Australia loves to celebrate its country towns.
We boast about our smallest communities producing world-class athletes, artists and leaders, and trade on the image of wide-open landscapes and unobstructed coastlines as integral to our national identity.
But while we acknowledge the symbolism, we often ignore the substance. The reality is that regional communities are routinely left behind when it comes to investment, innovation and infrastructure. The so called “beating heart of Australia” is where women and children experiencing domestic and family violence often struggle most to find safety.
Despite years of chronic underfunding, frontline domestic and family violence services in regional areas show unwavering courage and commitment. Every day, specialist workers drive hundreds of kilometres to reach women in crisis, stretch very limited funding across vast areas, and provide complex support that would be delivered by several different specialist services in a major city. Workers often fundraise in their own time to fill funding gaps and meet the basic needs of their clients.
They do this because they care about their community, and they know the need is urgent. The rates of domestic and family violence are up to six times higher in regional areas than metro Sydney – this is not new information, it’s been this way for decades and the divide is only getting wider.
In 2024, we commissioned a report by Impact Economics and Policy which found the cost of delivering DFV services in regional and remote parts of NSW is significantly higher than in metropolitan areas – up to 3.66 times higher for regional services, and up to 8.94 times higher for remote services.
Yet current government funding approaches continue to overlook the realities of service delivery outside Sydney, including the impact of distance, limited infrastructure, and workforce shortages, and are not flexible enough to meet the diverse and complex needs of individual communities.
Competitive tendering processes often compound this problem by favouring large national organisations, with the resources and grant-writing capacity to navigate complex funding applications, over local services that hold deep community trust and cultural knowledge.
Communities know what works for them. What’s effective in Wagga may not be the right approach in Walgett. Yet funding is often tied up in one-size-fits-all programs designed for metropolitan areas, or in short-term pilot projects that disappear just as they start to make a difference.
Without strategic, targeted, and long-term investment and planning, services can’t keep pace with demand and regional folks pay the price. The answer isn’t throwing money at copy and paste programs with rigid deliverables – it’s developing contracts that respect local knowledge and expertise, and giving services the freedom to do what works best for their communities.
Flexibility is not a luxury in regional NSW – it’s the only way DFV services can respond to the reality on the ground.
Australia prides itself on a willingness to ‘go the hard yards’, as a nation of ‘battlers’ with an innate ability to ‘make it work.’ These qualities run deep in our nation’s culture, especially in the country.
But when it comes to saving lives, resilience and goodwill are not enough. We can’t keep asking regional communities to ‘make do’ when women and children’s safety is at risk, or bury decades of inequity beneath a national story of toughness and self-reliance.
If we are serious about honouring our regional identity, we must do more than put it on a postcard. We must recognise the strength and knowledge of regional and remote DFV services and back them with proper funding, flexible contracts and investment in place-based solutions, to keep them safe, strong and thriving.
Safety shouldn’t come down to luck, location or the limits of frontline workers’ goodwill. Every woman and child in NSW deserves the same chance to live free from violence, no matter where they call home.
Anything less is pride without responsibility.
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Read our Regional Focus Report to further understand the experiences of regional DFV services and the clear recommendations for building safer communities across NSW.