Understanding the funding landscape
In 2025, Safety Measures undertook a scoping project to review publicly available information about funding for specialist domestic and family violence (DFV) services in the Northern Territory, South Australia and Victoria. The aim was to assess whether existing public data could be used to estimate funding levels and develop recommendations for future work.
Why funding matters
Funding underpins the availability of workforce, infrastructure and service models in the specialist DFV sector. Understanding the funding landscape for specialist DFV services is critical for understanding how governments resource the sector and whether funding aligns with the realities of service demand.
What we learned
Governments across Australia report significant investments in domestic and family violence prevention and response, often amounting to billions of dollars. However, despite these headline figures, much of this funding is dispersed across housing, justice, policing, health and broader social service systems, making it difficult to identify how much reaches frontline specialist DFV services. Across all jurisdictions, our review identified three key barriers to understanding the true funding landscape for the specialist DFV sector: limited transparency of funding allocations, incomplete public reporting, and fragmented funding information spread across multiple sources.
Limited transparency across funding arrangements
The National Agreement on Social Housing and Homelessness (NASHH) and the National Partnership Agreement on Family, Domestic and Sexual Violence Responses are the two primary sources of Commonwealth funding for specialist DFV services. However, a significant proportion of specialist DFV service funding is administered through broader homelessness arrangements, making it difficult to identify how much funding there is specifically for specialist DFV services.
There is limited transparency about funding allocations under key bilateral agreements between the Commonwealth and state and territory governments. Public breakdowns of NASHH funding allocations were not available in the jurisdictions we reviewed. While national agreements specify aggregate funding contributions, these are not consistently tracked and reported across jurisdictions, making it difficult to attribute funding to specific sources.
Publicly available data does not provide a complete picture
“There is no clear, publicly available summary of the exact dollar investment…or of the supports and programs that investment actually funds.”
Although governments publicly report on investments to prevent and respond to domestic and family violence, this rarely distinguishes specialist DFV services from broader violence prevention, housing, justice and government initiatives. For example, the Australian Government's Investing in a Future Free from Gender-Based Violence in Australia report provides an overview of government investments under the National Plan to End Violence Against Women and Children, but it does not provide a comprehensive account of specialist DFV service funding or consistently separate specialist service funding from other investments.
Information about funding for Aboriginal Community Controlled Organisations, as well as funding administered directly by Federal Government agencies such as the Department of Social Services and the National Indigenous Australians Agency, is not consistently available at a jurisdictional level. Published information generally lacks the detail needed to understand funding for different types of specialist DFV services. As a result, there is insufficient publicly available information to develop a comprehensive estimate of specialist DFV service funding across jurisdictions.
Funding information is fragmented
Across all three jurisdictions, funding information is spread across budget papers, bilateral agreements, government reports, media releases and program announcements. Different sources often describe funding allocations in different ways, with multiple initiatives and funding streams aggregated together.
It is also difficult to identify ongoing baseline funding for specialist DFV services. Budget announcements typically focus on new initiatives or short-term investments, making it challenging to compare funding increases against existing investments and track funding over time.
What does this mean for our work?
This work reinforces the need for greater transparency and consistency in how specialist DFV service funding is reported.
Safety Measures recently contributed to the ANAO audit of public reporting on DFSV expenditure and supports the recommendations outlined in the Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence Commission's 2025 Yearly Report to Parliament including the development of a National Funding Mapping Framework to improve visibility of DFV funding and expenditure, alongside efforts to better understand unmet demand for specialist services and inform future investment decisions.
Safety Measures will continue to support initiatives that strengthen funding transparency, accountability and evidence-informed investment across the specialist DFV sector.
You can read more about our findings in our Specialist DFV Service Funding Estimation Scoping Project overview.