Call her Anna. She is 34, with two children under ten, and a Friday-night argument in the kitchen tips into something that leaves her locked in the bathroom, phone in hand, calling the number printed on posters in Canberra GP clinics and school newsletters. It rings out. She calls back forty minutes later, once the house has gone quiet, and this time someone answers — takes her details, and tells her the earliest a caseworker can properly assess her situation is in three or four days. Anna is not a real person; she is a composite built from the pattern the Domestic Violence Crisis Service's own public account of its call volumes describes: a 24-hour line that, on its own figures, now fails to answer roughly half the calls that reach it.
Anna could live in Gungahlin, Tuggeranong or Belconnen. She is one of the people behind the roughly 12 domestic and family violence incidents ACT Policing now records on an average day, and she is calling into a system the Barr Labor–Greens government has spent a decade building: a dedicated levy on every rates notice, a statutory office, a named Coordinator-General for Family Safety. The evidence below is about whether that system, funded the way it is funded, can answer when she calls.
What the government did
The ACT government's central funding mechanism for family violence has been the Safer Families Levy, a fixed charge added to general rates on every residential and rural property in the territory. Introduced at $30 a year in the 2016-17 Budget as part of a package first costed at $21.4 million over four years, the levy funds programs run through the Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence Office (DFSVO) inside the Community Services Directorate, alongside a Coordinator-General for Family Safety role created the same year to give the response whole-of-government strategic leadership — one of the earliest such roles created in an Australian jurisdiction. The levy has since risen in stages, to $50 a year by 2024-25, $60 in 2025-26 and $70 in 2026-27, and the 2026-27 Budget locked in further $5 annual rises for three more years from mid-2027, on top of matched funding under the Commonwealth's National Partnership Agreement on family, domestic and sexual violence responses.
The government has also legislated. The Sexual, Family and Personal Violence Legislation Amendment Act passed the Legislative Assembly on 28 August 2024, tightening bail settings for sexual offences and streamlining family protection order proceedings, and the government has separately committed to introducing a standalone coercive-control offence by mid-2026, under Dr Marisa Paterson MLA, the Minister for the Prevention of Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence. ACT Policing formed a dedicated High-Risk Domestic and Family Violence Investigation Unit in June 2024. Budget funding has grown alongside the legislation: a $30.5 million 2025-26 package included $24 million over four years for core services — extending grants to the Domestic Violence Crisis Service (DVCS), the Canberra Rape Crisis Centre, YWCA Canberra's specialist children's caseworkers and the PCYC's Solid Ground program for young people — plus $6 million over three years for Aboriginal Community Controlled Organisations. A further $44.2 million over four years followed in the 2026-27 Budget. The territory also funds a statutory Domestic Violence Prevention Council, which periodically reviews domestic and family violence-related deaths and has published biennial findings in 2023 and 2025.
The strongest case
A small jurisdiction that built dedicated funding and institutions years ahead of most of the country
The ACT was one of the first Australian jurisdictions to put a named, disclosed levy on ratepayers' notices for family violence specifically, rather than folding the spending into general revenue where it would be harder to track — a transparent funding choice that has run for a decade and scaled from $30 to $70 a year without being wound back through a change of government. The Coordinator-General for Family Safety role, created in 2016, predates equivalent positions in several larger states, and the Domestic Violence Prevention Council's statutory death reviews put the territory's failures on the public record voluntarily, rather than waiting for a coronial inquest or a media investigation to force disclosure. When the ACT Audit Office delivered a critical report on the levy in November 2024, the government did not contest the findings; it accepted them and committed to developing the territory's first standalone domestic, family and sexual violence strategy. And when DVCS warned publicly in February 2026 that a threatened 20% cut to its crisis-line funding would leave the community at greater risk, the government did not proceed with the cut, instead delivering DVCS a four-year funding increase in the following Budget. In a policy area where many governments quietly under-resource crisis services and hope nobody audits the gap, this one invited the audit and mostly did not flinch from what it found.
The evidence
ACT Policing's own reporting shows family violence is not a marginal share of its workload. In 2024-25 it recorded 4,478 domestic and family violence-related incidents — an average of about 12 a day — and 44.9% of all assault offences reported to police that year were domestic and family violence related, essentially unchanged from the year before even as total assault numbers fell slightly. That is a caseload carried by a jurisdiction of roughly 470,000 people (approx.), and it sits alongside separate Australian Bureau of Statistics survey data showing 26% of ACT women (an estimated 44,900) have experienced violence, emotional abuse or economic abuse by a cohabiting partner since the age of 15.
