothing to counter the prevailing sexist attitudes. The manosphere is a symptom not a cause.
Labor presides over a system that maintains sexist stereotypes, a gendered workforce and discriminatory wages. Labor oversees a privatised childcare system that subsidises private providers where the majority female workforce is highly exploited and undervalued.
Labor cuts taxes for the rich and spends billions for nuclear submarines while domestic violence services are starved of funds and the cost-of-living crisis removes women’s options.
Until the underlying causes are addressed, the rates of sexual and domestic violence will keep getting worse.
By Jean Parker
