On the evening of 19 February 2020, Hannah Clarke buckled her three children into the family car outside her parents' Camp Hill home to drive them to school. Her estranged husband, Rowan Baxter, was waiting. He climbed in, doused the car in petrol, and set it alight. Hannah and the children died from their injuries; Baxter killed himself at the scene. In the years before that morning, there had been no single act that looked, from the outside, like the crime everyone recognises as domestic violence. There was monitoring of her phone, control of her money and movements, isolation from friends, a campaign to make her doubt her own judgment — the pattern of behaviour that specialists call coercive control, and that Queensland's criminal law, at the time, had no name for and no charge to fit.
The Coroners Court inquest into the deaths, handed down in June 2022, found that every agency that had contact with Hannah in the months before the murders — police, courts, the family-law system — had failed to grasp how much danger she was actually in. Her case became the reason a state government commissioned the biggest review of its kind in Queensland's history, and the reason a five-year, still-unfinished project to close the gap between what the law could see and what victim-survivors were living through began. What Queensland has built since then, and what still gets built now under a different government from the one that started it, is the subject of this audit.
The Taskforce, the law, and the government that inherited it
Nine months after Hannah Clarke's murder, the then Palaszczuk Labor government established the Women's Safety and Justice Taskforce, chaired by former Queensland Court of Appeal president Margaret McMurdo, to examine whether Queensland's laws adequately captured coercive control and whether the justice system was fit to respond to it. The Taskforce's first report, Hear Her Voice — Report One, was released on 2 December 2021 and made 89 recommendations; its second, Hear Her Voice — Report Two, followed on 1 July 2022 with a further 188 recommendations on women's and girls' experiences across the criminal justice system. Between them, the reports amount to the most detailed official account ever compiled of how Queensland's police, courts and corrections system treat victim-survivors of domestic, family and sexual violence — and they were blunt that criminalising coercive control before the system was ready to investigate and prosecute it would do more harm than good.
That staged, evidence-led sequencing is the main reason it took until 6 March 2024 for Queensland's Parliament to pass the Criminal Law (Coercive Control and Affirmative Consent) and Other Legislation Amendment Act 2024 — known publicly as Hannah's Law — creating a standalone offence, punishable by up to 14 years' imprisonment, for a pattern of controlling or coercive behaviour against a current or former partner or family member. It is a deliberately staged reform: the offence itself did not commence until 26 May 2025, fourteen months after the Bill passed, so police and prosecutors could be trained to build a "pattern of conduct" case rather than the single-incident case the system was built around. That commencement date fell eight months into the term of a different government — David Crisafulli's Liberal National Party, elected on 26 October 2024 — which inherited a law it had not written but chose to bring into force on the timetable Labor and the Taskforce had set, rather than delay or dilute it.
What the Crisafulli government added
The current government has not simply administered a Labor-era law; it has legislated its own, separate DFV reform. The Domestic and Family Violence Protection and Other Legislation Amendment Act 2025 passed the Legislative Assembly on 28 August 2025. It gives police the power to issue an on-the-spot Police Protection Direction — up to twelve months' immediate protection for a victim-survivor without first going to court, breach of which carries up to three years' imprisonment — which commenced statewide on 1 January 2026. The same Act allows courts to order GPS electronic monitoring for high-risk domestic violence offenders and introduces video-recorded evidence-in-chief for victim-survivors, intended to reduce the number of times a person has to retell their account of the violence in court.
The GPS tracking program is a pilot, not a universal rollout: the 2025–26 Queensland Budget committed $28.5 million to build the monitoring framework and fund the first 150 devices, with Townsville and Caboolture Magistrates Courts the first to gain the power to impose them from October 2025, on a trajectory the government says will reach 500 devices by the end of 2028. Alongside it, the government expanded the Domestic, Family Violence and Vulnerable Persons Units — specialist police teams — to every police district in the state by May 2025, and grew the Specialist Domestic and Family Violence Court model, which began under Labor at Southport and Beenleigh, into a wider DFV Live List covering thirteen additional court locations by June 2025. The 2025–26 Budget attached real money to the frontline behind these measures: $379 million for domestic and family violence programs overall, including $31.3 million over four years to double the state's 24/7 crisis-response service and build a new North Queensland hub, and a further $112.9 million over four years to legal-assistance services supporting DFV victims.
The strongest case
A government that kept faith with a reform it did not start
It would have been politically easy for an incoming government to slow-walk a law it inherited, particularly one requiring costly retraining of police and prosecutors before it could commence. The Crisafulli government did not do that: it brought Hannah's Law into force on the schedule the Taskforce and Parliament had set, and then went further, legislating its own Police Protection Directions and GPS-monitoring powers within its first year in office — reforms victim-survivor advocates had sought for years. The $379 million 2025–26 DFV Budget line, the statewide expansion of specialist police units, and the doubling of crisis-response hours are not announcements without funding attached; they are costed, dated commitments sitting inside a published Budget. The government's own account, released alongside the August 2025 reform, points to DFV-related incidents having risen 218% over the decade to 2024 under the previous government — a claim consistent in direction, if not in exact method, with the Auditor-General's 2022 finding of a 47.8% rise in recorded occurrences in just the six years to 2021–22. On that reading, the government now holding office is the one that has had to build the enforcement and support capacity to match a crisis that had already been growing for years before it took power, and it has moved on that task faster than its critics generally credit.
