They Closed The Woman's Safety Watchdog.

On 2 December 2021, the Women’s Safety and Justice Taskforce delivered Hear her voice — Report One. Eighty-nine recommendations. Three volumes. Nearly a thousand pages of women describing what had been done to them and what happened when they asked for help.

The first eighty-seven are what you would expect. Criminalise coercive control — but not yet, not until the system is capable of handling it. Reform the police response. Fix the courts. Train the profession. Fund the services.

The last two are about something else entirely. Eighty-eight and eighty-nine are not about domestic violence at all. They are about measurement.

Recommendation 88 asks the Queensland Government to establish a suitably qualified independent implementation supervisor, with an adequately resourced secretariat, within the portfolio responsibilities of the Department of Justice and Attorney-General, to oversee both the implementation of the recommendations and the achievement of system outcomes.

Recommendation 89 asks that the Attorney-General report annually to the Queensland Parliament on progress, and table the biannual reports of the independent implementation supervisor in the Queensland Parliament within 14 days of receipt, until implementation is complete.

An independent supervisor. Reporting every six months. Tabled within fourteen days. Until implementation is complete.

I want to sit with why a retired Court of Appeal president ends a report about coercive control by asking for a scoreboard.

Margaret McMurdo was not writing into a vacuum. She was writing six years after Not now, not ever — Quentin Bryce’s landmark report, 140 recommendations, every one of them declared delivered by the Premier in October 2019. Delivered. Finished. A major milestone.

And then McMurdo’s taskforce sat down with Queensland women in 2021 and heard the same system failing them in the same ways.

So she had watched, at close range, what acceptance does. She had seen a government accept 140 recommendations, announce their completion, and preside over a system that got worse. She understood that the announcement is the product. And the last two things she asked for were an invigilator and a public number, because she knew exactly what happens to a reform program that nobody is counting.

On 10 May 2022 the Queensland Government responded. It supported, or supported in principle, all eighty-nine. Not one was rejected. A $363 million package. A commission of inquiry into the police. The whole architecture.

Recommendations 88 and 89 were supported in principle.

I need you to look at what that phrase actually did here, because this is the part I got wrong when I started, and it is the part that matters.

McMurdo asked for the biannual reports to be tabled in the Parliament within fourteen days of receipt, until implementation was complete. That is a hard obligation. A date, a deadline, a recipient, an end condition.

Here is what the Government committed to instead. Its response to recommendation 89, in full:

The Queensland Government will prepare annual reports on its progress in implementing the Government response to the Taskforce recommendations, for tabling in Parliament by the Attorney-General and Minister for Justice, Minister for Women and Minister for the Prevention of Domestic and Family Violence. The Queensland Government will also consider options for reporting by the implementation supervisor.

Consider options.

McMurdo asked for six-monthly independent reports, tabled within fourteen days, until the work was done. The Government agreed to write its own annual report about itself, and to consider options for the independent one.

That was 10 May 2022. The escape hatch was not improvised in 2025 under pressure. It was drafted, cleared, and published four years before anybody needed to use it, in the same document that announced $363 million and accepted every recommendation. Nobody had to break a promise, because the promise was built not to bind.

And then they marked it delivered.

In the Second Annual Report on the reform program — a document tabled in the Queensland Parliament in May 2024 — recommendation 88 carries a status. So does recommendation 89. So does recommendation 188 of Report Two, which reaffirmed the whole arrangement and was supported in full.

The status is: Delivered in 2022–23.

Delivered. All three. The oversight of a decade-long reform program, booked as complete in its first year, on the basis that an office had been opened.

That is the sentence the entire mechanism turns on. You cannot abandon a recommendation you have already recorded as delivered. There is no obligation left to breach. The scoreboard was never a duty that continued — it was a box, and the box was ticked in 2022–23, and everything after that was optional.

Which is why closing the office in February 2025 required no announcement, no statement to the Parliament, no explanation to anyone. On paper, nothing was being closed. The recommendation had been delivered two years earlier.

