*A note of care: this discussion involves violence, death, and systemic harm. Readers are encouraged to pause, step away, or seek support if needed. Conversations about gendered violence should not require self-sacrifice to be engaged with meaningfully.

Royal Commissions in Australia are not everyday affairs. They are formal, high-level public inquiries backed by statute (the Royal Commissions Act 1902) that can compel witnesses, gather evidence, and shine a spotlight into dark corners of policy and society. They’ve been used to examine everything from corruption, institutional abuse, deaths in custody, and even systemic violence against people with disability.

Their symbolic power is immense: they are often described as the nation’s “truth-telling” instruments. But they also come with real limitations. A Royal Commission can identify problems and recommend solutions - but it cannot itself implement culture shift, redress attitudes, or change the underlying norms that allow harm to continue. Implementation is left to governments, bureaucracies, services, and communities, with mixed results.

Historically, some Royal Commissions have reshaped entire sectors. The inquiry into institutional child sexual abuse prompted a complete overhaul of safeguarding practices in schools and sporting clubs, in theory. Many others, despite groundbreaking reports, have seen partial or slow implementation of recommendations. This recurring dynamic helps explain the complexity - and the skepticism - around calls for new commissions.

Before going further, it matters to be precise about language. This piece uses the phrase “killings of women and girls” deliberately. Not as rhetoric, but as description. These deaths are not random acts of violence; they are patterned, gendered, and overwhelmingly connected to power, entitlement, and control. Internationally, they are increasingly understood through the lens of femicide - the killing of women and girls because they are women and girls.

This framing includes cis women, trans women, girls, and gender-diverse people who are targeted because of perceived femininity or gender non-conformity. It also acknowledges that while most perpetrators are men, the focus here is not on individual morality or pathology, but on the social, legal, economic and cultural systems that repeatedly fail to interrupt harm before it becomes fatal.

When the Public Says “Enough”!

Royal Commissions as Mirrors of Crisis

Australia has seen repeated crises that sparked formal inquiries:

• Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (1987–1991) - an attempt to understand systemic failures in policing and corrections, and the social inequities that fed them.

• Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability - a two-phase national inquiry spotlighting widespread harm to people with disability.

• Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide - which brought to light systemic issues contributing to high suicide rates among ADF members, including sexual violence and institutional culture.

• South Australia’s Royal Commission into Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence, established after an epidemic of fatal and near-fatal violence, delivered 136 recommendations and has stimulated state reforms including multidisciplinary responses and better regional support services.

Australia has no shortage of well-written reports. What it has struggled with is memory. Royal Commission recommendations often outlive the governments that commissioned them. Implementation is uneven, delayed, diluted, or quietly abandoned once public attention moves on.

For victim-survivors and families, this creates a particular cruelty: being asked to give evidence, to relive trauma, to speak truth - with no guarantee that the resulting recommendations will ever be fully realised. Any call for a new Royal Commission must grapple honestly with this history, or risk repeating a cycle of inquiry followed by inertia.

Each of these inquiries hit a nerve by exposing patterns of harm that everyday politics and policy often ignore.

Any serious examination of gendered killings must also contend with who is most exposed to risk - and why. Violence does not land evenly. First Nations women, women with disability, migrant and refugee women, LGBTQIA+ women, women in regional and remote communities, and women living with poverty, housing insecurity or state surveillance are disproportionately affected.

This is not because these groups are inherently vulnerable, but because they are over-represented in systems that intervene late, listen poorly, and punish disclosure. Risk accumulates at the intersections of gender, race, disability, class, geography and migration status. A national inquiry that fails to centre these intersections risks reproducing the same blind spots that have already cost lives.

Australia’s Femicide Crisis - Numbers and Reality

In Australia, violence against women isn’t distant. It’s statistically entrenched:

• Violence against women is pervasive - lifetime prevalence figures show one in two women experiencing sexual harassment, and one in three experiencing physical or sexual violence.

• On average one woman a week is killed by an intimate partner, and hundreds more suffer grievous bodily harm.

• In 2024, 37 women were killed by current or former intimate partners alone.

• More than 1300 women and girls have been killed in Australia since 2000 - a grim metric that activists say underscores systemic, not isolated, failure.

These figures are not abstractions. They represent lives cut short, families shattered, services overwhelmed, and legal and medical systems struggling to keep up.

Women’s rights advocates have been calling for a national inquiry into the killings of women and girls - a femicide-focused Royal Commission - to understand why these deaths continue at such scale and what systemic changes could prevent them.

Why A Royal Commission? And Why Now?

Royal Commissions are proposed in crises that overwhelm existing systems. They can:

• Break open taboos by allowing survivors and victims’ families to tell their stories publicly.

• Map patterns of systemic failure across institutions, media, law enforcement, and services.

• Generate concrete recommendations - from data systems to funding reforms - grounded in evidence and testimony.

This is part of why some voices see a commission into gendered killings as necessary: they want a national audit of failures, not just scattered reforms. They argue that without that deep look, policymakers will keep tinkering at the edges.

