Before we call it a ‘crisis,’ what is the true situation behind domestic violence?

This illustrates three issues.

First is that violence in Indigenous communities is enormous, accounting for 17 percent of total homicides. This dramatically influences state figures with the highest homicide rates being in those states and territories with the largest Aboriginal populations.

The other factor is socio-economic-violence increases in lower socio-demographics.

Without knowing anything else you could predict that our best-educated, wealthiest city, Canberra, would have the lowest murder rate. A similar distribution occurs within states.

Then there is the claim that this is a crisis.

The graph below shows the incidence of homicides since 1989-90 showing that they have more than halved. It also shows the incidence of intimate partner homicide. Total homicides have decreased by 52 percent while intimate partner homicides decreased by 73 percent. At no time in the last 33 years have we been safer from our fellow Australians.

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These figures are in isolation, what about the world context? As the map below shows Australia is again one of the safest countries in the world on the basis of homicide.

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And the scatter graph below breaks it down by sex, showing that not only is Australia a very safe country, it is safer for women than it is for men.

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That is not to say that there is no room for improvement. There will always be people who kill, and again as the graphs show, there are countries that still do much better than Australia.