Domestic violence prevention workers have welcomed a new scheme that will see all households in Canberra chip in to help tackle family abuse.
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Tuesday's ACT budget included a centrepiece $21.4 million spend over four years on major reforms and boosted services to benefit domestic violence victims and perpetrators.
The package will fund key measures including a full-time family safety coordinator-general and dedicated safe families team and an integrated case management system and coordination of services for family violence victims.
Extra funds were also announced for the Domestic Violence Crisis Service ACT and Canberra Rape Crisis Centre, as well as a residential behaviour change program for men at risk of using violence.
The majority of the reforms are set to be funded by a $30 per year safer families levy on every ACT household from July.
Chief Minister Andrew Barr said that scheme would provide a "locked in, legislated, sustainable revenue source", but the flat levy garnered some criticism for not taking into account household earnings.
Domestic Violence Crisis Service ACT Mirjana Wilson said the "quite substantial" funding package was unexpected, welcome and exciting for the family violence sector and the broader community.
She said the safer families levy represented a necessary, whole-of-community response to domestic and family violence.
"It allows for every single household to have an input and to see it's tangibly going somewhere."
Canberra Rape Crisis Centre chief executive Chrystina Stanford said the levy would keep domestic and family violence on the agenda and was smart given how many people were affected by family violence in their lifetime.
"I think the levy is a way of making people feel like they're contributing to something and I don't know many people who would begrudge that."
Ms Wilson was grateful for a funding top-up to frontline crisis services but said the package was also focused heavily on prevention and provided for a broad range of services, including the health and legal sectors.
"It's a very different budget, and I welcome that."
Ms Wilson also welcomed financial support for greater coordination between government and community services, the focus on perpetrator programs and extra funding for drug and alcohol treatment programs.
However, she said more money than was budgeted would likely be needed to develop and implement a consistent family violence risk assessment tool for the ACT.
The budget did not provide funds to Canberra organisation EveryMan Australia, which received a share in crisis funding last year for its Working with the Man violence prevention program.
Executive director Greg Aldridge said while he understood that was because the program's funding expired next year, he wasn't sure the perpetrator program funded in this year's budget would have the same focus on detecting and helping potentially violent men early on.
