When Amanda Cohn was working as a GP in the border towns of Albury-Wodonga, she knew a woman's postcode was a defining factor in the kind of support received if fleeing family violence.
"If I was worried about their safety in Victoria, that meant a one-stop shop, well-resourced service, and I could sleep well at night knowing that they were going to be cared for," Dr Cohn said.
But if the woman lived in New South Wales, she said, the response was different.
"We have absolutely tireless local services doing great work but the funding's really fragmented, so instead of getting a wraparound service, you have separate programs doing housing, justice and mental health," she said.
"People sort of get bounced around."
Dr Cohn, who has since become a NSW Greens MP, is one of a growing chorus highlighting the vastly different levels of care and funding available to people fleeing family violence in Victoria and New South Wales.
Bureaucratic obstacle course
YES Unlimited chief executive Dianne Glover said she struggled with it on a daily basis.
"It can be really confusing ... it relies on relationships [between services] on the ground to work together," she said.
Ms Glover oversees a NSW service in Albury that connects women and children fleeing violence with refuge and housing services and other support.
But she said it was a bureaucratic obstacle course for women who needed clarity when seeking emergency help.
"In New South Wales we do have safety action meetings ... police are notified of a really serious DV incident, then they're flagged and a meeting comes together of police and all of the agencies," she said.
"That works great but it's only for those at really high risk and often we'll see, especially with some of the deaths we've seen more recently, you don't always get those warning signs."
She said the Orange Door program in Victoria that acted as a one-stop-shop for services was a more practical, streamlined response.
Funding push
In Wodonga, on the Victorian side of the border, all 227 recommendations of Australia’s first Royal Commission into Family Violence have been implemented since 2016.
The Victorian government last month announced $211 million in the budget for family violence support, on top of $4 billion previously invested.
Another $100 million was announced last week as part of the Women's Safety Package.
Over the border in New South Wales, the state government set aside $39.1 million to prevent domestic, family and sexual violence in its most recent budget before announcing another $230 million announced as part of an emergency package this year.
"We've really seen the results in Victoria with that spend of funding, the rate of domestic violence in Victoria has fallen by 45 per cent, which is a really fantastic outcome," Dr Cohn said.
She said ahead of the New South Wales budget this month, Domestic violence New South Wales had asked for a funding increase of $145 million annually for existing family and domestic violence services as well as an additional $80 million to expand specialist services and $100 million over four years for a violence prevention strategy.
Yes Unlimited client services manager John Park said women could "fall through the gaps" without more integration for services.
"At the moment you go here for this, you go there for that and hopefully those services have a good enough relationship that collaboration happens," he said.
"There's also a heap of peripheral services like hospitals, GPs [and] the police and without structure in place it's a messy experience."
Wraparound service
The Australian Institute of Criminology's Homicide in Australiareport recently showed 49 per cent offemalevictims of homicide were killed by a former or current intimate partner in the 2022–23 financial year.
Centre Against Violence chief executive Jaime Chubb, who is based in Wodonga, said the changes implemented in Victoria since the Royal Commission into family Violence in 2016 had been tangible for people fleeing violence.
"The entire service system works together, essentially, the main part of that is the Orange Door program," she said.
"We know that there is a higher level of resources available on the Victorian side, so people who have come to us who have had some service in New South Wales absolutely get a different level of service here.
"They get different access to packages to re-establish their lives, to potentially move away, to access crisis accommodation ... for people who really need to get themselves back into a safe and stable life and what's available to them to enable that is very different in Victoria," she said.
"When we are talking about people being safe, people being able to protect their children, people being able to make decisions around their lives, it shouldn't matter where you live," she said.
"The unfortunate reality is that it does."
Frustration heard
NSW Minister for the Prevention of Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault Jodie Harrison said the community's anger and frustration was being heard but acknowledged Australia was in the midst of a domestic and family violence crisis.
"We had an emergency cabinet meeting before we made the announcement in relation to the $230 million emergency package and we heard very clearly from the commissioner the lessons that we could take from Victoria," she said.
"One of the key messages for that was having a strong prevention focus which we're very, very keen to take on."
A Victorian government spokesperson said the government had made it easier for victim-survivors to access support and safety through initiatives such as Specialist Family Violence Courts, the rollout of the statewide Orange Door Network and the implementation of the Multi-Agency Risk Assessment and Management framework.
