Tanya Plibersek (Sydney, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Childcare) Share this | Hansard source

In the lead-up to this year’s budget, the Treasurer conned Australian women into thinking that the government might address some of the issues facing them both at home and in the workplace—perhaps by starting to address the child-care shambles that they have created or introducing tax rates or other incentives that would make it easier for parents to balance their work and family responsibilities. The Treasurer said to the Press Club on 1 March 2006:

I think that we ought to be looking at making this the most female friendly place on earth.

He is very happy to talk about being family friendly and female friendly, but this budget is the exact opposite. This budget offers no solutions to some of the key problems facing Australian women. Of course, the tax cuts were welcome. Labor welcomed the tax cuts. But it is worth saying that those tax cuts were very quickly spent on higher mortgage repayments and higher petrol costs. With the insecurity and cuts to wages that people are facing with the new Work Choices legislation, those few extra dollars certainly evaporated very quickly. It is interesting to note that, when you look at the massive superannuation tax cut, most of that money will in fact go to men because men are generally higher paid than women and have higher overall superannuation payouts. They are not as likely to have disrupted work patterns as women are.

I have spoken in the past at some length about the issues facing the child-care system. I do not propose to dwell on that today except to say that there were such very high expectations of this budget. The minister responsible, the Minister for Families, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs, Mr Mal Brough, had been out there hyping this budget as the solution to the child-care crisis in this country. We have had statements from the Treasurer. Can I say: what a disappointment this budget was! I think that Australian parents who are holding their breath for some relief from the very high expense of child care or who are looking for a place and cannot find one or who are worried about the quality of the child care were extremely disappointed by this budget.

This budget also does nothing for skills. There are shortages in a number of traditional female employment areas as well. The budget does nothing for any of those traditional trades. Look at the disgraceful situation with the private TAFEs that the government was trumpeting at the last election. One of them has one student! That is a terrific contribution to improving Australia’s skills base.

However, there were a couple of issues that were startlingly absent from the budget that I want to focus on today. The first is a complete lack of interest in initiatives to tackle violence against women and particularly violence against Indigenous women and children. We had Minister Mal Brough and other members of the government out in public in recent weeks saying that this is a national disgrace. We have known for some time that this is a national disgrace. Indigenous leaders have been telling us for some time that it is a national disgrace and that they need help to address these serious problems. There was nothing in this budget in that respect.

There is also a serious lack of funding for community legal centres. I want to address that because one of the best things that we can do to actually provide justice for excluded and marginalised people in Australia is to give them equal access to the law. That is what community legal centres are set up to do, and that is what they do. They have received little or no support from the government over the years.

I turn to the issue of violence against Indigenous women and children. An international survey conducted in 2003 on violence against women found that 57 per cent of the women surveyed had experienced at least one instance of physical or sexual violence over their lifetime. That is a staggering figure in itself. The picture is even worse for Aboriginal women, who are 12 times more likely to be victims of assault than non-Indigenous women. A number of quite shocking cases have been focused on in the media recently. It is important for us to say two things: firstly, in many Indigenous communities it is indeed the Indigenous leaders, particularly the older women, who are leading the fight against this abuse; and, secondly, when we talk about the causes and the background of this sort of abuse, we are not making excuses—you need to understand a problem to be able to fight it properly.

A couple of weeks ago, the Queensland Centre for Domestic and Family Violence Research at Central Queensland University hosted an Indigenous family violence prevention forum titled ‘Men, Women and Community—Partners’. The forum was attended by 110 people from urban, rural and remote Queensland communities. Most of them came from Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander communities and a lot of the participants were men. A unique part of this year’s program was the yarning circles, where people were able to discuss the issue of violence in a less structured way. There were a lot of important addresses from Aboriginal people who work in Aboriginal communities in Northern Queensland and the Northern Territory, as well as Torres Strait Islanders.

They talked about examples that were working in their communities, such as: increasing the numbers of domestic and family violence units and liaison officers; setting up an integrated government approach to violence; employing Indigenous court workers to coordinate services to address offender needs and behaviour and not relying on community volunteers; mandating programs for offenders in custody, including parenting, healing, cultural and Indigenous art programs; and setting up alternative sentencing and periodic detention programs—for example, work on outstations for adolescents to provide them with real life skills and to discourage  recidivism. Those are some of the things that leaders in those communities argue are needed in their own communities. I hope that people who are interested in this issue, as the government have claimed to be in recent weeks, will take some notice of what Indigenous communities themselves are calling for.