In November 2022, an interim supervisor. In March 2023, after a national recruitment, Cathy Taylor was appointed permanent Independent Implementation Supervisor for a minimum term of two years. The selection panel included McMurdo herself.

The Minister’s statement announcing the appointment said that with investment then exceeding $1.3 billion, it was vital that there be independent oversight to ensure the reforms were implemented strategically and achieved the results intended.

Vital. Their word. Hold onto it.

The Office of the Independent Implementation Supervisor reported five times. December 2022. May 2023. November 2023. May 2024. November 2024.

And then it stopped.

Here is the sentence, from the department’s own website, as it stands today:

The final OIIS biannual progress report was issued in November 2024. As the OIIS (The Office of the Independent Implementation Supervisor

)was closed soon after on 20 February 2025, no further biannual progress reports will be issued by them.

Read it twice. It is not a leak. It is not a scoop. Nobody hid it. It is published, in plain English, under a Creative Commons licence, on a page the department reviewed on 13 April 2026 and modified on 13 May 2026 — which means someone was actively maintaining this page while the reporting it describes was not happening.

The page also has a heading. The heading reads: The former Independent Implementation Supervisor.

Since November 2024, the six-monthly cycles that recommendation 89 contemplated have fallen due in approximately May 2025, November 2025, and May 2026. Three of them. Twenty months.

Nothing.

Now look at where that page lives. The full address:

families.qld.gov.au/our-work/domestic-family-sexual-violence/dfsv-reform/ our-past-progress-to-address-dfsv /reform-governance/office-independent-implementation-supervisor

Our past progress.

The entire reform-governance branch sits inside it. The Independent Implementation Supervisor. The executive group. The steering committee. All of it, filed by the department’s own information architecture, as history — for a reform program the Minister maintains is ongoing.

I am not going to oversell this. A defender will tell you “former” and “past” are ordinary web housekeeping for a decommissioned office, and they will be half right, and they will say it in one sentence. So take it for what it is: not proof of intent, but a tell. The building knows. The URL knows before the press release does. The department’s own filing system had already decided what this was.

There is a live governance page, by the way. Separate branch, current, not archived. It says the Government has established governance arrangements to provide independent oversight of the DFV reform agenda. It lists four bodies.

The Office of the Independent Implementation Supervisor is not one of them.

The word “independent” stayed. The independent body left.

Fine, you might say. Machinery of government changes. Functions move. Somebody else is doing the counting now.

The department’s own page on the domestic, family and sexual violence system monitoring and evaluation framework says it is working towards establishing a framework for monitoring, reporting and evaluating the reform agenda.

That page was last modified on 21 May 2026.

Fifteen months after the office closed, the thing meant to replace it was still a verb. Working towards. Not delayed, not delivered late, not partially operational. Being worked towards, in the present continuous, while a reform program carrying 277 recommendations and more than a billion dollars ran with nobody outside the building counting anything.

The functions did move, in a sense. There is a Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence Executive Group, established — the department’s words — to strategically lead the whole-of-government implementation of reform activities. There is a Women’s Safety and Criminal Justice Directors-General Steering Committee, responsible for overseeing the systemic reforms arising from the Taskforce reports, staffed by directors-general of the departments doing the implementing, including Premier and Cabinet.

Recommendation 88 asked for a supervisor independent of government. Recommendation 89 asked for its reports to reach the Parliament. What exists now is the government reporting to itself and not tabling it.

That is not a replacement for independent oversight. It is the opposite of one, wearing its name.

On 28 August 2025, the Government put out a media statement on the passage of its domestic violence legislation. It contains this line:

After a decade of decline under Labor, with hundreds of reform recommendations left gathering dust...

Six months and eight days after it closed the office that counted whether recommendations were being implemented, the Government told Queensland that the previous government had left hundreds of recommendations gathering dust.

I want to be precise about what is wrong with that sentence, because it is not that it’s false. It may well be true. Labor accepted all eighty-nine and delivered thirty-six of them in two years. That is on the record — in the annual reports, which exist, because the office existed to produce them.

