For eighteen months, a Northern Territory courtroom heard the same story four times over. Kumarn Rubuntja. Kumanjayi Haywood. Miss Yunupiŋu. Ngeygo Ragurrk. Four Aboriginal women, killed by partners who had used violence against them before, in cases where police, health workers, courts or family violence services had, at some point, had contact with them. NT Coroner Elisabeth Armitage heard from 95 witnesses before handing down her findings on 25 November 2024: 245 pages that described the pattern behind their deaths as an "epidemic" and a national shame. It was Australia's largest-ever inquest into domestic, family and sexual violence deaths — held in the one jurisdiction that records, by a wide margin, the nation's highest rates of that violence.
A crisis two decades in the making
The scale is not new, and no single government built it. The Coroner's Court told the inquest it was aware of 86 domestic-violence-related deaths of Northern Territory women over the previous 24 years (approx.), the great majority of them Aboriginal — a toll spanning Country Liberal Party (CLP) and Labor governments alike, back to the early 2000s. On the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare's most recently published hospitalisation data, the Territory's rate of family-violence-related assault hospitalisations runs at roughly 1,792 per 100,000 people (approx.) — more than double the next-highest jurisdiction, Western Australia, and several multiples of anywhere else in the country. NT Police recorded 11,694 assault victims in 2024, a rate of about 4,677 per 100,000 (approx.) — more than four times the national figure — and by mid-2025 domestic violence accounted for roughly seven in ten of the assaults police attended. For Aboriginal women, the gap widens further again: the Aboriginal Medical Services Alliance Northern Territory (AMSANT) puts the intimate-partner homicide rate for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women in the Territory at around seven times the national rate (approx.). This is the emergency the coroner, health workers and Aboriginal community organisations have been describing for years, and it long predates Chief Minister Lia Finocchiaro's CLP government, elected in August 2024.
Counsel assisting the inquest, Peggy Dwyer SC, told Coroner Armitage that Territory government agencies had repeatedly missed opportunities to prevent the four women's deaths — contact points where a different decision, better information-sharing, or a functioning referral pathway might have changed the outcome. The coroner agreed, finding the failures were systemic rather than accidental: under-resourced frontline services, gaps between the criminal justice and health systems, and behaviour-change programs for men that, in some communities, either did not exist or could not take the referrals sent to them.
What the government did
Since taking office, the Finocchiaro government has moved on two fronts: law and order, and a funding response to the coronial findings. In May 2025, Attorney-General Marie-Clare Boothby reinstated mandatory sentencing for people who breach domestic violence orders — a tiered framework of roughly two to five years' imprisonment, weighted toward repeat and multiple breaches — reversing a change made under the previous Labor government. The same package lifted the victims' levy on offenders by about 40% to help fund victim services, expanded when victims are notified of a breach, and promised a faster, electronic path to victims' compensation. It sat alongside roughly $15 million over five years for victims of crime and about $10 million over four years for specialist domestic, family and sexual violence courts (approx.).
In July 2025 — about eight months after the coroner's findings — the government issued its formal response to all 35 recommendations, naming the Department of Children and Families as lead agency and pointing to a draft Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence Prevention and Response Roadmap for 2025–28. It also points to what it calls record recurrent funding of $36 million a year for the sector (approx.), sitting inside a 2025–26 Budget that delivered a record $1.5 billion for "public order and safety" alongside $780 million for "social protection," the broader category that funds family support, out-of-home care, homelessness and domestic violence services (approx., NT Budget Paper No. 2).
On capacity, the government has also backed head-leasing partnerships to add crisis and transitional housing stock — a minimum of 17 dwellings through Dawn House in Darwin and 8 through Women's Safety Services of Central Australia in Alice Springs, delivered with Community Housing Ltd and Community Housing Central Australia respectively (approx.). It is a genuine, if modest, addition to a shelter and refuge system the sector has described for years as short of beds, particularly outside Darwin and Alice Springs.
The strongest case
A response faster and broader than most governments manage
The government's defenders have a real case. No policy lever fixes in eighteen months what 24 years of compounding disadvantage — remoteness, overcrowded housing, alcohol misuse, intergenerational trauma, and chronic workforce shortages in a Territory where some communities sit hours by air from the nearest service — has built. It was the previous Labor government, not this one, that rejected the sector's $180 million funding request in August 2023 and offered $20 million over two years instead; the funding shortfall this article documents did not start on this government's watch. The government's formal response to the coroner — delivered within about eight months and covering all 35 recommendations — is faster and more complete than many Australian jurisdictions manage after a coronial inquest of this scale, and reinstating mandatory sentencing for DVO breaches responds directly to evidence the inquest heard about orders being breached repeatedly with limited consequence. On law and order specifically, the government can fairly say it has moved further, and faster, than its immediate predecessor.
