Dead certain. The ledger showing how Australia fails its women

While 34 women have been killed by their partners so far this year, our Government turns a blind eye by carefully choosing which atrocities to focus on. Andrew Brown The first in a series addressing the scourge of domestic violence.

Today, somewhere in Australia, a writer named Sherele Moody is updating a notebook. He is not a government official. It receives no government funding. It does this because the Australian government has decided that it is not its responsibility to count the women killed by men in this country as they die.

The Australian Femicide Monitor project exists because the government won’t keep records.

As of last week, 34 women are expected to die in 2026.

The year is not half over yet.

Death toll remained silent

A death toll you can’t keep is a death toll you can’t keep. This is not administrative oversight. This is a policy. This policy is the subject of this series.

Australia has no shortage of information about violence against women. It has decades of investigations, forensic experts’ findings, state royal commissions, ten-year national plans and ministerial task forces. In April 2024, the prime minister declared a national emergency, convened the National Cabinet and appeared before the cameras and said the deaths of women were a crisis that required action.

The year ended with the deaths of 101 women. It rose from 74 the previous year. The year before that was 56.

This series is not about the failure to solve this problem. It’s about something colder. Australia did not fail. It was successful. Over two decades, governments of both colors have built a political system for managing this crisis that turns suffering into procedure, absorbs public pressure without unleashing it, and ensures that no individual, no institution, and no minister has to respond in a particular way to a particular death with particular consequences.

The machine is working. Women continue to die inside.

Thousands marched to call for an end to domestic violence

To understand how this machine works, consider two moments involving the same Prime Minister.

On the night of December 14 last year, two ISIS-linked gunmen opened fire on families gathered at Bondi Beach to celebrate Hanukkah. Fifteen people were killed. This was Australia’s worst terrorist attack since Port Arthur. Anthony Albanese appeared before the cameras within a few hours.

“We will eliminate this,” he said.

The 2026 federal budget allocates $604.2 million in response. Of this amount, $131.1 million is for the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, whose interim report the government has accepted in its entirety, and $124 million is for the security of the Jewish community.

Five months later, a Hobart radio host named Christie Hayes asked Albanese about the murders of the women. Four people were allegedly killed in domestic violence incidents in four days. A royal commission petition signed by more than 90,000 Australians. What was the government planning to do?

“What does the royal commission do apart from funding lawyers?” he said.

This is not a contradiction. This is a policy. In Australia, whose death causes a national reckoning and whose death provokes a press release is a precise and measurable expression of this.

The numbers make this visible. 15 people were killed in Bondi. In 2024 alone, 101 women were killed by men who knew them. Two women die this way every week. This means fifteen people dying every seven and a half weeks. A program equivalent to Bondi, year after year, decade after decade, without a royal commission, without an emergency budget, without a prime minister saying he’s going to scrap it.

The difference is not the scale of death. The difference is in the lobby.

lobby effect

The Jewish community in Australia numbers approximately 117,000 people. Australian Jews are represented by the Executive Council, the Australia-Israel and Jewish Affairs Council, the Zionist Federation of Australia and related organizations with documented access to both major parties at the highest levels. When 15 Australian Jews were murdered in Bondi, this community had the political infrastructure to ensure the response was appropriate to the horror.

Women killed by their husbands do not have such an infrastructure. They got Sherele Moody to update a ledger that the government refused to keep. Fair Agenda has Daisy Gardener, who points out that the same budget that found $604.2 million for the antisemitism response found nothing to increase funding for domestic violence services.

There are women waiting up to three months for accommodation in crisis shelters in New South Wales. There is a crisis line whose demand has increased by 3000 percent since it was built and new financing was not available last week. There is Moody, the founder of the Red Heart Movement, who wants to meet Albanese before his interview. He didn’t sit down with her. he said MWM:

I really think the Prime Minister has no idea how angry, upset and exhausted women are.

This is the first in a series; The second part aims to dispel public myths about what domestic violence looks like. Many Australians are still waiting for a bruise to appear before they believe it. Coercive control and financial dominance occur long before the fist is raised. Hannah Clarke had never seen a punch coming. The system that was supposed to protect him did not do so.

The third part will dock this system. The police record the call and close the case. How courts treat past violence as background rather than evidence. Institutions that record the danger and submit the documents. The system is not broken. It does exactly what a chronically underfunded, politically abandoned system does. Processes cases. Some women do not survive the procedure.

The fourth part will go to where the crisis was at its worst and most consistently erased. Indigenous women are dying at rates that would be staggering in any other population. Instead they create an asterisk in the data. Community-led interventions that work are under-resourced. This is not an oversight. This is a model.

Finally, we will establish the existence of a Royal Commission with federal subpoena powers and legislative obligations attached to its findings. Victoria’s 2016 commission led to real reform. South Australia submitted 136 recommendations and the government accepted seven. The difference between these results is what happens to institutions that ignore the findings. Not another review. A showdown.

One hundred and one women in 2024. Fifteen dead in Bondi. The government knows exactly what it is like to treat mass shootings as a national emergency. The information was revealed with named dollar figures, a Royal Commission and a prime minister using the word destroy.

Meanwhile, Sherele Moody’s book continues to grow.

International Women’s Day. Never come close to equality or close to losing it.