Behind the incident count sits a documented gap between what victim-survivors need and what the funded system supplies. DVCS told the ACT government in its 2026-27 Budget submission that demand for some of its programs had risen by up to 47% over eight years and that monthly requests for its services had climbed to around 1,100, up from roughly 850 two years earlier, while only about half of calls to its 24-hour crisis line were being answered, with some callers waiting three to four days for a caseworker. In February 2026, DVCS chief executive Sue Webeck warned that a proposed 20% cut to crisis-line funding would leave the community at "greater risk"; the responsible minister said the funding would not be cut, and the 2026-27 Budget subsequently allocated DVCS $9.94 million over four years plus $3.2 million over two years for its Room4Change behaviour-change program. DVCS's own verdict on that outcome was blunt: deputy chief executive Brooke McKail said the funding "maintains our current funding levels and provides a small uplift," but the service "will not be able to answer every call with this funding."
The Auditor-General's review of the levy itself, tabled in November 2024 as Report No. 10 of 2024, found the structural problem underneath these numbers. After eight years and roughly $46 million in levy revenue, the DFSVO had no territory-specific domestic and family violence strategy to plan spending against, no performance-monitoring or evaluation framework to show whether levy-funded programs were working, and public reporting the Auditor-General found "not transparent or effective" in telling the community how the money was used. Separately, the Domestic Violence Prevention Council's 2025 biennial death review examined 11 homicides linked to family violence in its reporting period but found only one had progressed far enough through the criminal and coronial process to allow the in-depth systemic analysis the review is designed to produce — a procedural constraint that leaves the territory's most serious family violence failures largely unreviewable for years after they occur.
"This maintains our current funding levels and provides a small uplift … we will not be able to answer every call with this funding." — Domestic Violence Crisis Service, on the 2026-27 ACT Budget
The critique
The core problem is that the levy's revenue grew steadily while the operational planning behind it was never built — until an external auditor forced the point. The levy itself more than doubled over a decade, from $30 to $70, while DVCS reported demand for some of its programs rising by up to 47% over eight years and monthly service requests rising by roughly a third in just the two years to 2025. Money and need have both climbed; nothing in the record the Auditor-General examined shows the DFSVO ever measured whether the first was keeping pace with the second, because for eight years it had no strategy setting out what "keeping pace" would even look like.
The frontline consequence is concrete, not abstract. A Canberra woman calling in crisis has close to even odds of reaching a person, and if she does get through, a caseworker assessment can take three to four days — the period directly after a woman decides to seek help or leave a violent partner, which specialist services and the DVPC's own death reviews consistently identify as among the highest-risk windows. The government's pattern of response — hold funding steady, then respond to public pressure from the funded service's own chief executive rather than to internal demand forecasting the Auditor-General found did not exist — suggests the territory is still managing this policy area budget cycle to budget cycle, not against the published strategy it promised in November 2024 and has yet to deliver.
The exit pathways the crisis line refers people to show the same mismatch from a different angle. Refuge providers report that some women — particularly migrant women with no other housing eligibility — now stay up to two years in crisis accommodation designed to turn over every three to six months, which mechanically shrinks how many new women a fixed number of refuge beds can take in each year, regardless of crisis-line capacity. Men's behaviour-change funding has grown through Room4Change and EveryMan, but these remain voluntary, capacity-limited programs that cannot compel attendance from the men whose conduct generates the 4,478 annual incidents. Funding a call line without matching capacity in the refuges, behaviour-change places and public and community housing it refers people toward treats the point of contact, while leaving the underlying supply constraint in place.
The risk to the future
A levy that keeps rising while the gap between calls made and calls answered does not visibly close
The Safer Families Levy is now on a legislated path past $70 toward further $5 annual rises through the end of the decade, meaning Canberra ratepayers will keep paying more for family violence services indefinitely on current settings. That is defensible only if the extra revenue closes the demand gap the Auditor-General and DVCS have each independently documented — and nothing in the 2026-27 Budget response suggests it will. DVCS's own assessment of its new four-year allocation is that it maintains rather than closes the shortfall, and the government has yet to publish the standalone domestic, family and sexual violence strategy it promised in response to the November 2024 audit. If demand keeps growing at anything like the pace DVCS has reported — up to 47% for some programs over eight years — a levy that rose from $50 to $70 over the same two Budgets is not obviously scaled to close that gap, only to keep it from widening as fast. The practical risk is not that the ACT stops funding family violence responses; on the record above, it plainly will not. It is that a Canberran in Anna's position keeps facing close to a coin-flip on whether her call is answered in real time, that refuge places stay full for want of housing exits rather than crisis-line referrals, and that the territory produces a second Auditor-General report in a few years finding — as the first one did after eight years — that nobody can yet say whether the growing revenue is closing the gap it was raised to close.