National Child & Family Safety Leadership Summit 2026
This Summit is part of the For-Purpose Leadership Series
This Summit will bring together leaders, practitioners, policymakers, researchers and community voices from across Australia. This national gathering will provide space for a collective conversation on the pressing issues shaping child and family safety, including domestic violence, coercive control, child protection, and community wellbeing.
Across Australia, critical work is already underway — in family and domestic violence services, child protection, community legal services, housing and homelessness, justice, health, education, and First Nations’ community-controlled sectors. The Summit is an opportunity to listen across systems, delve into on what is working, and explore how regulation, quality and safeguarding standards, workforce capability can support more coordinated and effective responses to keep families safe.
Through six panel conversations, participants will explore the themes of policy and law reform, coercive control, intersectionality, prevention, collaboration and recovery. Together, these discussions will help shape a collective voice and shared understanding of how governments, services, and communities can align efforts to build a safer future for every child and family in Australia.
- Connect with leaders and practitioners from across all states and territories working in family and domestic violence, child protection, community legal services, justice, housing, education, and health.
- Learn from national and international experts on policy, prevention, coercive control, recovery, and system collaboration through six high-impact panel discussions.
- Contribute to a shared national dialogue that values inclusion, lived experience, and First Nations leadership in shaping pathways toward safety and wellbeing.
- Explore how emerging technologies, workforce strategies, and safeguarding standards are transforming responses across sectors.
- Collaborate in shaping collective insights that will inform a shared vision for stronger, safer communities across Australia
These conversations aim not to prescribe reform, but to listen, learn and connect across sectors and jurisdictions, capturing the diversity of experience and insight that strengthens Australia’s approach to safety.
🟦 Panel 1 — Children at the Centre: Strengthening Systems of Care and Safeguarding
Guiding Question:
How can Australia’s child, family, health, justice and education systems better connect to respond to the current landscape of family and domestic violence — aligning policy, law reform and safeguarding standards so that every child is visible, heard and safe?
🟩 Panel 2 — First Nations Leadership and Governance: Guiding the Way Forward
Guiding Question:
How can Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leadership, culture and governance shape responses to family and domestic violence, coercive control and child safety — embedding cultural authority, community control and strong workforce pathways across the system?
🟧 Panel 3 — Early Intervention and Perpetrator Accountability: Inclusive Pathways for Safety and Change
Guiding Question:
How can justice, health, community and legal sectors work together to better recognise coercive control, engage perpetrators, and strengthen inclusive pathways for early intervention and lasting change?
🟨 Panel 4 — Safe Homes, Health and Economic Security: Building the Conditions for Safety and Recovery
Guiding Question:
How can housing, health and economic systems work together — through shared standards, technology and coordinated policy — to ensure families and individuals can recover, rebuild and thrive after experiences of violence?
🟪 Panel 5 — Prevention, Education and Technology: Shaping a Culture of Respect
Guiding Question:
How can education, community, media and workplace sectors — together with lived-experience voices — use prevention programs, respectful-relationships education and technology to drive lasting cultural change and stop violence before it starts?
⚫ Panel 6 — One System for Safety: Collaboration, Data and Shared Accountability
Guiding Question:
How can governments, community services, justice, health, child protection and housing sectors collaborate — through shared data, regulation, workforce alignment and restorative pathways — to build a more connected, accountable and healing-focused national system?
Attend 22 May 2026 in Perth, Western Australia or online across Australia
