“How do we maintain the rage?” Sussan Ley asked in parliament last week.

The opposition leader was speaking to a motion introduced by Labor’s Sharon Claydon to end family and domestic violence. Claydon read the list of the 74 Australian women who were murdered in the last year.

“Every year I read this list in the hope it will be the last,” she said. “Heartbreakingly, that day has not yet come.”

The rage remains. What’s missing is a proportionate response.

Day after day we read the stories of women, and often children, killed by men.

We light Parliament House up in orange, an initiative that I began with the speaker Milton Dick when I was an MP, now repeated annually by the government.

We have a plan to end violence against women and children within a generation.

Yet we continue to underfund it, on both prevention and response.

As I’ve written before, gender-based violence, a sanitised term for the bashing, coercion, intimidation and murder of women, barely rated a mention in this year’s federal election campaign.

In 2024 the prime minister, under pressure after a series of horrific deaths over the previous year, had named it a “national crisis” – which it is.

But what’s changed?

I have seen few words and even less action from the government on this since the........

© The Guardian