I spend a lot of my time criticising our leadership. I do that because, as people we empower to run our country, people with the power to shape our country and chart its path forward, they should obviously be held accountable for their decisions and actions.

However, I’m well aware that our leaders are us, in more ways than one. They emerge from us. They’re born and raised here, and—for better or worse—they’re products of this society. They’re also well aware of this society’s blind spots. They know what we care about and what we don’t. They know what we’ll put up with (and we’ll put up with a lot), and they generally stay on the safe side of that line.

That’s why they don’t really care about domestic violence.

Sure, they’ll make the requisite noises in Parliament and the media, they’ll express shock and sadness from time to time at the more heinous domestic violence murders, but they don’t actually do anything meaningful about it. That’s because they know they’re leading a society that’s actually generally fine with it.

And they’re right about that. The government will blithely reveal that a woman is murdered by a partner (or aspiring partner or former partner) every 11 days without announcing any intention of doing much more than it’s already doing about it. Meanwhile, the TTPS will admit that “a lot of the perpetrators of domestic violence are sometimes people in the services,” meaning victims may well be trying to report domestic violence to officers committing that very crime at home.

And we say nothing.

Victims’ families will lament that their cries for help fell on deaf ears at the police station, and the ACoP will publicly suggest that the victims put themselves in harm’s way. Even as the TTPS faces a lawsuit from a victim they allegedly repeatedly failed to help.

And we say nothing.

A national newspaper will publish an editorial filled with a truly staggering amount of stereotypical victim-blaming domestic violence apologia even as women and children continue to fall at the hands of murderers initially identified as “a close male relative.”

And we say nothing.

Our Prime Minister will respond to questions about his government’s plans to address our horrifying domestic violence rates by declaring, “I am not in your bedroom; I am not in your choice of men.” He’ll spend years doubling down on that.

And we say nothing.

So our leaders know they don’t actually have to do anything much about that kind of crime.

They’ll call a State of Emergency with an ever-increasing list of crimes as justification, and not once will any of them so much as mention domestic violence murders. Gang violence might be an emergency, but not domestic variety. Even as women continue to be attacked by the men in their lives in the midst of that very SoE.

And still we say nothing.

And so they do nothing.

And nothing changes.