What is wrong is that the Government removed the instrument that measures dust, and then reported the dust.

You cannot audit your predecessor with a mechanism you abolished. You can only assert. And an assertion that cannot be checked, made by the party that removed the ability to check it, is not an accountability claim. It is the absence of one, delivered in the grammar of one.

In June I published a piece about Queensland’s child protection system — the $500,000 per child, the 2,258 children in residential care, the seven years without a single adoption from state care, the 67 per cent of reported sexual abuse in care occurring in residential facilities. I proposed three leverage points. The third was this: remove all child safety auditing from departmental control. A fully independent, well-resourced body with the power to access placement data, follow the funding, and refer systemic failures directly to law enforcement.

I wrote that on 4 June 2026.

Queensland had built that. Not in child protection — in domestic violence, next door, in the same department. Recommended by an independent taskforce. Accepted by government. Recruited nationally. Reported five times.

It closed on 20 February 2025. Fifteen weeks before I asked for it.

I did not know. That is the point. I had been reading this system for years and I did not know, because there was no announcement to read.

McMurdo says the recommendations appear abandoned “despite the Minister saying the Government is committed to implementing every recommendation of the Taskforce report.” I am not going to tell you which Minister, because I do not know, and the answer matters less than the structure. Recommendation 88 put the supervisor inside the Attorney-General’s portfolio. Recommendation 89 named the duty-holder as “the Attorney-General and Minister for Justice, Minister for Women and Minister for the Prevention of Domestic and Family Violence” — a single office, in 2022. That office no longer exists. Those portfolios are now split between two Ministers, and the archived record of the supervisor sits on the website of the department that does not hold the tabling duty.

So the duty and the record are in different buildings. Which means there is no single desk at which the question “why did the reports stop?” arrives. Ask Families and it is Justice’s tabling obligation. Ask Justice and it is the Families website. This may be entirely innocent — machinery of government changes, portfolios split, it happens after every election. It is also, functionally, the perfect arrangement for an obligation to evaporate without anybody deciding to evaporate it.

And here is what all of it costs the State, permanently: it can no longer say that independent inspectorate oversight is untested, or unaffordable, or novel, or unproven in the Queensland context. It ran one. It knows precisely what one costs and precisely what one produces, because it holds five volumes of the output. It closed it anyway and built nothing in its place.

What is being refused is not an unfamiliar mechanism. It is a familiar one.

Eighty-nine recommendations. Not one rejected.

That is the finding, and it took me a long time to see it as a finding rather than as good news.

Rejection creates a record. Reject recommendation 88 in May 2022 and you own it. You have to say why. It sits in the response document forever, and every subsequent failure gets measured against the moment you refused the measurement. Rejection is expensive.

Support in principle is free. And it is not a weaker yes. It is a different instrument entirely — a yes to the sentiment with the obligation removed, which is why it takes three words and buys four years.

Look at the sequence, because it is beautiful in the way a trap is beautiful:

Accept all eighty-nine. Announce $363 million. Take the photograph.

Support in principle the two that would have measured you — and in the response text, quietly swap “table the independent reports within fourteen days until implementation is complete” for “consider options for reporting”.

Mark them delivered in 2022–23, in a report tabled in Parliament, on the basis that an office now exists.

Close the office three years later. No announcement required. Nothing is being breached. It was delivered.

Campaign on your predecessor leaving recommendations to gather dust.

There is no document anywhere in that sequence that says no. There is no moment a decision was made against the public. Every single step is affirmative, published, and defensible on its own terms. The only thing missing at the end is the number.

This is the Architecture of Silence, and this is the cleanest specimen of it I have ever found, because for once I do not need a sealed record or a redacted file or a forty-year-old form to prove it. The State published the whole thing itself. It just published it in the past tense.

The 2,258 children in Queensland residential care are inside a system that is now the subject of Commission number sixty-two. Anastassiou delivered fifty-two recommendations on 22 May 2026 — the day after the department’s monitoring page last said it was still working towards a framework. Those fifty-two recommendations are about to be accepted. All of them, or nearly all, with a funding figure and a photograph.