There’s precedent for nation-wide inquiry leading to structural shifts - but not always in clear, linear ways. Some recommendations are taken up; others linger in “implementation backlogs.” And in many cases, entrenched cultural attitudes continue to undercut legal and social reforms. This is where the limitations of commissions become apparent: they inform change, but they do not make it happen.

There is another uncomfortable truth beneath these calls for inquiry: Australia does not even count the deaths of women and girls consistently. There is no single, unified national femicide data system. Instead, information is fragmented across police jurisdictions, coronial findings, health systems, family courts, and media reporting. Advocacy organisations and journalists are often left to do the work governments have not systematised.

This data failure matters. What is not consistently counted is easier to minimise, misclassify, or forget. A Royal Commission could offer the first comprehensive national mapping of how, where, and why these deaths occur - not as isolated tragedies, but as a preventable pattern embedded in policy silos and institutional gaps.

The Current Debate

Calls for a federal Royal Commission have recently focused on other high-impact events too, such as the December 2025 Bondi Beach terror attack and rising concerns about antisemitism - sparking debate over the role and scope of national inquiries. Families of victims have called for a Commonwealth Royal Commission to examine failures and societal conditions that contributed to the violence, but the government has so far resisted, pointing to existing inquiries and criminal proceedings.

This modern flashpoint underscores a broader truth: calls for Royal Commissions often arise when citizens feel existing systems are too fragmented, too slow, or too insulated from real-world harms to protect people first, and to explain what went wrong.

Critics counter that commissions can be expensive, slow, and sometimes redundant with other legal processes - and that governments often don’t act decisively on their recommendations. The truth sits somewhere in the middle. They can catalyse change, but they cannot force it.

Royal Commissions are powerful instruments of inquiry. They can compel testimony, expose institutional negligence, and draw together evidence that would otherwise remain siloed. They are particularly effective at naming patterns that governments and systems have learned to normalise.

But inquiry is not the same thing as change. A Royal Commission can recommend reforms; it cannot enact them. It can expose culture; it cannot transform it. It can diagnose systemic misogyny, but it cannot, on its own, undo the beliefs, norms and power structures that allow violence against women and girls to persist.

This distinction matters. Without it, inquiries risk being treated as endpoints rather than beginnings.

Systemic Change and Attitudes:

The Real Work Begins After the Report

An Australian Royal Commission into killings of women and girls - if ever established - would almost certainly provide an unprecedented, comprehensive body of evidence, testimony, and structural recommendations. But the hard truth is this:

• Royal Commissions can document patterns, but they cannot rewrite culture.

• They can recommend resources and laws, but they cannot ensure implementation.

• They can compel testimony, but they cannot ensure everyday safety, respect, or equality.

The chapters of change that matter most happen when education, community norms, policing, media framing, service funding, legal accountability, and attitudes toward gender and violence shift in tandem with policy.

This is true whether the focus is gender-based violence, missing and murdered women, fatal family violence, or intersections with race and class. The commission may shine a light - but the long walk toward prevention, respect, and equitable safety happens in the meshwork of daily life: in schools, workplaces, services, homes, and hearts.

So if a Royal Commission is a tool, let it be one in a broader forge of transformation. What we really need is not just another report on the shelf - but the deep, persistent work of altering the systems and social attitudes that enable violence to persist.

Thoughts to Sit With in Closing

Imagine a series of maps. One shows every Royal Commission since federation - lines, arrows, pages of recommendations. Another shows the lived experience of women and girls in Australia: where they live, where they walk home, where systems failed, where support lit up amidst darkness. The maps don’t overlap cleanly - but they tell complementary stories.

The first is about inquiry. The second is about experience.

A Royal Commission can give us the first map. It can tell us what has happened. But the second map - the one charting how we actually change society’s direction - that is authored piece by piece by communities, policymakers, families, educators and citizens reshaping norms and systems together.

In the end, transforming violence into safety - and horror into understanding - requires more than a report. It requires a new kind of cartography altogether: one that marks paths toward equity, justice, and shared responsibility.

Wouldn’t that be a story worth telling?

Perhaps the most confronting question is not whether Australia needs another inquiry, but why so many women must die before inquiry feels politically unavoidable. We already know the risk factors. We already know where systems fracture. We already know which groups are most exposed, and which warnings go unheeded.

The question, then, is not what a Royal Commission might uncover - but what we choose to do with what has already been revealed.

Timeline of Major Australian Royal Commissions

Below is a chronological overview of significant national and state royal commissions (including ones completed in recent decades) that have shaped policy on issues ranging from violence to institutional failures:

1900s - Mid 1900s

• Royal Commissions in early federal history tended to focus on economic, industrial and constitutional matters; comprehensive lists are available via parliamentary records.

Late 20th Century

• Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (1987–1991) - landmark inquiry into systemic failures in policing, corrections and social disadvantage.

2000s - 2010s

• Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (2013–2017) - pivotal national inquiry that transformed safeguarding policies in education, religious and institutional settings.

