Women’s Health in the South East approaches every State Budget from a clear position. We are the place-based, intersectional, primary prevention agency for women, girls and gender-diverse people across Victoria’s Southern Metropolitan Region. Our work sits at the intersection of health, gender equity, and the prevention of gender-based violence, grounded in the social determinants — the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, learn, work and age — because those determinants are where women’s health is made or broken long before it reaches a clinic. Alongside the eleven other women’s health services across Victoria, our role is to translate state-level health and social policy into the textures of real community life, so that all women thrive, our communities are well, and our economy is productive.

Read against that position, the 2026/27 Victorian Budget marks meaningful continuation and meaningful new investment. We acknowledge the Government’s recognition of the women’s health sector as core public infrastructure, and we welcome the substantive new commitments named within the Budget — particularly those that move the system toward the integrated, prevention-oriented architecture the evidence has long called for.

Among the commitments WHISE recognises as significant are the:

• Continuing rollout of dedicated Women’s Health Clinics and Sexual and Reproductive Health Hubs, with five new clinics scheduled to open in late 2026 to provide specialised care for conditions including pelvic pain and menopause
• The $10 million investment in preventative sexual health, including funding for peer-led services and women’s health organisations
• The $4 million establishment of the Victorian Women’s Health Research Institute, which has the potential to close the long-standing gap between gendered health research and clinical practice and
• The dedicated investment in First Peoples-led health infrastructure, including the Wathaurong Dreaming Project and the Aboriginal Family Violence Refuge in Horsham.

Read together, these commitments describe a system beginning to take the architecture of women’s health seriously.

The opportunity ahead is to ensure this architecture connects — and connects to community.

Place-based women’s health services such as WHISE, act as the connective tissue that translates state-level investment into outcomes in local communities, applying an intersectional lens across the social determinants and embedding primary prevention in the everyday systems that shape women’s lives. Independent evaluation finds that WHISE’s work returns $3.15 in community benefit for every dollar invested — not as an outlier result, but as the predictable return on place-based, evidence-informed prevention done well.

We hold particular commitments to those whose health needs have been least well served by the system as it has historically been designed. Women with disabilities, women from migrant and refugee communities, First Nations women, women managing chronic and complex conditions, LGBTIQ+ women, and women in outer metropolitan and growth-corridor communities have all carried a disproportionate share of the system’s failures. The Inquiry into Women’s Pain made this visible. Many of the women who contributed to the Inquiry came from precisely these communities across the south-east, and they did so on the understanding that the system would listen and respond. WHISE’s My Body, My Voice project, co-designed with Women with Disabilities Victoria and the Butterfly Foundation, contributed eleven evidence-based recommendations to the Inquiry, and we are now working across the region to support implementation in place.

Looking forward

The next horizon lies in moving from continuation to consolidation — from a year-by-year settlement to a multi-year framework that allows the women’s health system to plan, partner and deliver at the scale the evidence calls for. Three points of focus would do particular work. First, resourcing the implementation of the Inquiry into Women’s Pain recommendations across the regions where the contributing communities live, with regional women’s health services positioned as the lead translation partners. Second, embedding the new Women’s Health Research Institute in genuine partnership with place-based women’s health services, so that research is grounded in community evidence and findings flow back into practice. Third, treating the architecture of women’s health, gender equity and the prevention of gender-based violence as a single integrated system rather than a collection of programs — a system in which prevention, response, research and community advocacy reinforce one another across the social determinants.

WHISE looks forward to continuing our partnership with government on our shared commitment to a women’s health system that meets the evidence and meets the community where it is. The community has done the work of contributing evidence and lived experience. The women’s health sector has done the work of building the regional, place-based infrastructure that translates policy into practice. The question now is what we build, together, across the years ahead — so that every woman in Victoria’s south-east has the conditions she needs to thrive, our communities are well, and our economy reflects the full participation of the women who help build it.

Stay tuned

WHISE will soon release our gender analysis of the 2026 Victorian State Government Budget.

For further information contact

Kit McMahon, CEO, WHISE