A series of gendered violence deaths has brought a moment of fresh national reckoning. With it has come renewed scrutiny on the actions of governments.

The federal government's response has been to stick to its plan – specifically, the National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children, agreed by federal, state and territory leaders in October 2022.

The plan is not a list of specific actions. Instead, it is a broad vision document, which is meant to structure and guide the actions of governments and community organisations. Its timeline is a decade and its overarching aim is to "end" gendered violence "within a generation".

Because the plan is high-level and long-term, assessing its progress is difficult.

That partly reflects the vast scope of the problem, which most voices in the debate agree is embedded in cultural attitudes and will take both time and effort to shift.

And it also reflects the disparate nature of the policy response, which traverses several areas of government policy, all levels of government, the community sector, the justice system, schools, the media and society at large. When responsibility is shared, tracking progress is complicated.

This is how federal ministers have talked about the plan this week.

"The benefits [of the plan] won't be seen for some time," Social Services Minister Amanda Rishworth said on Sunday.

"What we need is this effort to be sustained long-term. That is the challenge here. For this not to become an issue in the news cycle for a short period that we then forget about."

Many advocates, prevention workers and victim-survivors agreed, and many were involved in the formulation of the plan and endorse its aims. But others are frustrated with the pace of progress and action in the short-term.

A plan in four parts

The national plan is divided into four domains for action:

· Prevention – work to shift the societal attitudes that drive violence;

· Early intervention – work to identify likely perpetrators and victims, and intervene;

· Response – including the response of police and the justice system; and

· Recovery and healing – work with victim-survivors, including children.

Under each heading, the plan diagnoses what has failed in previous policy responses, and what the evidence says about what will work.

Alongside the 10-year plan are 5-year "action plans", the first of which has been published. It is also broad, although it does assign responsibility among governments for 10 different categories of action.

This is the second time a national plan has been attempted. The Gillard government led the first such effort in 2010, which led to the creation of the organisation Our Watch and the reporting hotline 1800RESPECT, but which failed to meet its main goal of reducing prevalence.

The new plan sets out a wider set of metrics, including shifting societal attitudes.

But it does not set out what specific actions will be taken, or by whom, or how they will be funded. That is up to governments and, like many areas of federal-state co-ordination, can become mired in bureaucratic headaches.

National partnerships of inconvenience

Just like in health education, states and territories are mainly responsible for frontline service delivery, but the federal government often contributes funding.

For example, the federal government contributed $159 million to state and territory frontline services in the last budget as part of an ongoing National Partnership Agreement.

And in the previous budget, it gave states and territories $169.4 million to hire 500 additional frontline workers.

But Katherine Berney, executive director of the National Women's Safety Alliance, said it was not easy to track how that money was being spent at state and territory level.

"Some states and territories are great at delivery, others aren't," she told the ABC. "The public has an expectation that the funding is going to the frontlines, but in some cases it is unclear."

Ms Berney noted the action plan had only been active for six months, and said it was "positive" that the federal Department of Social Service had promised "continuous evaluation" of whether money was leading to results.

"We haven't had that before, we are working this out as we go," she said.

But progress has been slow. Coalition questioning at Senate estimates in March revealed only two of the 500 workers had been hired. Ms Rishworth this week suggested that number had increased, but the government has not provided an updated number.

Ms Berney said that as well as funding transparency, governments needed to set appropriate goals and think broadly about how to achieve them.

"If we're going to talk about 500 workers, we need to talk about workforce sustainability and the workforce pipeline. Where do the workers come from?

"It's a really nuanced and highly skilled professional skill set that's required … We can't just pluck people out of the air."

As well as how the funding is spent, there's also the question of how it is divided among jurisdictions.

For domestic violence funding, as in many areas of federal-state overlap, funding is often provided on population size, not on need.

That has particular relevance for gendered violence against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women, who are six times more likely to be victims of homicide due to domestic violence than non-Indigenous women, and 33 times more likely to be hospitalised as a result of domestic violence.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women are covered by a separate plan to the national plan, and last year's federal budget allocated $194 million to targeted support.

But domestic violence workers in First Nations communities say this funding often fails to go where it is needed, especially when it is divided among jurisdictions according to population, which sees the Northern Territory miss out despite its high First Nations population and high rates of domestic violence.

"We've been calling year after year for increased funding to meet the demand for our frontline services, our frontline non-legal work, and that has not been forthcoming," Antoinette Braybrook, chief executive of Djirra, a legal service for Aboriginal women focused on gendered violence, told the ABC.

She said the dedicated national plan needed to be "fast-tracked," noting much of the currently-committed funding did not arrive until 2026.

"We cannot wait until the 2026 budget for funding to hit the ground for Aboriginal women's safety."

How to define prevention?

While states provide frontline services, the federal government has taken a leading role in work on prevention.

In its first two budgets, the Albanese government has provided a total of $2.3 billion in total new funding to combat gendered violence. This was divided up among dozens of different initiatives some of which focused on prevention.

Examples of programs include an intervention program for adolescent boys and a "perpetrator risk assessment framework".

Much of the federal government's prevention work is led by Our Watch, which has free online resources outlining evidence-based approaches to shifting male attitudes, and which tracks how attitudes shift over time.

It cites "encouraging signs of progress," including a reduction in attitudes that condone or accept violence against women over the last 10 years.

But while there is broad agreement about the importance of shifting attitudes, some experts have said this long-lens approach to prevention needs to be accompanied by more short-term actions.

Jess Hill, a journalist and gendered violence educator, warned a single-minded focus on prevention and shifting attitudes could "outsource results to future generations".

"We're not talking about the things that we can do now, the industries, for example, that are exacerbating this violence," she told the ABC's News Breakfast."What are the levers that government can pull on mainstream porn and the access that young kids have to that unfettered?

"What can they do about the intersection between problem gambling and family violence? What can they do about alcohol? What can they do about social media?"

Ms Hill and Michael Salter from the University of New South Wales recently published a paper calling for a "rethinking" of the approach to primary prevention in the national plan.

The pair pointed to Iceland and other Nordic countries, which have some of the best gender equality statistics in the world but have retained high levels of gendered violence, to argue that shifting attitudes was necessary but not sufficient.

"Frontline workers in Nordic countries … talk about getting too comfortable simply pursuing and celebrating gender equality and norms change, but lacking systems reform and consistent accountability measures for perpetrators.

"We also need to see offender accountability as core to prevention," they said, pointing not only to the justice system but to lower-level accountability measures, such as banks which have started shutting down accounts when they detect financially abusive behaviour.

Ms Berney said the national plan was "good and solid" but agreed it could have "more aspirations in the short-term".

"The tendency has been to isolate prevention, but in a sense all elements of the plan are prevention."

Antoinette Braybrook agreed that both short-term accountability measures and long-term attitude shifts were important but said both needed to reflect specific recognition of the different dynamics of gendered violence experienced by First Nations women.

On attitudes, she said disproportionate rates of gendered violence should be framed as "a gendered issue for Aboriginal women" rather than "an issue of violence in Aboriginal communities… Our women are partnered with men from many different cultures and backgrounds."

And on accountability measures, she cautioned that any "tough on crime" approaches should be "mindful" of the different experience of the justice system. "In our work what we see is Aboriginal women seeking safety, but they're treated as criminals, they're mis-identified as perpetrators and incarcerated," she said.