Australia is at the halfway mark of a ten-year national plan that set out to end gender-based violence in one generation. Primary prevention is the only part of that plan that works on a generational time frame, and it is the part the Second Action Plan has not yet named.
Women’s Health in the South East (WHISE), which coordinates the Promoting Respect and Equity Together (PRET) Partnership of close to 40 organisations across ten local government areas and 1.56 million people, welcomes the attention and priority First Ministers gave to gender-based violence at National Cabinet on 26 August.
There is real substance in what was agreed. Online harms are now a national priority. Alcohol-related harm prevention has been brought inside the Second Action Plan, which treats a structural driver of violence as prevention business rather than as another portfolio’s problem. Work is underway on media reporting standards, on a new National Family and Domestic Violence Risk Assessment Framework, and on the establishment of a national Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peak body under Our Ways, Strong Ways, Our Voices.
The question now being asked across the sector and the parliament is whether Australia knows what all of this is achieving. More than a dozen crossbench MPs wrote to the Prime Minister this week seeking a statutory Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence Commission with the power to track implementation and audit spending, so that governments can demonstrate which interventions actually reduce harm.
WHISE supports better measurement, and adds one thing to it. Prevention cannot be assessed with the instruments currently used to judge it. Prevalence rates, homicide statistics and service demand are crisis indicators. They measure what the system failed to stop, not what prevention is achieving. If the next five years are judged on those numbers alone, prevention will appear to be failing at precisely the moment it is starting to work.
Prevention produces different evidence: shifts in attitudes and norms, changes in institutional practice, schools and workplaces and sporting clubs that operate differently than they did. Those changes are real, they are measurable, and they need a national measurement framework built for them.
The changing online environment makes the case sharper still. The Fix Our Feeds campaign is calling for social media algorithms to be opt-in, on the basis that young men and boys are being served content that positions women as the source of their grievances. The PRET Partnership’s submission cited that campaign in July, because our practitioners see the effect in classrooms and youth settings across the south east.
Respectful relationships education is now competing with an algorithm. National Cabinet has committed to ensuring that education is effective, and effectiveness in that environment requires two things at once: legislative accountability for platforms, and sustained, skilled prevention work in the schools and communities where young people are.
That second part already exists in our region. The Critical Friends Network trains local practitioners as strategic advisors to school leadership on Respectful Relationships, with each practitioner supporting between six and ten schools and 42 community leaders supported to embed the work. Victoria’s twelve women’s health services have operated as prevention workforce development infrastructure for more than a decade, which is the capability every jurisdiction will need to align health services to the new risk assessment framework within two years.
“Ending gender-based violence in a generation is the right ambition, and it commits us to funding the work that takes a generation,” said Kit McMahon, Chief Executive Officer, WHISE.
“Right now a fourteen year old boy is getting hundreds of messages a day about what women are for, and a teacher has one lesson. Prevention is how we change that balance. We have spent ten years building the infrastructure that does it across ten councils, it is evaluated, and it is ready for a plan that asks for it.”
As the Second Action Plan moves to validation, WHISE and the PRET Partnership are asking that primary prevention is named as a distinct priority with gender equality as its foundation, that the implementation layer is funded including regional prevention partnerships and the place-based leadership of local government, and that prevention is measured with a framework built for prevention.
The PRET Partnership lodged its submission on 27 July 2026 on behalf of close to 40 organisations, including councils, health services, legal and family services, Aboriginal Community Controlled Organisations, multicultural, ethno-specific and faith-based organisations, universities and government departments.
