Over four days in July, two women, Lavanya Chappa and Jana Armstrong, and two girls, Layla Jeffery and an unnamed 17-year-old Yolŋu girl, were killed, allegedly murdered by men known to them.
According to the Australian Femicide Watch, they are counted among the 38 women killed and 17 children killed so far this year.
Their alleged murders coincide with allegations the Liberal National Party (LNP) is hiding domestic and family violence (DFV) reports from public scrutiny and abandoning its own taskforce’s recommendations. Meanwhile, it has announced tens of millions in dollars in cuts to DFV prevention. Recently released 2026–27 budget papers reveal plans to cut funds by $38.5 million.
Further, Queensland’s budget papers from the previous financial year reveal the LNP failed to spend $22.7 million of allocated DFV prevention funding. This brings the real cut to $61.2 million over two years.
By contrast, the same budget papers revealed the LNP administration spent $50 million, over 2025–26, on advertising campaigns. The Australian Financial Review reported on July 19 that the $15.5 billion earmarked for the Olympic and Paralympic games is likely be an underestimation: $3.5 billion is slated for the cost of the athlete’s villages alone.
A pilot program designed to support victims escaping DFV into housing is among the programs slated to be scrapped.
When pressed about this on July 13, Amanda Camm, Minister for the Prevention of Domestic and Family Violence, offered her “sincere condolences” to Armstrong’s family before refusing to answer questions on why funding for pilot programs had been discontinued. She instead spoke about coercive control laws.
Camm is no stranger to media scrutiny, having been referred to the Crime and Corruption Commission earlier this year after revealing a previously undisclosed relationship with Olympics minister Tim Mander who, himself, has only just been cleared of misconduct.
Premier David Crisafulli also refused to answer questions about the cuts, saying that Camm was “working to unravel 10 years of failures”.
Burying reports
Camm said the LNP is “on track” to deliver on the Women’s Safety and Justice Taskforce’s 277 recommendations in the Hear Her Voice reports. But Margaret McMurdo, the former chair, fears that key recommendations have been abandoned.
That taskforce, commissioned by the former Annastacia Palaszczuk Labor government, was detailed to report on laws against coercive control — a pattern of conduct used by domestic violence offenders to dominate. It submitted recommendations in two reports over 2021 and 2022.
The taskforce received 700 submissions mostly from victim-survivors who drew on their lived experience of abuse. It suggested an independent supervisor be set up and resourced to oversee and report on the progress of the recommended changes and that reports be tabled in parliament within 14 days of receipt.
McMurdo said the LNP is no longer honouring its commitment to independent oversight. She was quoted in the July 15 Brisbane Times saying that “recommendations 88 and 89 [within the report] appear to be abandoned, despite the Minister saying that the Government is committed to implementing every recommendation”.
McMurdo said the implementation supervisor is “supposed to report directly to the relevant Minister — with reports tabled in parliament within 14 days — this has not been done. The new group formed to take on the role has not done it either”.
The LNP government claims to have replaced the oversight role with an advisory panel within government.
But a leaked document obtained by The Guardian showed the LNP set up a working group with DFV victim-survivors only to decline to publish the results. Sources told The Guardian the report gave detailed and varied criticisms of the Queensland Police Service (QPS) responses and called for it to be subjected to civilian oversight.
Such calls, including for an institutional overhaul, are not new and neither is the police’s resistance to being scrutinised. Former Queensland Police Union CEO Ian Leavers slammed the Hear Her Voice reports as “another woke, out-of-touch report by a retired judge that overreaches where it pertains to the police”.
Despite the Australian Bureau of Statistics recording an 8% rise in family and domestic violence offenders over 2024–25, compared to 2023–24, the QPS defended its decision to close a specialist DFV vulnerable persons command unit, after a review said DFV was not core business.
Blaming victims
While many mainstream MPs are ignoring the shocking statistics, One Nation’s Pauline Hanson is blaming victim-survivors, saying domestic violence is a “two-way street”.
One Nation’s Barnaby Joyce followed that up with his appeal to men to “be cool” and to be like James Bond and walk away if “provoked”. (Bond is the man with a license to kill mostly people of colour in their country of origin on behalf of English secret service, when he’s not treating women as sexual playthings.)
Even Queensland’s shadow treasurer Shannon Fentiman told 4BC Brisbane that primary DFV prevention consisted of “identifying boys who can’t regulate their emotions”. Her suggestion that men are a bad mood away from resorting to abuse is wrong. In reality, acute emotional activation, much like alcohol, is only risky for men who believe males are entitled to control women.
The evidence is clear that women are far more likely to experience violence from men than vice-versa and women who experience abuse face many barriers to leaving. Women’s use of violence is often related to self-defence or as retaliation to being badly treated.
The mainstream parties and QPS’ refusal to adequately respond to male violence against women, which is worsening as the cost-of-living and housing pressures intensify, is a feature of an oppressive, patriarchal, unjust system — capitalism.
Just as capitalism rewards the exploitation of workers by bosses, patriarchy rewards the subjugation of women by men. Women’s unpaid domestic labour, including shouldering most of the burden of reproducing and raising the next generation of workers, means women have to pull off a double shift. This is the bedrock of women’s oppression and male violence enforces this super-exploitation and inequality.
Hanson’s “two-way street” comment lends credibility not only to the QPS and mainstream politicians, but it underpins the institution of patriarchal capitalism in which men’s abuse of women is normalised.