Why $702 million won't keep women safe

This week, the federal government announced much-needed funding of $702 million to tackle domestic violence in Australia, which disproportionately impacts women and children.

Under the new funding package, the federal government will commit $351million, and the states and territories are expected to match this with another $351 million.

I support that, 1000%!

Having said that, my observations of how such funds get frittered away worries me that very little of this $702 million will actually make it to the front-line services that do the heavy lifting on preventing domestic violence and supporting the victims of it.

What women who find themselves in situations like this need the most are alternatives – a place to live, maybe even the opportunity to stay where they live and means to support themselves and their children in the short to medium term.

We have to ensure that we have this infrastructure ready, and that women know how to access them. Victims also need quick and effective intervention by police and courts, who must have the resources and powers to keep the abuser at a distance (this is critical, and we – governments – constantly fail at this most critical task).

Instead, what I see again and again, is the money being siphoned off by the ‘talk talk’ industry, ie, activist organisations who will do the following:

• Create reports and studies that gather (digital) dust
• Run social media campaigns with no meaningful purpose or output measure
• Act as a branding vehicle (good will hunting) for the organisation’s executives
• Find tangential reasons to further social media campaigns on their other pet issues – identity politics, colonisation, hate speech, and hating on the right wing.

Case in point: Respect Victoria – an agency Victorians fund to the tune of $9 million per year to prevent violence against women.

You may remember it from a January media statement of mine in which I called out its ‘decolonise your booklist’ campaign to mark Australia Day.

Even back then, I had asked why Respect Victoria was wading into the highly contentious ‘decolonisation’ debate when it already had a very big and difficult issue to tackle – violence against women.

Today, I will take a deeper dive into Respect Victoria’s operations for you.

Respect Victoria’s mission is to ‘prevent violence from occurring in the first place, by changing the conditions that drive it’. A bit ‘Bob Hawkish’, but ok let's ride with the good sentiment. However, if you are thinking that this involves building, operating or supporting infrastructure or services that support women – you don’t really understand the Victorian government.

No, Respect Victoria’s evidence-informed primary prevention work includes:

• driving quality, sustained uptake of prevention work across the state
• building knowledge and evidence about what works to prevent violence
• keeping prevention on the policy and public agenda
• supporting social change and educating the community that violence is preventable.

In short, they do not implement a single program or intervention.

They ‘talk talk’, that’s literally all they do!

I’ll now share how taxpayers’ money – your and my money – actually gets spent by looking at Respect Victoria’s Annual Report for 2022-23, which you can download from here.

Let’s start with how it spent the roughly $9 million it received from taxpayers last year.

The largest component of Respect Victoria’s expenditure last year was on salaries, which amounted to 57% of its total expenditure.

But that is not the worst part.

The worst part is that more than quarter of this money – more than $1.26 million – was siphoned off in wages by the organisation’s 6 executives and senior staff.

So, the top executive at an organisation that doesn’t run a single program or service is between $320,000 and $340,0000.

And what did this highly-paid Respect Victoria management actually achieve in terms of measurable outcomes?

It published 3 (yes you read that correctly, I do mean 3) reports on family violence, all of which were commissioned to other organisations. Meaning no research was conducted in-house by Respect Victoria.

Other than that, it dispensed some advice to a few committees and governments (a good branding exercise for the 6 executives), partnered with this or that organisation, and ran two social media campaigns to promote the idea ‘respect is a good thing’.

Want to know how much these 2 social media campaigns cost you? Nearly a million bucks!

Now, the Annual Report claims that the first campaign reached an estimated 31% of all Victorians over the age of 18, and second about 9,00,000 Victorians.

If you are like me, your bull shit detector must be blowing its head off on this one!

Afterall, what does ‘reach’ actually mean?

Only, those familiar with social media ‘speak’ know that to ‘reach’ someone on social media means nothing. You can just pay Facebook for your content to appear on people’s newsfeeds.

What really matters is how many people engaged with your content – let alone changed their thinking or their behaviour in any way.

The report is strategically silent on this metric.  

Here’s why I don’t think Respect Victoria is achieving much engagement on social media.

I visited its Facebook page and found that since 1 July, Respect Victoria has posted all of 18 posts (that is just about 2 posts per week).

Worse, on average its posts received between 10 and 15 likes. (The highest number of likes on any of its posts was 55). I know. Stop laughing!

I don’t know about you but if it is costing Victorian taxpayers $9million to get 3 reports and 55 likes, the $702 million will not go a long way in preventing family violence.

If we are serious about combatting domestic violence, we have to start by cutting out grifters like Respect Victoria from the supply chain by placing accountability measures for every dollar spent.

If not, we will just be failing the victims of domestic violence one more time.

#domesticviolence #violenceagainstwomen #keepingwomensafe #governmentgravytrain #womenssafety #bureacracy