Meryl Swanson (Paterson, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Defence) Share this | Hansard source

I would like to commend the member for Newcastle on raising this motion in the House, talking about the United Nations International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women and the 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence. This is something that I have been really aware of and interested in, broadly, since 2008. To be truthful, I didn't have much idea of White Ribbon, which we know originated in Canada and was originally a vehicle for men to stand up and say, 'No more; we do not want gendered violence; we do not want violence against women.' Men wanted to be able to stand up and say, 'We want to stand together as a brotherhood of nonviolent, peaceful men in the world.' I want to commend all the good blokes who make the pledge for White Ribbon, who are really good people and want the violence, broadly against women, to stop. We know there are male victims but we also know the statistics overwhelmingly show that women are victims of domestic violence. So, again, to the men who take the pledge, to the good blokes: thank you, because when women are safer and girls are safer then everybody is safer in our world.

I first came to be heavily involved in White Ribbon when I worked as a radio broadcaster doing talkback. I would very occasionally get a call from someone who, in a very coded way, was reaching out for assistance, for help, and was just trying to signal that all was not well in their world. I became particularly attuned to what that meant for those people, in those times, and I would always refer them to services such as Port Stephens family services like Interrelate or Jenny's Place. There were a raft of services in our area that did incredible work. They provided that first point of call when someone was in a position where they felt that things weren't as they should be in a normal, healthy, happy relationship in a domestic situation.

I think that's the other great travesty about domestic violence: it's more often than not perpetrated by someone who also purports to love that person. That is one of the great scourges of it. I used my radio program over the years to shine a light on domestic violence, and one of the ones that really stuck with me was when I spent some time talking on the radio with a constable, Shelley, out of Cowra. She was a police officer. I think it was around 2008 that we chatted. She came home, a year or two before that, to find that her father had bludgeoned her mother to death and then had murdered her two children. She had, in fact, escaped domestic violence and gone home to live with her parents, because, as a police officer, she needed child care when she was on duty. He had also drowned the dog. I know this is very graphic, but I'm telling you this because these things are happening in our community. She was a police officer, and she fended him off. When she got home from duty, he went to attack her with an axe—she fended him off. This was her own father. He went to prison and subsequently murdered a cellmate.

I'm not using this to try to be dramatic, but I'm just saying these things happen in our community. The more we can do to put in place proper programs—once upon a time we turned our eyes away from domestic violence and said, 'Look, it's none of my business.' It is all of our business, particularly at the highest levels of government, if we do not have the systems in place to properly support people so that they can stay at home and stay safe. I can't stand the question, 'Why didn't she leave?' 'Why should she have to leave?' is the question I ask. People deserve to be safe in their own homes. As a broader community, we have an obligation to ensure that the system doesn't fail people. As legislators, we have a legal responsibility to ensure that people are safe in their community, that they have somewhere to turn and that the brilliant organisations that are supporting them are resourced enough to do the job that they need to do. They are overwhelmed.

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