Michelle Rowland (Greenway, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Communications) Share this | Hansard source

So often, we as local members stand in this place and talk about the things that we are rightly proud of in our local communities. There is one stain on my local community that I am not proud of, and that is that for the year to June 2013, Blacktown recorded the highest number of domestic assaults in New South Wales, with 1,963 incidents reported that year. Whilst for the year to June 2014 the domestic assault count dropped to 1,916, I hardly think that that statistic is a cause for celebration. This is an issue that all of us in our local communities should be concerned about.

Whilst today in this parliament we commemorate and express our support not only for victims of family violence but also for support groups, I want to acknowledge a local event that is being conducted at the same time in my home town of Blacktown; that is, what has become our annual Blacktown White Ribbon Day breakfast. I want to acknowledge Blacktown Workers Club, the Blacktown Local Area Command, Gold Crest Security, the Outer West Domestic Violence Network, and the WASH House, for being the main sponsors of this event. It is an event which I know—if it is anything like previous years where I have been able to attend—attracts hundreds of people.

More importantly than that, I would like to go back to something that I am proud of—that is, the resilience and the commitment of the local community to continue to combat and raise awareness of family violence. I want to raise the issue of this event in Blacktown, the White Ribbon Day breakfast, but also a specific person in particular: Constable Genelle Warne, who got on her bike last year and rode nearly 200 kilometres from Newcastle to raise money for local victims of domestic violence and for local support groups. Constable Warne said the woman who had inspired her had witnessed and experienced terrible acts of domestic violence. These are Constable Warne's words: 'I said to her: because she had been so brave, I felt I had to raise awareness in my personal time.' They completed the ride last year, and I was very pleased to be amongst those to welcome them. I am also very pleased to acknowledge Constable Genelle Warne as recently having won the Field Operations award for her work with domestic violence victims. She is the Domestic Violence Liaison Officer at Blacktown, and she said—as all humble recipients do—that she had not expected to receive such an award. And again in her words: 'For me, it was to show my kids how dedication and compassion can pay off. I dedicated my win to the victims, and to the good officers at Blacktown.' So what did inspire Constable Warne? I will not go into too much detail because it is so graphic, but it was the torture of a woman who had experienced abuse for six years before she could even talk about it, and who said she still felt embarrassed and ashamed and did not even want her mother to know about it. Well, thanks to people like Constable Warne, the perpetrator is now receiving the retribution that they deserve.

I want to mention some other local initiatives that are taking place in the Greenway electorate and I want to commend Boronia Multicultural Services and the National Sikh Council of Australia who initiated a very important tool kit for raising awareness of domestic violence in our local Sikh communities called Domestic Bliss. I want to also mention two people who have had a great influence on my life and they are Michelle Hannon, the pro bono partner at Gilbert + Tobin lawyers and Susan Vogels, who coordinated the domestic violence women's advocacy service at the Downing Centre. In my 10 years as a solicitor I decided very early, thanks to the influence of those two people, that my pro bono work would be done for victims of domestic violence—I was not a litigator so it was the only time that I got to go to court. I could see in those 10 years the reality that it did not matter what background you came from, family violence touched everyone—everyone from Aboriginal women to a nondescript career professional whom I saw in a court room and whom I actually thought was another solicitor but she was actually a victim seeking support. Let us all remember what is on the back of the little card that comes with these ribbons—it could be your mother, wife, sister, daughter, friend, partner or colleague that is a victim, and stopping this violence is everyone's responsibility.

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