We donβt need another Royal Commission. We need political courage to act
In the wake of recent femicides, calls for a Royal Commission into domestic, family, and sexual violence are growing louder. But if a Royal Commission is a factβfinding exercise, then the uncomfortable truth is this: there is very little left to find.
We already know this violence is a crisis. We know the patterns of escalation, when women and children are most at risk, that separation and access to weapons increase danger, that safe, stable housing is critical to recovery, and that institutions regularly encounter warning signs and fail to act decisively.
The question is not what we are trying to discover, but why, after decades of inquiries, reviews and reform commitments, there is still a failure to act on what we already know.
Part of the answer lies in how domestic, family, and sexual violence is still culturally framed.
Violence in the home is routinely treated as private rather than public, inevitable rather than preventable, a tragic feature of personal relationships, rather than a predictable outcome of policy choices in housing, justice, policing, and social support.
When violence is understood as private, responsibility is not so quietly shifted back onto victims. When it is understood as inevitable, prevention becomes optional. Governments can express concern without absorbing accountability. Deaths are mourned but rarely framed as endβtoβend failures of systems designed to protect.
This logic also explains why the burden of action so often falls back onto survivors and communities. As my colleague Cecelia McKenzie has said, what we need is _outrage that leads somewhere_. Instead, a sector of dedicated individuals is expected to maintain a constant state of urgency; endlessly outraged, endlessly articulate, endlessly required to explain, justify, and reβprosecute a crisis that is already well documented. This allows governments to wait for the temperature to drop.
Anger can be powerful. But no system should rely on exhaustion to function. No prevention strategy should depend on people remaining permanently furious in order to be effective.
Australia has shown that decisive action is possible when violence is treated as a public safety issue rather than a private tragedy. After the Port Arthur massacre, the response did not end with an inquiry; it led to swift, coordinated gun law reform. The lesson was not that inquiries save lives, but that political will and implementation do.
And yet, nearly a decade after a 2015 Senate committee report recommended a national firearms registry, Australia still does not have one fully operational. The project has drifted between departments, delayed by administrative churn and diluted ambition. At one point, a senior official reportedly described the registry as being βabout the weapon, not the perpetratorβ a line that reveals how deeply the privateβviolence logic persists.
In a domestic and family violence context, firearms are not neutral objects. They are tools of coercion, control, and lethal risk. A national registry is not bureaucratic housekeeping; it is a prevention mechanism that could stop women and children from being killed in their own homes. The failure to prioritise it is not an evidence gap. It is a political choice.
The same pattern is visible in housing. Australia has been in a housing crisis for years. The evidence is unequivocal: access to safe, stable housing is central to escaping violence and rebuilding lives. Without it, women are forced to choose between homelessness and harm, and children are forced into instability that compounds trauma. Yet housing continues to be treated as adjacent to violence prevention, not core to it.
Funding matters. Services are underβresourced and stretched thin. But funding alone will not solve this crisis if the underlying systems remain unchanged. Money poured into broken structures will not produce safety. What is required is a shift in how responsibility is allocated, risk is understood, and prevention is operationalised across institutions.
Calls for a Royal Commission risk reinforcing the very pattern we need to break. Recent history shows that inquiries do not guarantee timely implementation. The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse and the Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability confirmed harms that were already known. Years later, many of their most significant recommendations remain stalled, partial, or inconsistently applied.
Survivors are still waiting. Services remain under strain. Responsibility has been fragmented across jurisdictions, while accountability has thinned with time. In these cases, the presence of a Royal Commission did not create urgency. In many respects, it displaced it.
Another inquiry may produce another authoritative report. It will not resolve a failure that is fundamentally operational rather than diagnostic.
Royal Commissions are appropriate when facts are hidden. This violence is not hidden. It is visible, measurable, and tragically consistent.
What we need now is not more evidence, nor outrage without direction. We need political courage that outlasts an election cycle: courage to complete the national firearms registry with a clear understanding of its role in preventing domestic homicide; courage to treat housing as violence prevention infrastructure; courage to reform systems, not just fund their edges.
The question is not whether we understand this crisis well enough. It is whether we are finally prepared to act as if violence in the home is neither private nor inevitable, but a public responsibility we have chosen, for too long, to avoid.
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domestic and family violenceroyal commission
by Katherine Berney
5 days ago
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