What the record shows
The primary data tells a more complicated story than either the reform announcements or the crisis headlines alone. Queensland Police recorded 139,135 domestic and family violence occurrences in 2021–22, already a 47.8% rise over the previous six years, according to the Queensland Audit Office's 2022 examination of the system — and the QAO warned that up to 80% of DFV incidents are never reported to police at all, meaning the official count understates the true scale by a wide, unknowable margin. More recent Queensland Police figures put the service responding to more than 175,000 DFV-related calls in a single recent year (approx.) — on that volume, a call roughly every three minutes.
The enforcement pipeline built to respond to that volume is under comparable strain. Queensland Police recorded 56,267 breaches of domestic violence orders between 1 July 2024 and 14 April 2025 alone. Matters for contravention of a domestic violence order lodged in Queensland's magistrates courts have very nearly doubled in five years, from 24,142 in 2019–20 to 41,523 in 2024–25. The Queensland Sentencing Advisory Council's 2025 analysis of contravention sentencing since 2005–06 found a reoffending rate of almost 45% among people previously punished for breaching an order, that men make up 84% of those sentenced, and that more than four in five custodial sentences for a breach run under twelve months, averaging 6.7 months. And the outcome the entire system exists to prevent still occurs on a grim, near-monthly rhythm: the Domestic and Family Violence Death Review and Advisory Board recorded 19 DFV-related homicides in Queensland in 2023–24 alone, and 183 since 1 July 2016 — a toll of roughly one death every three weeks over eight years, essentially unmoved by the reform program described above.
A coercive-control law changes what police are allowed to charge. It does not, by itself, change how early anyone notices.
The gap between the law and the room
None of this means the reform program is hollow. It means the hardest part — matching new laws with the frontline capacity to use them well before violence escalates — is the part still visibly unfinished, and the part least reducible to a Budget announcement or a bill passing Parliament.
Start with timing. Hannah Clarke was killed in February 2020. The Taskforce that bears her case's weight did not report until December 2021 and July 2022; the law it recommended did not pass until March 2024; the offence it created did not commence until 26 May 2025 — five years and three months after her death, and after tens of thousands of contravention matters had already moved through a court system that, until that date, had no charge available for the pattern of control the coroner found had gone unrecognised in Hannah Clarke's own case. That gap was, on the Taskforce's own advice, the price of doing it properly rather than rushing a law police and courts were not trained to use. But it is still a gap in which the specific harm the reform targets kept occurring, unnamed in law, for half a decade.
Even with the offence now in force, capacity has not caught up with demand. The GPS-monitoring pilot the current government is rightly proud of will track 150 offenders by the end of 2025, against 56,267 recorded DVO breaches in the nine and a half months to April 2025 alone — a program built, on its own government's stated timeline, to reach only 500 devices by 2028. The specialist court and police-unit expansions are real, but they layer onto a base the state's own Auditor-General found structurally under-resourced in 2022: no single entity responsible for coordinating case information across police, courts, health and child safety; high-risk teams, the model shown to prevent the worst outcomes, covering only about 52% of the state's population; and prevention work — the spending category aimed at stopping violence before it starts, rather than responding after — funded at just 4% of total DFV expenditure ($7.1 million) in the last year the government tracked the figure separately, 2018–19. Queensland's Budget papers do not appear to have restored that itemised prevention tracking since, which makes it impossible to say from the primary record whether prevention funding has kept pace with the far larger sums now going to courts, police and electronic monitoring.
The sentencing data completes the picture of a system still built to respond after the fact rather than interrupt the pattern early. A reoffending rate near 45% for people already punished once for breaching a protection order, combined with average custodial terms of 6.7 months for that breach, describes a revolving door that specialist courts and tougher charges do not, by themselves, close. Domestic violence reform has also had to compete for Cabinet and Budget attention with the government's higher-profile "Making Queensland Safer" youth-crime laws, passed in the same term — a genuine claim on the same portfolio's time and political capital, even where the DFV-specific funding lines have still grown.
The risk to the future
Building a system that is better at responding to violence than at seeing it coming
The Hannah Clarke inquest's central finding was not that the system responded to violence badly — it was that the agencies involved failed to recognise how much danger she was in before the fatal act occurred. Every reform since, from the coercive-control offence to Police Protection Directions to GPS monitoring, adds capability to identify and punish a pattern that has already been reported. None of it, on the evidence available, has yet closed the earlier and harder gap: high-risk-team coverage stuck near half the state as of the Auditor-General's last full audit, prevention funding untracked since 2018–19, and a reoffending rate showing the courts are recycling many of the same offenders rather than stopping them the first time. If specialist courts, electronic monitoring and legal aid keep expanding while refuge capacity, prevention funding and cross-agency coordination do not receive the same scrutiny and money, Queensland risks building a state that is genuinely better at prosecuting domestic violence after it escalates, without being demonstrably better at recognising it — the exact sequence that failed Hannah Clarke and her children in the months before February 2020.