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

I am very happy to answer this question now, and I will, but I think the Minister for Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs will need to leave after this. So, if there are other questions to her, we could do those next and then come back to me afterwards if that suits people.

The member for Farrer has asked about two slightly separate issues and I am very happy to talk about both of them. The first issue is our plans to communicate with the community about the very serious issues of domestic violence, and I take it that you also mean to have sexual assault included in that communication. You have asked about the continuation of the No Respect, No Relationship campaign. The first thing that I should clarify is that the original No Respect, No Relationship campaign was not proceeded with by the previous government. In fact, it was pulled at the last minute because some judgements were made that it was not an appropriate campaign.

Our view at the time was that it was a very strong campaign because it was intrinsically based on very good international and domestic research about what really worked in changing not just community attitudes but also community behaviour when it came to domestic violence and sexual assault. That campaign was replaced with another campaign that was called Violence Against Women—Australia Says No, which was a quite different advertising campaign. The original campaign proposed a quite deep behavioural change effort. It was about working with young men, in particular, through sporting heroes, and there was much more detailed on-the-ground work in schools and local communities. That campaign was replaced with a much broader campaign that was an advertising campaign in the mass media: television, newspapers, magazines, websites and so on.

There was substantially different content between the two campaigns; there were different target groups and different aims. The Violence Against Women—Australia Says No campaign had a booklet that was sent, for example, to every Australian household, whereas the No Respect, No Relationship campaign was targeted more directly at the population groups that were most likely to be able to change behaviour when it comes to violence against women.

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