In the past 15 years there have been about 50 reports on violence in Indigenous communities and related issues. I do not think that we need another report or summit. We need to start taking notice of the recommendations that are made in those reports and meetings by people who know what works in their own communities and actually backing some of those success stories. I have come across examples myself, such as: a community where men are dropped from a very popular and successful local cricket team if they get an apprehended violence order made against them; tiny country towns where they have a rally against child sexual abuse—something that was previously a taboo issue that nobody talked about—and where the community stand together and say, ‘This is not acceptable in our community’; and night patrols where older women patrol, often on foot, and diffuse potentially violent or dangerous situations before they escalate. Those are all things that we should be looking at.

We also have to look at what is happening when it comes to legal support for the people who have the bravery to come forward and say that they have been victims of sexual assault or child sexual abuse. Sexual assault and child sexual abuse in particular have notoriously low conviction rates. It is impossible to imagine even the most articulate and confident person going through the legal system and braving the questioning of defence lawyers and so on without proper legal support. Without proper legal support it is just impossible. Police services are important, of course; but police are only part of the equation when it comes to dealing with the unfortunate end of abuse and sexual violence against women and children.

When you look at the work done by Indigenous women’s legal services—there is one office in each state, and between them they share $1 million in funding—you see how important it is to have accessible and culturally appropriate services that not only look at criminal behaviour but also support Indigenous people in dealing with some of the surrounding issues. When you look at the shocking lack of support for community legal centres in general in this year’s budget, you see that it is another glaring omission that deserves to have the attention of the public brought to it. A number of state-wide services operate from my electorate, so I am fortunate enough to have 19 community legal centres operating from my electorate. They operate on a number of different issues, such as credit and debt, disability discrimination, arts and entertainment law, and welfare issues.

Community legal centres have not received a service funding increase in any budget since 1996. In some budgets, they have not even received the CPI increase. In this year’s budget, the government has allocated a tiny $22.2 million to the national community legal centres program. That is an increase of only two per cent on last year; again, that is less than the CPI increase. That means that community legal centres are, effectively, going backwards. I know that many of them are struggling to remain viable even though the service they provide is of a high quality and done with an absolute minimum of overheads. Community legal centres have told me that over the last few years they have been forced to slowly reduce their services, and that is a very disappointing outcome. Many solicitor positions are now only four days a week, not five, and many community legal centres have cut their administrative staff. That means that centres are operating less efficiently because solicitors, instead of seeing clients, are doing administrative work.

More importantly, with less money and fewer staff, operating hours of centres are being cut back. Of course, fewer hours open means that fewer clients are getting the help they need with their legal problems. Research conducted by the Institute for Sustainable Futures shows that for every dollar spent on community legal centres $100 is saved in avoidable costs to other government departments. Of course, the Treasurer and the Attorney-General do not see the economic sense in making that sort of investment. Indeed, the Attorney-General is not prepared to defend community legal centres, because he blames them for spending their time on political campaigns and ideological causes. I can tell the Attorney-General that community legal centres see a great number of clients and do very important work. When they get involved in a political campaign it is because they see the vast majority of their clients being disadvantaged by something that the government is doing. If the Attorney-General visited the centres occasionally he would see the real story. He would see what a good job community legal centres are doing, what long hours their lawyers are working and what low pay they are receiving to provide vital legal services for the issues that Australians face day to day. They deal with things like family law, credit card debt, medical negligence, disputes with banks, employment issues, being ripped off by companies, tenancy disputes and unscrupulous landlords.

There are people who cannot afford high legal fees. The government are spending $174 million in legal fees this year to pay law firms for their own legal advice, but they are not prepared to help low-income Australians to afford legal advice themselves. One firm alone is due to get $19 million. That is almost the whole budget of community legal centres in this country.

It is worth noting too that many of the disputes that people go to community legal centres to solve are caused by changes that the government has made to family law, industrial relations, and other recent legislative changes. The government is terrific at creating the disputes that send people to community legal centres but no good at all at funding the work done by those community legal centres.

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