Craig Emerson (Rankin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I would like to commend the member for McPherson for raising the issue of domestic violence in the parliament. It is a fundamentally important issue to any civil society. I would take up the offer of the member for Ryan to seek a bipartisan approach to this terrible problem in our country.

Firstly to the facts: based on surveys done by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, it appears that in Australia only 28 per cent of female victims of assault and just 20 per cent of female victims of sexual assault report the matter to police. Based on that and some other work, the ABS has concluded that one in five women experienced domestic violence or sexual assault in the last year. Any number is unacceptable, but one in five women experiencing domestic violence in the last year is an astonishingly high number. Over their lifetimes as many as 57 per cent of women have reported experiencing at least one incident of physical or sexual abuse. For anyone to suggest—and no-one has in this debate—that this is not a national scandal would be way off the mark. It is a terrible indictment of us as a country and of our hope and aspiration to be a civil society when women are being bashed and sexually abused at this sort of rate.

It is not only the direct victims of domestic violence to whom we should be paying attention. One-quarter of our young people have witnessed violence against their mother or stepmother. In my first speech when I came into the parliament in 1998, I said how horrifying it is to imagine little kids watching their father beat their mother. It is just a shocking thing, and as a parliament we have not done anywhere near enough to deal with this terrible problem in Australia.

Last year, for example, when the Supported Accommodation Assistance Program five-year agreement was to be signed, the government actually reduced base funding for the service. I do not want to make this a highly political contribution, but I do need to point this out. It was done in spite of evidence that there was a lot of unmet demand for the Supported Accommodation Assistance Program by women who needed to flee the violence in the house or the premises in which they were living. The sort of assistance provided through that program is not available to anywhere near the number of women who need it. As a consequence, some women will return to violent homes simply to make sure that their children have a roof over their heads. So women take a beating to protect their children and so that their children are not homeless.

There have been some positive developments. The Victorian government released a survey entitled Two steps forward one step back: community attitudes to violence against women. It showed that community attitudes towards violence against women have not shifted significantly. The positive development is that the survey has at least been conducted. But the brutal truth is that violence against women and children continues to be trivialised and condoned by many Australians.

I think it is great that the Howard government has put the ads against domestic violence to air but that is not of itself a comprehensive response to this problem, and nor do I believe that the Howard government asserts that it is a comprehensive response to it. Instead of a piecemeal approach where a little bit of money goes to the Supported Accommodation Assistance Program and some ads go to air, we need to develop a national plan to prevent violence against women and children. That is what Labor has committed to do.

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