In 2008, Andrea Pickett left the man she had married, telling police and support workers that she feared for her life. Over the following year she took out a restraining order against him, watched him breach it, and repeatedly sought help from police and from women's shelters funded by the state government — at least one of which turned her away. In October 2009, he stabbed her to death outside a relative's home in Perth. The findings of State Coroner Alastair Hope, released on 28 June 2012, described a system in which the paperwork of protection existed but the protection itself did not (WA Coroner's Court, findings into the death of Andrea Pickett, 28 June 2012). Three days later, amid a string of family violence killings that included hers, the WA Ombudsman took on a new statutory duty: reviewing every death connected to family and domestic violence in the state. By March 2026, it had reviewed 237 of them.
What the government did
Western Australia's modern family and domestic violence policy grew out of that period. In July 2020, the McGowan government released Path to Safety, a ten-year, whole-of-government strategy to reduce family and domestic violence, backed initially by a $28.1 million support package funded through the state's COVID recovery plan (Government of Western Australia, Path to Safety: Western Australia's Strategy to Reduce Family and Domestic Violence 2020–2030, Jul-2020). A month later it committed $15.5 million to a two-year trial of GPS ankle monitoring for up to 100 high-risk offenders who had breached a family violence restraining order, run jointly by the Department of Justice and WA Police as part of a wider $52.3 million expansion of electronic monitoring across the justice system (Government of Western Australia, "Family and domestic violence offenders face GPS tracking", 18-Aug-2020).
Roger Cook's government, in office since June 2023, has extended that program rather than replaced it. In September 2024 it committed $5 million over two years to statewide education campaigns on coercive control — the pattern of monitoring, isolation, intimidation and financial control that often precedes physical violence — alongside earlier amendments to the Restraining Orders Act 1997 that wrote the patterned, cumulative nature of coercive control into the legal definition of family violence for the first time (Government of Western Australia, "New education campaign to raise awareness of coercive control", 30-Sep-2024). Unlike New South Wales and Queensland, which have each created a standalone criminal offence of coercive control, WA chose a slower, staged path that starts with recognition and training before any prosecution power follows. Funding has kept rising alongside it: the 2026-27 State Budget added a further $106 million for family and domestic violence prevention and response, taking cumulative investment since 2017 to $818 million, including a $45 million boost to refuges and safe houses funding five new services under development in Albany, Bunbury, Narrogin, Newman and Peel, a $3 million extension of the Family Violence Restraining Order shuttle-conferencing program, and $3.4 million for a "Leave Safe, Stay Safe" program at Bandyup Women's Prison and Greenough Regional Prison (Government of Western Australia, 2026-27 State Budget, Safe and Inclusive Communities overview, May-2026).
The strongest case
A government that has kept building on a genuinely hard problem
Put the government's defence at its strongest, because parts of it are genuine. Western Australia is one of the largest subnational jurisdictions on Earth, larger than Western Europe; its remote communities can sit hundreds of kilometres from the nearest police station or refuge, and its economy runs on a fly-in fly-out mining workforce whose long absences and short, high-pressure returns are widely linked by frontline services to elevated family violence risk. Successive governments have not stood still on this problem: the McGowan government's ten-year Path to Safety strategy and GPS monitoring trial, and the Cook government's coercive-control definitional reform and record 2026-27 funding, add up to $818 million in cumulative investment since 2017 — a growing, sustained commitment rather than a one-off announcement. WA has also done something many governments avoid: it funds an independent Ombudsman to keep reviewing its own family violence fatalities and publishing what it finds, including findings that embarrass the government of the day. A state that commissions the report that criticises it is, on that measure, more accountable than most.
The evidence
The primary record shows both rising reported demand and a response system that, by the state's own independent reviewer, is not reliably reaching the people most at risk. Police-recorded assault victims in WA reached 47,045 in 2024, the highest figure in the Australian Bureau of Statistics' thirty-year time series for the state and 10 per cent up on 2023; of those, 30,451 people, or 65 per cent, were victims of family and domestic violence specifically — one of the highest FDV shares of any Australian jurisdiction reporting comparable data (Australian Bureau of Statistics, Recorded Crime — Victims, Australia, 2024). Family and domestic violence incidents reported to police and referred to the Department of Communities rose from 49,198 in 2019-20 to around 53,841 in 2023-24 (approx.), a caseload increase the department attributes partly to greater willingness to report, but one the same frontline system still has to carry (Office of the Auditor General Western Australia, Report 17: 2020-21, 11-Mar-2021; WA Department of Communities family and domestic violence data, 2023-24).
