Yearly Report to Parliament 2025

This report is the Commission’s second yearly report to Parliament and provides recommendations for priority activities over the next 12 months to work towards achieving the outcomes of the National Plan. The report contains case studies of great work being done that we must learn from, share and scale to be able to understand impact and outcomes.

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Overview

This report presents critical recommendations to set Australia up for success during the 7 years remaining in National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children 2022–2032 (the National Plan). Immediate action is required over the next 12 months to keep building the systems that will drive implementation and deliver better outcomes.

Recent royal commissions, inquiries, coronial inquests and reviews that focus on domestic, family and sexual violence (DFSV) have delivered strikingly consistent recommendations.

We now need a razor-sharp focus on coordinated, accountable and agile delivery – to move beyond fragmented responses to embrace comprehensive, community led systems change.

We can, and should, choose to implement these recommendations with the urgency this crisis demands.

Key findings

The success of the National Plan to end violence against women and children by 2050 depends on the design, implementation, monitoring and review of the next Action Plan. The Commission recommends that the Commonwealth, with all states and territories, should immediately start developing the next Action Plan. This should be a live planning mechanism that brings coordinated and focused attention to agreed priorities.

Prevention must begin in childhood. We must have a razor‑sharp and united focus on addressing children’s and young people’s needs. This means centring what children and young people tell us they need, and listen to them about their experiences of change as we implement. Too many times, our plans refer to the specific and unique needs of children, and yet we fail to implement programs or change systems. We need to invest in creating the conditions for a generation that grows up knowing love without fear, identity without shame and power without violence.

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Priority recommendations

Immediate action required

Action planning process: Begin the next action planning cycle immediately for commencement by end of 2026. The Action Plan must be a living plan with regular reviews every 12–18 months and transparent public reporting. It must be co-designed with relevant stakeholders from all jurisdictions. This includes key knowledge holders: lived experience voices, the sector, policy leaders and academics.

Driving coordinated implementation: Establish a Commonwealth implementation and delivery mechanism with responsibility for cross-government coordination, quarterly Cabinet reporting dashboards and ensuring DFSV remains a priority on the Secretaries Board agenda.

Informing and overseeing implementation: We must strengthen the Commission itself as a statutory authority. This includes expanded powers to gather timely information, data and evidence to enable the Commission to monitor and assess progress and outcomes of the National Plan. We also need to consolidate the role of Australia’s National Research Organisation for Women’s Safey (ANROWS) as the national evidence convenor.

Institutional strengthening

Research and evidence: Build on the leadership position of ANROWS in relation to practice-led, lived experience informed evidence while taking the role of system convenor to set national research priorities and align efforts across jurisdictions.

Funding framework: Develop a national funding mapping framework with agreed definitions, consistent categories and embedded reporting in bilateral agreements to enable visibility of DFSV funding nationally.

Workforce development: Activate the health system as a prevention lever, continue to grow specialist DFSV workforce capacity and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander specialist workforce, and upskill migrant and multicultural organisations for DFSV competency.

Strategic focus areas

Embedding lived experience: The Commission's Lived Experience Advisory Council will lead development of an engagement framework and toolkit and evaluation framework, while the Commission conducts a national audit of lived experience engagement mechanisms to establish effectiveness metrics.

Children and young people: Establish a DFSV Youth Advisory Council to embed young voices in action planning, drive increased activities, amend service contracts to count activities addressing children’s needs and expand funding for programs targeting unaccompanied young people and child sexual exploitation prevention.

Men and boys engagement: Implement a national, coordinated approach to engaging men and boys on healthy masculinities, develop targeted responses to online misogyny and radicalisation, and expedite national standards for men’s behaviour change programs.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities: Embed shared decision-making in governance structures, the four Priority Reforms under the National Agreement on Closing the Gap, increase long-term flexible investment in Aboriginal community-controlled organisations (ACCOs) and urgently invest in data to monitor Closing the Gap Target 13.

People with disabilities who experience violence and use violence: Prioritise learning from the experience of people living with a disability, including people who experience violence and those who use violence. Progress future-focused work under the National Plan and release the Disability lens to the First Action Plan in 2025 to ensure we can act to eliminate violence for women living with a disability and to meet desired outcomes of the National Plan.

Sexual violence: Include a roadmap for implementing Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) recommendations (ALRC 2025a) as well as actions and investments to progress sexual violence reforms outside the scope of the ALRC inquiry with clear timeframes and responsible agencies, while focusing specifically on child sexual exploitation prevention within education systems.

Economic and systems abuse: Undertake systematic mapping of recommendations across reviews and inquiries, particularly addressing misuse of family law, tax and child support systems, with clear signposts for delivery timelines and responsible agencies.

Time for transformational action

The Commission’s recommendations represent an urgent call for coordinated, immediate action to maximise the value of the work that has already been undertaken and the foundations that have been laid – and to drive real change in the remaining 7 years of the National Plan. Success requires genuine commitment to lived experience engagement, strategic focus on priority cohorts, robust implementation mechanisms and sustained investment in capability building across all levels of government and the community sector.

The time for incremental change has passed – Australia needs transformational action now to end violence against women and children. This means focusing on systems that keep women, children and communities safe – at the same time prioritising action to end violence, predominantly men’s violence.

Recommendations

The Commission has made 30 recommendations to ensure progress towards the outcomes under the National Plan. The Commission will report on progress of these recommendations in the next yearly report. The Commission welcomes all agencies to respond publicly on their activities.

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Commission Reports

Our Commission Reports outline findings and recommendations to help guide national response, recovery and prevention.