And there is currently no independent instrument in that department capable of reporting to the Parliament whether a single one of them is ever implemented.

We already have the tell. On 3 June 2026, responding to the Commission’s findings, the Attorney-General said the Government would “carefully consider every recommendation.”

Consider. Not implement. The same verb, four years on, out of the same grammar that gave us consider options for reporting.

There is one forced adoption redress scheme in Australia. Victoria’s. It is the only one — no other state or territory has established any scheme at all. It carries a fund exceeding $138 million, pays $30,000, provides counselling and psychological support and individual apologies, is administered independently of the institutions involved, requires no waiver, and closes on 31 January 2028.

It is open to mothers.

The inquiry that produced it heard from mothers and adopted people both. One of those categories survived into the eligibility criteria. The infant — the person the act was performed upon, now sixty years old — is not an applicant class the scheme contains.

Nobody rejected us. There was no debate, no refusal, no document to appeal. We were resolved out somewhere between the hearing and the design, and there is no record of it happening, because that is what this mechanism is for.

Same finding. Different instrument. The eligibility criteria is the schema, and the schema is the confession.

Queensland’s budget estimates hearings run in the fortnight ahead; the committee reports table on 14 August. A Minister will sit at a table and answer questions about her portfolio’s expenditure, on the record, under her own name.

Every question that matters here is answerable from her own department’s website, or from a paper already tabled in her own Parliament.

Was the Office closed on 20 February 2025? How many progress reports have been tabled since November 2024? Is implementation complete? If it isn’t, what is the basis on which the Government measures it? And on what date, exactly, will the framework you have been working towards for fifteen months exist?

And the one I would most like answered: recommendations 88, 89 and 188 each carry the status “Delivered in 2022–23”. Is that the Government’s position — that the independent oversight of this reform program was delivered in its first year?

I do not expect answers. I expect the shape of the non-answers, which is its own data, and which will be in Hansard permanently.

McMurdo has broken years of public silence to say that the last two things she asked for appear to have been abandoned, and to say — in the same breath — that women continue to die.

The scoreboard was not an administrative nicety. It was the only mechanism by which the distance between the announcement and the outcome could be seen from outside the building. That is exactly why it is the thing that went.

They didn’t reject it. They marked it delivered, closed it, and filed the counting under past progress.

Primary Sources

• Hear her voice — Report One — Addressing coercive control and domestic and family violence in Queensland, Women’s Safety and Justice Taskforce, 2 December 2021

• Queensland Government response to Hear her voice — Report One, 10 May 2022

• Women’s Safety and Justice Reform — Second Annual Report 2023–24, tabled Queensland Parliament, May 2024 — recommendations 88, 89 and 188, positions and status (pp. 48, 120)

• Office of the Independent Implementation Supervisor, biannual progress reports 1–5 (December 2022 – November 2024)

• Department of Families, Seniors, Disability Services and Child Safety — Office of the Independent Implementation Supervisor; Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence Executive Group; Women’s Safety and Criminal Justice Directors-General Steering Committee; Governance arrangements; DFSV system monitoring and evaluation framework; Our past progress to address domestic, family and sexual violence. All accessed 16 July 2026

• Ministerial media statement, Independent Supervisor Appointed to oversee reform implementation, 16 March 2023

• Ministerial media statement, Landmark Domestic and Family Violence reform passes through Parliament, 28 August 2025

• Ministerial media statement, Damning report exposes Labor’s failure to protect vulnerable children, 3 June 2026

• Margaret McMurdo AC, statement to Brisbane Times, 15 July 2026

• From Pressure to Purpose: Reforming Child Protection in Queensland (Anastassiou Commission of Inquiry, 22 May 2026)

• Historical Forced Adoptions Redress Scheme, Victorian Department of Justice and Community Safety

• DNS resolution checks, oiis.qld.gov.au and womenstaskforce.qld.gov.au, 16 July 2026