The clearest evidence of a system under strain comes from the Ombudsman's own analysis, tabled in Parliament on 19 March 2026, of the 237 family and domestic violence deaths it has reviewed since 2012. It found that 61 per cent of those victims had been assessed by police or another agency as at high risk of serious harm before they died, yet the coordinated, multi-agency response designed for exactly that group of cases was triggered in only 2.5 per cent of them — roughly one case in forty. Almost a quarter of the risk-assessment questions police are required to ask at a family violence callout were left blank or recorded as "unknown", meaning decisions with life-and-death consequences were routinely made on incomplete information. The report made nine recommendations, covering how risk is assessed and recorded, how high-risk cases are escalated, and how the system holds perpetrators accountable (Ombudsman Western Australia, A Review of Family and Domestic Violence in Western Australia, tabled 19-Mar-2026). None of that is a funding problem in the narrow sense; it is a process and data problem inside a system the state has spent hundreds of millions of dollars building.
The gap in remote WA
The burden of that gap falls hardest away from Perth. Regional hospital admissions data compiled by the injury-prevention body Injury Matters WA, drawing on WA Department of Health figures for 2018 to 2022, found the Kimberley's hospitalisation rate for assault was around 1,293 per cent higher than the state rate over that period — roughly thirteen times as high — with the Pilbara and Goldfields also recording rates multiple times the state average (approx.; Injury Matters WA, "Violence and Injury" regional fact sheet, citing WA Department of Health data, 2018-22). Aboriginal women, who make up a far larger share of the population in these regions than in Perth, are known nationally to be hospitalised for family violence at many times the rate of non-Indigenous women; WA's own regional data is consistent with that pattern, not an exception to it. Yet the state's frontline response is thinnest exactly where the need is greatest: the 47 government-funded refuges and safe houses statewide have capacity for only 324 people a night between them, spread across a state larger than Western Europe (Government of Western Australia, Department of Communities, "Family and Domestic Violence Women's Refuges" service page). WA's specialist family violence courts, which allow a magistrate to hear the criminal and civil sides of a case together, sit at Joondalup, Rockingham, Fremantle, Midland, Armadale, Perth and the Barndimalgu Court in Geraldton — a Perth-metropolitan-heavy footprint with no equivalent specialist court in the Kimberley or the Pilbara, the two regions with the highest recorded family violence hospitalisation rates in the state. The Auditor General found in March 2021 that the Department of Communities did not reliably collect data on unmet demand or waitlist times for the services it funds, so it could not say with confidence how large the shortfall in any region actually was — only that a children's counselling waitlist uncovered in one case study ran two to three months (Office of the Auditor General Western Australia, Report 17: 2020-21, 11-Mar-2021).
The critique
None of this erases what the reform program has achieved: a legal definition that finally names coercive control, a funded GPS monitoring capability that did not exist before 2020, and a budget line that has grown every year since 2017. But seventeen years after Andrea Pickett was turned away from a state-funded shelter, and fourteen years after her death helped prompt the creation of the Ombudsman's fatality-review function, that same review's March 2026 finding — that only one high-risk case in forty gets the coordinated response the system is designed to deliver — shows the failure has narrowed rather than closed. It has moved from "will the shelter take her" to "will the system even notice she is at risk", which is a smaller gap on paper but not a smaller one for the people who still fall into it.
A government can fund a system for seventeen years without ensuring it notices the people that system was built to protect.
Coercive control can still be prosecuted only as an aggravating pattern attached to other offences, not as a stand-alone crime, two years after New South Wales' offence commenced and roughly a year after Queensland's took effect. WA's phased, education-first approach may yet prove the more durable model — laws written ahead of a system's ability to investigate them tend to produce prosecutions that fail — but it currently means a partner who never lays a hand on a victim commits no specific offence in this state. And a department that still could not measure its own unmet demand five years after its auditor said so cannot credibly claim to be matching resources to need in the parts of Western Australia where the Ombudsman's and the hospital data both say the need is highest.
The risk to the future
A widening gap between the paperwork and the protection
Recorded family and domestic violence has risen for years while the coordinated-response rate for the highest-risk cases sits near zero; those two lines cannot keep moving apart without more people dying in the space between them. The risk is sharpest in remote and Aboriginal communities, where a shortage of refuge beds, health data and frontline workers means an at-risk woman is furthest from help exactly where WA's own hospitalisation data says she is most likely to need it. If the coercive-control reform stalls at education rather than reaching a criminal offence, and if refuge and caseworker funding keeps arriving as one-off boosts rather than the indexed, needs-based funding the Auditor General has been asking for since 2021, the next Ombudsman fatality review will simply add more names to a list that already runs to 237. The measure of success from here is not another funding announcement; it is whether the coordinated-response rate the Ombudsman found in March 2026 has actually moved by the time the next one is tabled.