On Tasmania's west coast, a handful of officers cover thousands of square kilometres of forest, coast and mountain from stations in towns like Queenstown and Zeehan. A woman leaving a violent relationship there cannot simply walk to a refuge: the nearest shelter bed is likely to be in Hobart, Launceston or Devonport, a drive of several hours away, along roads where mobile coverage disappears for long stretches. This is not a hypothetical extreme; it is the ordinary geography of family violence in a state where a large share of the population lives outside the two main cities, scattered across the north-west, the west coast, the Huon Valley and the islands. The same crisis that plays out in a Hobart townhouse plays out here too — except here, the nearest support worker, the nearest police response and the nearest refuge bed can each be an hour or more away, sometimes all three at once. Every service designed in Hobart has to somehow reach that geography before it can help anyone.
What the government did
Tasmania's family violence response runs through Safe at Home, an integrated criminal justice model — police, courts, corrections and victim-support services acting under one framework — operating since 2004, longer than comparable systems in several larger states. It spans six state government departments and eleven business units, with the Department of Justice as lead agency and Tasmania Police acting as the gatekeeper through which most victim-survivors first enter the system. On top of it, successive Liberal governments have run consecutive statewide action plans: Safe Homes, Families, Communities (2019–2022), which committed $26 million to 40 actions, and the current Survivors at the Centre: Tasmania's Third Family and Sexual Violence Action Plan (2022–2027), which commits $100 million to 38 actions under a dedicated Minister for the Prevention of Family Violence.
Under Premier Jeremy Rockliff specifically, the government has added a run of justice reforms: an expansion, announced in February 2025, of Tasmania's electronic monitoring of family violence perpetrators to those released on bail, alongside a presumption against bail for people charged with a family violence offence; the Family Violence (Miscellaneous Reforms) Bill 2025, which went to public consultation in May 2025 and amends the Family Violence Act 2004; and "Jari's Law," which passed the Legislative Council in October 2024 and makes a coronial inquest mandatory in any death where family violence is a suspected contributing factor. In the 2026–27 Budget, handed down in May 2026, the government announced a further $83 million package to strengthen family violence prevention and support for women, on top of a renewed $15.7 million National Partnership Agreement with the Commonwealth — split evenly between the two governments — funding frontline family, domestic and sexual violence programs from July 2025, taking total Commonwealth National Partnership funding to Tasmania to around $23.4 million since 2022. Within the current action plan sit specific, smaller funding lines that matter to frontline services: $9.62 million over three years for therapeutic services for victim-survivors of sexual violence, delivered through the Sexual Assault Support Service and Laurel House; $370,000 a year to fund the core operations of the Tasmanian Family and Sexual Violence Alliance itself in 2025–26 and 2026–27; and $500,000 in one-off funding to continue Family Violence Intervention Programs for perpetrators within Corrections and Rehabilitation.
The strongest case
A funding and reform trajectory that has genuinely grown
Judged across a decade rather than a single budget, the government's commitment has scaled with the problem: from $26 million over three years (2019–22) to $100 million over five years (2022–27), plus a further $83 million announced for 2026–27 alone — a trajectory of growth, not neglect. The electronic monitoring model is a genuine first for Australia; New South Wales has since adopted a similar approach. Jari's Law closes a real evidentiary gap: Tasmania previously had no mechanism guaranteeing that a death with a suspected family violence dimension would be independently examined, meaning systemic failures could go undocumented. Credit is due on a harder point too: a large share of the rise in recorded incidents is not straightforward evidence that violence itself is worsening at that rate. Family violence is chronically under-reported everywhere, and part of Tasmania's rising numbers reflects broader legal definitions, better police classification and, plausibly, more victim-survivors willing to come forward because the system responds. No government controls the underlying incidence of a crime that happens behind closed doors; it can fairly be judged only on whether the system it funds keeps pace with the demand that becomes visible to it.
The evidence
The visible demand has grown sharply. Tasmania Police recorded 5,856 family violence incidents in 2024–25, up from roughly 1,582 a decade earlier — an increase in the order of 250 per cent (approx.), even allowing for the reporting effects described above. Firearms feature in a rising share of that caseload: incidents involving a firearm rose from 69 in 2021–22 to 140 in 2024–25, an increase of 103 per cent, with a further 83 recorded in the first three quarters of 2025–26 alone. Sexual violence reporting has climbed even faster than family violence generally: analysis by the Tasmanian Family and Sexual Violence Alliance puts recorded sexual assault victims at around 199 in 2018, rising to 585 by 2023 — more than half of them children under 18 (approx.).
