Sharon Claydon (Newcastle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

by leave—As the deputy chair of the Social Policy and Legal Affairs Committee I am very pleased to rise in the House today and speak on this report, following our rather extensive inquiry over the last eight to nine months of this parliament into family, domestic and sexual violence.

At the outset, I want to thank the chair for his leadership in helping ensure that this committee stayed on track at a time when we were in the midst of COVID. Like all committee work had to, we were able to shift to digital platforms in order to take vital evidence on an issue that has now really become such an urgent one. It has been for a long time, but family, domestic and sexual violence in Australia is now well and truly in the government spotlight.

I'm delighted to be able to table this report. It is a weighty tome, and there are 88 solid bipartisan recommendations in it. I won't go through each of those; I think the chair has done an excellent job in mapping out some of those broad themes. On behalf of all the Labor members of the committee I sincerely thank the chair and our government colleagues, who made great contributions in ensuring that this report was the best it could be.

I also want to give a shout-out to the extraordinary efforts of the secretariat. People may not realise that we were actually running two major concurrent reports. We were also doing a report into housing and homelessness—another national crisis in Australia—at the same time as our work on family, domestic and sexual violence. The secretariat were terribly underresourced and overstretched at the time, and we were able to get one additional staff person to help crack through two really big inquiries. We are yet to table the housing and homeless inquiry; that's yet to come.

In addition to the secretariat, I want to acknowledge the contributions from victims-survivors who gave especially powerful testimony to the committee. We are forever indebted to them for sharing their experiences of family, domestic and sexual violence. I also thank those frontline services and organisations that made contributions on the most pressing issue facing us as a country, at a time when they were probably the most stretched and pushed.

As the chair said, we had more than 350 submissions, 47 confidential submissions, 16 days of inquiries and 90 hours of evidence over many months. In addition to what the chair mapped out, I would just like to say that these are very strong bipartisan commitments—recommendations. I slipped because I want to see them become government commitments. I will acknowledge that there were measures in the budget last night. But, before I give too many pats on the back, I want to say that this is off the back of women and children in Australia making their voices heard, loud and clear, year after year after year until, finally, enough was enough. The evidence taken by our committee was absolutely unequivocal. The scale of this problem is greater than either the resources or the resolve that the government has committed to date. We would want to see these recommendations endorsed, wholly, by the government, because that is what's needed to face up to the challenge and to finally embrace the capacity and the obligation that we have, as a Commonwealth, to actually do so much more.

As good as this report is, I could point to another eight reports that have been tabled in this parliament over eight years asking for urgent action on this issue. I'm not going to do too much self-congratulation just at this point. When I see the full weight of government behind these 88 recommendations then I'll feel like the job might well have been done. Many of the recommendations made by this committee, as I said, have been made by previous committees. They could have been implemented by the government many years ago. That failure has had some very real consequences. The economic cost of violence against women and children in Australia is estimated to be $26 billion a year. Victims and survivors bear more than half of that cost, as well as the long-term social, health and psychological damage. It's a very heavy burden. Our failure to act on family, domestic and sexual violence, over many years now, has resulted in a very heavy burden for women and children in this nation.

The government must not ignore this report. The recommendations should be implemented immediately. The government doesn't have to wait till the next national plan to implement the majority of these recommendations. The Labor members on the committee are calling for urgent action to be taken. A crucial test of this government will be, indeed, how quickly it responds to this report and how willing it is to enact the recommendations. It cannot sit on the shelves gathering dust like the other eight reports over the last eight years have done.

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