Ten years of coordinated prevention practice across Melbourne’s south east has shown what stops violence before it starts. The Second Action Plan under the National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children 2022 to 2032, now being finalised, is the opportunity to put that practice to work nationally.
Women’s Health in the South East (WHISE) coordinates the Promoting Respect and Equity Together (PRET) Partnership, close to 40 organisations working across ten local government areas and 1.56 million people. We lodged our submission to the Second Action Plan consultation on 27 July 2026 on behalf of that partnership. This statement sets out how we read the decisions taken at National Cabinet on 26 August, and what we believe the Plan can now do with them.
What was agreed is welcome
There is real substance in the commitments made. The recognition of online harms as a national priority reflects what practitioners have raised for years about algorithm-driven content and the ground it takes from prevention work with young people. Bringing alcohol-related harm prevention inside the Second Action Plan treats a structural driver of violence as prevention business rather than as another portfolio’s problem. The work now underway on media reporting standards, the new National Family and Domestic Violence Risk Assessment Framework, and the establishment of a national Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peak body under Our Ways, Strong Ways, Our Voices are all steps this sector has sought and should be recognised as significant.
What a decade of regional practice offers
Each of those commitments now needs to be delivered somewhere, by someone. That is where the work already built in our region has something to contribute.
The commitment to ensure respectful relationships education in schools is effective has a tested answer. The Critical Friends Network trains local practitioners with prevention and health promotion expertise as strategic advisors to school leadership. Each active practitioner sustained support to between six and ten schools, and 42 community leaders were supported to embed Respectful Relationships across our region. It extends implementation support into schools that no departmental team could reach at that scale.
The commitment to implement the risk assessment framework in the health sector gives states and territories two years to align. Alignment at that scale is a workforce development task. Victoria’s twelve women’s health services have operated as the prevention workforce development infrastructure for more than a decade, building not only their own specialist staff but the capability of the much larger workforce across councils, community health, schools, sport and community organisations.
The commitment to develop practice standards for working with children who have experienced or been exposed to violence reaches into early childhood, where whole-of-service programs in our region have embedded gender equality and family violence readiness into the everyday practice of early learning services, at the life stage where gender norms first take shape.
Our Partnership has also developed the Framework for Embedding Lived Experience in the Primary Prevention of Gender-Based Violence, the first framework of its kind developed specifically for the prevention context, and now being put into practice through a regional community of practice.
None of this needs to be invented. It needs to be named, resourced and connected.
What we are asking
The Plan is now moving to validation, the stage where priorities, actions and implementation arrangements are tested before it is finalised. We are asking that two things are carried into it.
- Name primary prevention as a distinct priority, with gender equality as the foundational prevention strategy. On 7 August, the Women and Women’s Safety Ministerial Council reported that consultation showed strong support for a nationally coordinated approach focused on prevention, listed first among the priorities people asked for. Carrying that finding through would give the national prevention effort a clear home, its own outcomes and a workforce strategy to match.
- Fund the implementation layer, including regional prevention partnerships and the place-based leadership of local government. Standards and frameworks need a workforce to land on. Coordination is what turns local flexibility into a coherent national effort rather than uneven local delivery. Prevention will otherwise be delivered wherever the infrastructure happens to already exist, and we would like it delivered everywhere.
We also ask that the sector continues to be engaged through validation, so that the people who deliver prevention help shape what the Plan asks of them.
What we are doing next
We are writing to the Minister for Social Services and the Assistant Minister for the Prevention of Family Violence to offer the models, evaluations and practice tools developed across our region. We are continuing to work with our partners, with the Women’s Health Services Network and with statewide agencies on a shared response. And we will keep making the case that prevention is generational work that compounds when it is funded to last.
A future free from gendered violence is possible. The evidence for that is not aspirational. It is sitting in ten years of practice across ten councils, and it is ready for the Plan that asks for it.
Read the media release: Ending violence in a generation means funding the work that takes a generation – WHISE