The evidence
Set against the size of the emergency, both the crackdown measures and the funding response look proportionate to an ordinary law-and-order problem, not to the nation's worst domestic violence rate. The primary record shows a pattern of announcements that individually sound substantial and collectively still fall short of what the coroner and the sector asked for.
On funding specifically, the numbers do not resolve cleanly. The government's own figures describe $36 million a year in "record" recurrent DFSV funding, but AMSANT — which sits inside the sector the funding is meant to reach — says the additional, genuinely new money delivered in the most recent budget cycle was closer to $30 million over two years (approx.), against the sector's and the coroner's $180 million ask. Both figures can be true at once: a large baseline of pre-existing recurrent funding, re-announced as "record," sitting alongside a comparatively small increment of new money. The coroner's recommendation was for the $180 million to be released without delay; a year on, the sector says it has not been.
The workforce and capacity behind the funding numbers tell a similar story. On 25 November 2025 — a year to the day after the findings — the government released its promised DFSV strategy and roadmap, but the sector's peak body, the Northern Territory Council of Social Service (NTCOSS), said the document did not reference the coroner's findings at all, and that the specialist sector still lacked the long-term, indexed funding needed to plan beyond a single budget cycle. NTCOSS described an "underfunded and overwhelmed" DFSV sector facing "overstretched frontline programs" as demand kept rising, and said no Territory-wide domestic violence workforce strategy was yet in place. "Real safety will come with systems change," NTCOSS chief executive Sally Sievers said — a direct challenge to a government response built substantially around funding that already existed.
"In-principle acceptance isn't keeping women safer." — Rob McPhee, AMSANT Chair, December 2025
The critique
The clearest gap is between where the coroner pointed and where the new money has gone. Of the 2025–26 Budget's record $1.5 billion for public order and safety, the great majority funds police, prisons and courts generally, not the DFSV sector specifically; the additional domestic-violence funding announced in May 2025 — roughly $15 million for victims of crime and $10 million for specialist courts — is a fraction of that figure. NT Aboriginal peak organisations have called the government's practice of announcing DV funding alongside new spending on women's prisons "concerning," arguing it undermines the shift toward prevention that the coroner said the evidence demanded. Of the coroner's 35 recommendations, the government's July 2025 response found that 24 already matched existing programs or processes — a framing that lets the government claim substantial compliance without necessarily committing new resources to the gaps the coroner actually identified, including prison behaviour-change programs she found were inadequate or, in some cases, did not exist at all.
The most direct measure of whether the response is working is also the grimmest. AMSANT counted five more Aboriginal women allegedly killed by a partner in the year following the November 2024 findings, and eight since June 2025 alone (approx., AMSANT's own count — informal sector tallies of this kind can differ from later court-finalised figures). The government points to a reported 1.4% fall in domestic violence incidents between January and September 2025 against the same period in 2024, but NT Police's own crime statistics carry an explicit caveat that data from December 2023 onward, following a new records system, is not directly comparable with everything published before it — which makes short-run trend claims from either side hard to verify against the primary record.
There is also a causal claim doing more work in this policy than the evidence yet supports. The government's justification for reinstating mandatory sentencing rests partly on a claimed 82% rise in domestic violence that it attributes to Labor's earlier removal of the policy — a causal claim the government has not published supporting analysis for, and one that sits awkwardly against a 24-year, 86-death coronial record showing the crisis predates any single sentencing regime. A policy can be defensible on its own terms — responding to breach enforcement, as the steelman case above argues — without the government's own explanation for it being accurate. A more coherent response would fund the coroner's prevention and behaviour-change recommendations at the same speed and scale as the enforcement measures; on the record so far, enforcement has moved first and moved further.
The risk to the future
A punitive system funded in full, a prevention system funded in part
If that pattern holds, the Territory risks the exact outcome the coroner tried to prevent: further Aboriginal women's deaths that agencies could, in hindsight, have seen coming. Each new death also risks feeding a further coronial inquest, which itself consumes years and tens of millions of dollars that could otherwise fund the frontline services the sector says it lacks. A justice system built increasingly around more prison beds, without the behaviour-change and prevention capacity the coroner found missing, risks higher reoffending and a rising prison population competing for the same budget as women's shelters and remote family support workers. And every year the $180 million commitment remains only partly delivered is a year in which the Territory's Closing the Gap safety targets for Aboriginal women move further out of reach, not closer. There is a trust cost too: a sector that has now sat through two governments' funding shortfalls, a landmark inquest and a first coronial anniversary without the money it says it needs has less reason each year to believe the next announcement will be different, which makes the next inquest's recommendations harder, not easier, to act on.