Part 3: Creating the conditions for effective national primary prevention impact

Primary prevention requires a holistic approach involving programs that engage individuals and communities; whole-of-setting approaches in organisations and institutions and bold policy and law reform. It works across communities, organisations and society in settings where people live, learn, work, socialise and play to change the social conditions that produce, drive, excuse, justify or even promote gendered violence.  

For primary prevention work to succeed, Australian governments need to do more than fund individual primary prevention programs. They also need to establish and sustain the supporting infrastructure that helps prevention activities work together in a way that reaches more people, avoids duplication, and allows adaptation and learning around what works to achieve lasting change. Individual projects and activities become much greater than the sum of their parts when they operate as part of a coordinated system (27).

This section focuses on the different mechanisms that make up this ‘primary prevention infrastructure’.  Strong prevention infrastructure includes sustained political leadership that prioritises ending gendered violence, workforce and sector development and mechanisms for monitoring, evaluation, evidence-building and coordination. As Australia’s only state-based agency dedicated to the prevention of family violence and all forms of violence against women, Respect Victoria plays a critical role in strengthening the prevention infrastructure in Victoria and beyond. Drawing on this expertise, we outline key areas for action to help ensure primary prevention activities are well supported, connected and able to achieve lasting impact.  

3.1 Design funding models to support prevention impact

Effective primary prevention depends on sustained investment. Beyond the quantum of funding, governments should also consider how prevention is funded. The majority of current primary prevention funding too short-term and insecure to achieve lasting, population-level change. Short-term funding arrangements are fundamentally misaligned with the long-term nature of primary prevention and undermine the ability of funded organisations to collaborate, evaluate, translate evidence, build capability and achieve long-term impact (16, 22).  

Respect Victoria’s forthcoming policy brief on effective primary prevention funding models highlights core principles to be included in future primary prevention funding. It notes that independent of project or quantum, all primary prevention funding should be long-term, sustainable and collaborative. 

Long-term investment reflects the evidence that preventing gendered violence takes time. Research indicates it takes 5-10 years of sustained action across the social ecology before population-level primary prevention outcomes and changes in the gendered drivers of violence are realised (60). Investment therefore must provide organisations with the required time to plan, implement and evaluate primary prevention interventions. The Second Action Plan should support longer-term investment through minimum five-year funding cycles for both the organisations that enable effective primary prevention and the initiatives that deliver it. This includes specialist prevention agencies, peak bodies, organisations providing implementation support and system leadership and primary prevention initiatives, including place-based and community-led approaches.  

Sustainable investment provides the certainty needed for primary prevention work across Australia to move beyond repeated grant rounds, short-term trials and pilot projects. A national dedicated primary prevention investment fund could reduce the significant time organisations delivering primary prevention interventions spend preparing grant applications, tenders and funding bids, allowing greater focus on delivery, continuous improvement and evaluation (61).

Collaborative funding approaches, including pooled or braided funding models, enable governments, the private sector, philanthropy and other partners to invest together in shared primary prevention priorities (22). By bringing together multiple funding partners, these models can better reflect the shared benefits of primary prevention, foster innovative approaches, support initiatives at the scale required – particularly in constrained fiscal environments – and maximise impact and return on investment. 

3.2 Strengthen governance, oversight and accountability  

We note that despite significant investment by Australian governments and a breadth of activity across jurisdictions, successive reports from oversight bodies and inquiries, including the Domestic Family and Sexual Violence Commission’s Yearly Report 2025, repeatedly call for stronger coordination and implementation architecture to ensure investment and activity result in meaningful change (17,7).  

Strong and representative governance arrangements are important to the effective design, implementation and oversight of National Plan actions. Prevention expertise across these arrangements is essential to ensure implementation is informed by the established primary prevention evidence-base along with prevention system design, implementation and practice knowledge. Without this, we risk fragmented or ineffective implementation and a failure to show demonstrable change as a result of the Second Action Plan.

Importantly, Respect Victoria recommends a review of the composition of current governance and advisory bodies including the National Evidence Technical Working Group and relevant stakeholder groups to ensure they include appropriate levels of primary prevention and monitoring and evaluation expertise. This expertise is crucial to ensure we can track and articulate progress towards ending gendered violence and show real and demonstrable impact at the end of the National Plan.

3.3 Improve nationwide coordination and quality assurance

As noted throughout this submission, to stop violence before it starts, prevention must be embedded across the systems, settings and institutions where people live, work, access services and socialise. Achieving this across a country as large and diverse as Australia requires strong national and state coordination. Prevention initiatives should be aligned across jurisdictions and mutually reinforcing to achieve population-level change.  

While significant reform has occurred over the past five years, the Second Action Plan presents an opportunity to better align and coordinate efforts across Commonwealth, state and local governments. Stronger national coordination will help connect place-based and community-led initiatives with broader state and nation-wide reform efforts, while supporting the adaptation of evidence-based approaches to local contexts. Respect Victoria welcomes the Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence Commission’s recommendation to establish an Implementation and Delivery Oversight Mechanism to strengthen alignment across government reform processes (17). As noted above, ensuring any such mechanism includes primary prevention expertise will be crucial for success.  

National coordination should also include formal mechanisms for implementation support, quality assurance and cross-jurisdictional knowledge sharing. Current opportunities to exchange implementation lessons, evidence and good practice are largely ad-hoc, resulting in duplication and placing the burden of translating evidence and maintaining implementation quality on individual organisations. A coordinated national approach should support jurisdictions to learn from one another, accelerate implementation and build national capability.

3.4 Foster partnerships and collaboration

The Second Action Plan should also strengthen partnerships and collaboration across key prevention settings and sectors, including workplaces, education, sport and media. In Victoria, regional women’s health services coordinate place-based primary prevention through nine prevention partnerships that support local collaboration, embed gender equality across communities and organisations, and connect local action with statewide priorities.  