The rural gap
Outside the state's two cities, the specialist family violence sector is thin by the accident of geography, not by any single government's choice — but the government's job is to fund around that geography, and the record is mixed. The main dedicated outreach service covering Tasmania's north-west and west coast operates from just three towns — Devonport, Burnie and Zeehan — for a region stretching from Wynyard to Strahan and inland to the Central Highlands. National research on regional, rural and remote family violence, compiled by the Australian Institute of Family Studies, finds the pattern is not unique to Tasmania but is especially acute in small, dispersed states: longer waits for a crisis response, fewer refuge beds within reasonable driving distance, less anonymity for victim-survivors in small towns, and patchier mobile and internet coverage for the safety apps and hotlines the system increasingly relies on. On King Island and Flinders Island in Bass Strait, the nearest dedicated refuge is on the Tasmanian mainland, reachable only by air or sea — a step that risks leaving behind work, children's schooling and the very support network that might otherwise help keep a woman safe.
Recent capital investment in crisis accommodation has been real but concentrated. The Salvation Army's expanded McCombe House will support up to 120 women and children a year; the Hobart Women's Shelter is building 15 new self-contained apartments, expected to help a further 260 women and children annually. Both are in or near Hobart. Meanwhile the housing system that any woman leaving violence must ultimately rely on — public and transitional housing — is already saturated statewide: one in 86 Tasmanians received specialist homelessness assistance in 2023–24, a higher rate than the national average of one in 95, and 42 per cent of requests for medium-term or transitional housing went unmet that year, the single most requested and least available service type in the system (approx.). Domestic and family violence is the second most common reason Tasmanians seek that help, behind eviction crises, out of a Specialist Homelessness Services caseload of around 6,700 people statewide each year (approx.). For a woman in Zeehan, the practical meaning of that statistic is that even a successful escape from an immediate threat can end in a motel room, a car, or a return to the household she left, because there is nowhere else to go.
The critique
The specialist sector the government funds has told it directly, in successive budget submissions, that the response has not scaled with the demand. The Tasmanian Family and Sexual Violence Alliance's submission on the 2025–26 Budget states that reports of family violence rose by close to 70 per cent over five years and reports of sexual violence by around 180 per cent over the same period, while funding to specialist support services "has not shifted to match that demand." The Alliance's own analysis of 2024–25 budget allocations found Tasmania spending about $25.96 per person on dedicated family and sexual violence funding — the lowest rate of any Australian state, against $42.85 in Western Australia, $59.20 in Queensland and $114.15 in Victoria (approx.). As the Alliance's chief executive, Bree Klerck, put it in response to the 2025–26 Budget, "women are waiting far too long" for help, with sexual violence services reporting "significant wait times for survivors to access much needed trauma counselling."
Tasmania funds the response to family violence at close to the lowest rate per person of any state, while recording some of the highest rates of intimate partner violence in the country.
That gap shows up in specific, unglamorous ways: the Alliance reports lengthening waits for trauma counselling, women increasingly representing themselves in family violence court matters because specialist legal services are scarce, no dedicated program for Aboriginal women, and thin child and youth support for those who witness violence rather than experience it directly. None of this began with the current government — Tasmania's small tax base, dispersed population and historically underdeveloped non-government service sector predate Jeremy Rockliff by decades. But the pace of response to a documented, rising crisis is a choice governments make each budget, and on the sector's own figures — drawn from the same data the government itself publishes — that choice has not kept pace, even as total spending has grown in absolute terms.
The risk to the future
A widening gap between reform and reach
The sharpest warning in the data is the firearm trend: a 103 per cent rise in firearm-related family violence incidents in four years, outpacing the rise in family violence incidents overall, in a state with high rates of legal firearm ownership concentrated in exactly the rural areas furthest from a police or refuge response. Jari's Law now means every death where family violence is a suspected factor must go to a coronial inquest — the right reform, but one that will, over time, generate a documented record of whether service gaps and funding shortfalls contributed to deaths that a better-resourced system might have prevented. If the $83 million committed for 2026–27, and the funding pipeline behind it, does not close the per-person gap with other states and does not extend meaningfully beyond Hobart and Launceston, Tasmania risks entrenching a two-tier system: a strengthening justice response concentrated where the population already is, and a widening safety gap for the Tasmanians — on the west coast, the Highlands, the islands — for whom the nearest help is measured in hours, not minutes. Genuine reform on paper is only as good as the distance it can travel; the test of the next budget cycle is whether it finally reaches Zeehan as reliably as it reaches Hobart.