2019 - Present (Recent Federal Royal Commissions)

National Royal Commissions (selected):

• Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability (2019-2023) - final report with recommendations for systemic reforms.
• Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide (2021-2024) - examined systemic issues contributing to suicide risk among current and former defence personnel.
• Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme (2022-2023) - investigated unlawful Centrelink debt recovery practices.
• Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety - national inquiry into elder care service failures.
• Royal Commission into National Natural Disaster Arrangements - reviewed disaster response systems.
• Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation & Financial Services Industry - major inquiry into financial sector misconduct.
• Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion (established Jan 2026) - new national inquiry into prejudice, inclusion and social cohesion.

State Royal Commissions

• South Australia Royal Commission into Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence (2024-2025) - responded to a crisis of gendered violence with systemic recommendations.

Key Recommendations from Recent Inquiries on Gendered Violence (Australia)

These arise from state and national inquiries, royal commissions, and research review processes focused on domestic, family, sexual and gender-based violence.

1. South Australia Royal Commission into Domestic, Family & Sexual Violence (2025)

Launched after a series of fatal family violence incidents, this 700-page report made 136 recommendations to overhaul how systems prevent and respond to gendered violence.

Priority themes and specific recommendations:

• Establish a five-year statewide domestic, family and sexual violence strategy grounded in prevention, early intervention, response, recovery and healing.
• Create Lived Experience Advisory Networks (adults and children) to advise government policy and programs.
• Develop community-based, open-door service hubs offering co-located, non-statutory supports.
• Significant and sustained funding uplift for specialist domestic, family and sexual violence services, rather than tying them to homelessness funding streams.
• A 10-year workforce development strategy and fund to grow sector capacity and specialisation.
• Statewide awareness campaigns co-designed with priority populations to drive understanding and help-seeking.
• Centralised crisis and information service (24/7 hotline and online access) to improve access to risk assessment and referral pathways.
• Vulnerable witness suites and safety-focused court infrastructure so victims don’t face alleged perpetrators in court rooms.
• Specialist responses for underserved groups including LGBTQIA+ victim-survivors and disability-specific support workers.

The government response has committed funding linked to many of these recommendations, though some elements - like criminalising parental smacking - are being debated.

2. Disability Royal Commission (Final Report, 2023)

This national royal commission delivered 222 recommendations relevant to violence, abuse and exploitation experienced by people with disability, including in domestic settings.

Recommendations with gendered violence relevance:

• Ensure legislative definitions of family and domestic violence include all relationships in which people with disability experience harm - including carers and support workers — and settings such as group homes.
• Strengthen reporting, referral and complaint mechanisms for violence affecting people with disability in all residential and community settings.
• Broader structural reforms across law, policy, housing, employment and justice systems to reduce vulnerability to abuse and neglect.

These recommendations highlight that gendered violence must be understood intersectionally - especially for disabled women and gender-diverse people whose experiences often fall outside mainstream frameworks.

3. National Rapid Review of Gender-Based Violence Prevention (Federal, 2024–2025)

As part of implementation of the National Plan to End Violence Against Women and Children 2022–2032, an expert panel delivered a rapid review with 21 recommendations on evidence-based prevention approaches.

Key prevention recommendations include:

• Strengthening early-intervention and prevention efforts across life stages and contexts.
• Supporting national coordination and evidence sharing to enhance the effectiveness of prevention initiatives.
• Embedding best-practice approaches into the implementation of the National Plan.

The focus here shifts from reactive crisis response to upstream prevention - addressing cultural, social and structural drivers of gendered violence.

4. Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) Inquiry into Justice Responses to Sexual Violence

While not a royal commission, the ALRC’s inquiry made detailed recommendations for reforming justice systems to better respond to sexual violence.

Notable recommendations with gendered violence implications:

• Trauma-informed courtroom and investigation processes (e.g., prerecorded hearings for complainants).
• Standardised rights protections for victims.
• National consistency in consent laws and improved evidence frameworks.

These reforms aim to reduce barriers to reporting and improve outcomes for survivors within the justice system — a critical component of systemic change.

Where These Recommendations Fit in Broader Change

Across these inquiries, a consistent message emerges: systemic issues require systemic solutions. Royal Commissions and formal inquiries identify gaps, patterns and pathways for reform — including law, services, data systems, prevention frameworks, and justice responses. But the reports are only the beginning.

Real change happens when:

• governments fund and implement recommendations;
• communities shift norms around gender, respect and power;
• frontline services are resourced for trauma-informed, equitable and affirming practice;
• education embeds respectful relationships and consent broadly;
• justice systems are reformed to prioritise safety and accountability;
• prevention becomes central rather than peripheral.

Royal Commissions illuminate and inform. But lasting transformations require culture shifts and sustained political will that move beyond reports into everyday life, law, and relationships.

In Solidarity

*This piece is written from a feminist, systems-critical perspective informed by inquiry findings, advocacy work, and lived-experience-led scholarship.