Preventing violence requires stronger partnerships and collaboration beyond the prevention sector. Harmful influences such as gambling, alcohol, violent pornography and online misogyny operate through large and powerful global industries and cannot be addressed through community-based prevention alone. Most Australians will never engage directly in a primary prevention program, making partnerships with adjacent sectors and coordinated, system-level action and collaboration essential to achieving population-level change.

3.4 Strengthen data and evidence  

A strong prevention system relies on robust research, data collection and evaluation to ensure policy and practice remain evidence-informed, responsive to emerging trends and capable of continuous improvement. Australia’s prevention evidence base has been built over decades through academic inquiry and practice knowledge (11, 30). In a rapidly changing world, well-resourced data and evidence systems must continue to inform our approach to preventing violence across Australian communities (27).  

The Second Action Plan should prioritise sustained investment in research, monitoring, evaluation and national data infrastructure, with a more comprehensive focus on increasing resources to build evidence about effective primary prevention approaches. Evidence gaps and research priorities identified through the Australian National Research Agenda 2023-2028, Respect Victoria’s 2025 Three Year Report to Parliament, Maintain the Momentum, and other recent reviews provide a strong foundation for future prioritisation and investment. These include strengthening the evidence on how primary prevention can be more effectively integrated across early intervention, response and healing, and continuing to improve our understanding of the most effective ways to engage diverse communities in primary prevention initiatives (63).

Addressing Australia’s current data gaps should be a national priority. The Domestic Family and Sexual Violence Commission identified that 89 of the 131 measures in the National Plan’s Performance Measurement Plan currently lack a data source, limiting the ability to measure progress and drive accountability (17). National data also remains limited in key areas, including people who use violence, pathways into and out of violence and the experience of violence across different population groups.

Improving data quality requires more inclusive and disaggregated data collection that reflects the diversity of Australian communities (22,7). Better data on the experiences of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, children and young people, people with disability, LGBTIQA+ communities, and people from migrant and refugee communities, older people and culturally and linguistically diverse communities is essential to inform tailored prevention approaches (22, 27). Research, evaluation and data collection should also continue to embed lived experience and community expertise to ensure prevention policy and practice remains relevant, culturally safe and responsive to the communities it seeks to assist.

3.5 Grow and sustain the primary prevention workforce

A larger, more diverse and well-resourced prevention workforce is essential to mobilising a national response to the national crisis of gendered violence. Preventing violence will require investment to grow and sustain Australia’s specialist prevention workforce, while building prevention capability across the broader systems and settings that shape everyday life.

Australia’s specialist prevention workforce remains relatively small and fragmented despite growing demand for prevention action (64). Significant investment is needed to expand this workforce, strengthen coordination and ensure specialist prevention expertise is available across every jurisdiction (13,16)

Preventing violence cannot be the responsibility of primary prevention specialist organisations alone. Prevention capability should also be embedded across the institutions and sectors that shape people’s lives including health, education, workplaces, justice, family law and community services. This broader capability will be critical to responding to rising backlash against gender equality, increasingly complex digital environments and growing demand for targeted work with particular cohorts, particularly children and young people.

Growing the prevention workforce requires more than training. Primary prevention is specialised work requiring expertise across a range of fields including community engagement, research, systems change, partnership brokering and knowledge translation across diverse settings and communities (64). Without secure, long-term funding, clear career pathways and coordinated workforce planning, Australia risks losing prevention specialist expertise at a time when it is needed most.  

The Second Acton Plan should support the development and implementation of a national workforce strategy, as recommended by Our Watch (13). Building on existing Commonwealth workforce initiatives, including the national domestic, family and sexual violence workforce survey and recent investment to strengthen the domestic, family and sexual violence workforce, the strategy should:  

• identify current and future workforce needs;  
• strengthen national workforce planning;  
• support professional development and career pathways;  
• improve knowledge exchange within and across jurisdictions; and  
• coordinate investment across Commonwealth, state and territory governments.  

This would help attract, retain and grow a skilled primary prevention workforce while ensuring expertise is available to support implementation of the National Plan across Australia.  

3.6 Drive continuous improvement through monitoring, evaluation and learning

Sustained investment in monitoring and evaluation systems is essential to demonstrate the impact of prevention investment, strengthen accountability and support continuous improvement. Robust evaluation enables governments to understand not only whether prevention activities are being delivered well, but how they are impacting on the gendered drivers of violence and contributing to long-term reductions in the prevalence of gendered violence (60).  

While the National Plan’s Outcomes Framework represents a positive step, key implementation elements, including the Evaluation Strategy and Information Development Plan, remain undeveloped. As noted by the Commission for Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence, current reporting through the National Plan Activities Addendum provides valuable information about the implementation progress of activity but is less able to demonstrate progress toward long-term prevention outcomes or support adaptive implementation (17). While process evaluation can demonstrate that activities have been delivered as intended, impact evaluation is required to assess whether prevention efforts are shifting attitudes, norms, behaviours, systems and structures that underpin violence. Despite its importance, impact evaluation is rarely funded at the scale or over timeframes needed to measure these outcomes.  

The Second Action Plan should prioritise and strengthen investment in impact evaluation, alongside monitoring and process evaluation, to strengthen the evidence base and improve accountability. National evaluation approaches should measure progress towards changes in the gendered drivers of violence and be complemented by place-based evidence, practitioner expertise, lived and living experience, and continuous learning.  

Respect Victoria’s Statewide Theory of Change and ongoing development of Victoria’s state-wide monitoring and evaluation system provides one example of how jurisdictions can articulate pathways from prevention activities to intermediate outcomes and, ultimately, long-term reductions in the prevalence of gendered violence.