On an ordinary day in New South Wales, a police officer responds to a domestic or family violence call-out roughly once every two-and-a-half minutes. In 2024, NSW Police attended 152,268 domestic and family violence incidents statewide — an average of 560 a day (approx.), on police data compiled by the state's own crime statistics agency. Behind each of those numbers sits an unremarkable, private sequence: a woman deciding whether it is safe to spend the night at home, a duty worker scrolling a list of refuges with no vacancies, a child packing a bag for a school she may not go back to. Most of these households never make a headline. They reach, if they are fortunate, an intake worker at a service in Sydney's outer west or a country town three hours from the nearest refuge, and are told there is a bed available, or there is not.
What the government did
Chris Minns' government won office in March 2023, inheriting a domestic violence system that reviews under the previous government had already flagged as under strain. The turning point came just over a year later. On 22 April 2024, Molly Ticehurst was found dead in Forbes, in the state's central west; her former partner was charged with her murder, allegedly committed two weeks after a court registrar granted him bail on a series of domestic violence charges. Her death, and a string of other domestic-violence killings in the same weeks, drew national attention and fed into a National Cabinet meeting convened by the Prime Minister in May 2024. NSW moved first. On 6 May 2024, Premier Minns announced a $230 million emergency domestic, family and sexual violence package over four years, built into the 2024-25 Budget. It spread across crisis response ($48 million for the Staying Home Leaving Violence program and integrated support services), specialist workers for children in refuges ($48 million), justice-system reform including bail law changes ($45 million) and specialist domestic violence workers in the courts ($24 million), the state's first dedicated Primary Prevention Strategy ($38 million), an early-childhood pilot on healthy relationships ($8.1 million), and smaller allocations for the Domestic Violence Death Review Team, perpetrator research and workforce training across the sector.
The bail law, and a second budget
One month later, on 6 June 2024, Parliament passed the Bail and Other Legislation Amendment (Domestic Violence) Act 2024. It reverses the presumption of bail for people accused of serious domestic violence offences, requiring them to show cause why they should not be held in custody rather than the prosecution having to prove they should be; it removes court registrars' power to grant bail in domestic violence matters, reserving those decisions for magistrates; and it makes electronic monitoring a standard condition for anyone granted bail on a qualifying charge. A second, larger commitment followed a year later. The 2025-26 Budget, handed down in June 2025, added a further $184.1 million over four years to lift core, recurring funding for six frontline specialist domestic and family violence programs by 50 per cent, taking total funding for domestic, family and sexual violence assistance services to $272.7 million for that year alone — which the government describes as 50 per cent higher than the funding base it inherited in February 2023 (approx.).
The strongest case
A government that moved faster than its predecessors, on both money and law
The government's case is substantial and should be stated on its own terms. The $230 million package was, at the time, the largest single domestic violence funding commitment in NSW history, delivered within a fortnight of the National Cabinet meeting rather than deferred to the next budget cycle. It was followed a year later by a structural change the sector had been asking for: an unprecedented 50 per cent lift to the core, recurring funding base of frontline specialist services, rather than another one-off package. The bail law reform was politically difficult in both directions — it drew criticism from civil liberties and legal groups for reversing a bail presumption, a step governments typically avoid — and the government legislated it within six weeks of the case that exposed the gap, rather than waiting for a lengthy review. Taken together, a government facing a problem it did not create chose to spend political capital on both the justice system and the funding base within the same term, and followed its first package with a second rather than treating the 2024 announcement as the end of the conversation.
The evidence
The state's own criminal-justice data shows a system generating more activity, even where the underlying rate of violence looks comparatively stable. BOCSAR's most recent quarterly crime statistics, to December 2025, show recorded domestic violence assault incidents rose from 29,143 in 2016 to 37,828 in 2025 — average growth of 2.9 per cent a year over the decade — though the number has been broadly stable over the two years to December 2025. Over the same recent period, the share of domestic violence assault incidents resulting in a charge rose from 65.7 to 69.4 per cent, and the number of adult offenders proceeded against for domestic violence offences reached a record 45,984 in 2025, more than one in four of all adult court proceedings in the state. BOCSAR's own analysts caution that the rise in charges and court actions more likely reflects increased police enforcement and proactive detection than a rising underlying rate of violence, pointing to stable hospitalisation and victimisation-survey figures over the same period — a genuine complication for any simple reading of the numbers, and one this analysis takes at face value rather than smoothing over.
Demand for crisis accommodation and frontline casework tells a more direct story about capacity. Nationally, specialist homelessness services assisted around 117,000 clients who had experienced family and domestic violence in 2024-25 — the largest single client group in the system — and recorded around 350 unassisted requests a day on average, some 129,000 for the year, up from 110,000 the year before, most often because no short-term or emergency accommodation was available, on the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare's national count (figures are national, not NSW-specific, but NSW is the largest contributor to the national system). Inside NSW, the pattern shows up service by service: the Tamworth Family Support Service, the only crisis accommodation provider across more than 100 kilometres of the state's north-east, can house five families at a time and turns women away roughly twice a week when full, on sector reporting (approx.; 2024). Since 2022, the NSW Government has approved 39 new crisis refuges statewide, with around 7 operational as at the most recent count (approx.) — real new supply, but a rollout measured in years, against a service system reporting it is already full most weeks. The Domestic Violence Death Review Team, an independent statutory body convened by the State Coroner, recorded 36 domestic-violence-related deaths in NSW in 2024-25, and found that a history of domestic violence is present in close to one in three of all homicides in the state — a proportion that has not meaningfully moved across two years of increased funding.
The critique
The gap between these two pictures — a justice system processing a record number of cases, and a service system that still turns people away — is the problem this funding has not yet closed. Domestic Violence NSW, the peak body for specialist services, argued in its 2026-27 pre-budget submission that a further 50 per cent increase to the core funding of services funded by the Department of Communities and Justice is needed on top of what has already been committed, because unmet demand for specialist domestic and family violence services in NSW reflects continuing underinvestment rather than a problem two packages have resolved. That is an advocacy position, not an audited finding, but it is consistent with what services themselves report: turn-aways that are routine in areas the refuge-building program has not yet reached, rather than an occasional overflow.
Much of the new money is also structured as time-limited. The bulk of the $230 million 2024 package runs over four years, to around 2028; the $184.1 million core-funding lift announced in the 2025-26 Budget is also a four-year commitment. Neither has been legislated as a permanent, indexed increase to the funding base, which means the sector's baseline could, in principle, revert once these packages expire unless a future budget explicitly renews and extends them — the funding-cliff pattern the sector says affected earlier one-off domestic violence packages before 2024. The government's own comparison point for its "50 per cent higher" claim — the funding base as at February 2023 — is also a low bar in one respect: it compares new spending against a starting point the government itself has criticised as inadequate, so the percentage increase looks larger than the dollar gap against what services say they now need to meet current demand.
The bail law changes carry a parallel, less visible cost. Reversing the presumption of bail for a defined class of serious domestic violence offences was designed to close the specific gap exposed by the Ticehurst case — a registrar, not a magistrate, granting bail — but the legislation went further, extending a show-cause test to a broader category of offences and moving all such bail decisions onto already-stretched magistrates and electronic-monitoring capacity. Legal and civil liberties groups have argued the change was a reasonable response applied more broadly than the case that prompted it, with flow-on effects for remand numbers and court lists that the 2024 package's $45 million justice allocation was not sized to absorb on its own.
A tougher bail law changes what happens to the person she is leaving. It does not, by itself, fund the refuge bed she needs the night she leaves.
Regional and remote NSW carries the sharpest version of this mismatch. The state's own data shows Aboriginal women recorded as domestic violence victims at around eight times the rate of non-Aboriginal women, concentrated in exactly the areas — districts like Tamworth and Forbes — where refuge capacity is thinnest and the nearest specialist service can be hours away. Two funding packages have added real money and real refuges to that map. They have not yet closed the distance between where the violence is recorded and where the beds are.
The risk to the future
A funding cliff meeting a system still short of beds
None of the packages announced since 2024 are permanent. If the $230 million package and the $184.1 million core-funding lift are not renewed and indexed in the 2028-29 Budget, NSW risks repeating a pattern the sector says it lived through before 2024: a burst of catch-up funding followed by a plateau, while demand recorded by police and courts keeps climbing on its decade-long trend. The refuge-building program, the specialist court workers and the bail law changes all depend on a workforce — caseworkers, duty solicitors, magistrates, refuge staff — that takes years to train and is already reporting strain; money announced in a budget speech does not itself produce a trained worker or a built refuge the following week. The test of the next budget cycle is not whether the government can announce a third package. It is whether the services already reporting they turn people away each week can say, on evidence rather than a press release, that they no longer do.