Peta Murphy (Dunkley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am very pleased to follow that incredibly thoughtful and honest contribution from the member for Cowper. He and I share some similarities in our pre-parliamentary careers. With a long history of working in the criminal justice system as a solicitor and a barrister, particularly as a legal aid barrister, I've represented victims, perpetrators, men, women and children. It is impossible to have had that job and to have been involved with the people who have suffered domestic violence or perhaps have committed it because they were brought up in a family or a community where that was the attitude and the behaviours that they were taught, and to have met children who have been exposed to domestic violence, and not understand that this is a complex, difficult but fundamentally crucial issue that we all have to work together to solve. So thank you for that contribution.

The Fair Work Amendment (Paid Family and Domestic Violence Leave) Bill 2022, as many people have said, is an important step forward in trying to deal with the consequences of domestic violence, particularly for women. It is the culmination of a 10-year campaign. The first time an enterprise agreement included 10 days paid domestic violence leave was in my state, Victoria, on the Surf Coast, with the agreement between the council and the Australian Services Union, when the current member for Corangamite was the mayor of that council. That was 10 years ago. This is an important reform, and it should be a proud moment for the government and for those who aren't in the government but support this legislation in this House and in the upper house. But it should also be a time for all of us to reflect on the fact that it's taken 10 years, and in those 10 years the need for paid domestic violence leave has grown, not diminished.

Despite genuine effort from state and federal governments, Labor and Liberal, over many years, we have not been able to address violence in relationships and violence in the community—violence predominantly perpetrated by men against the women and the children that they purport to, and in many cases do, love. It's just a fact that this is an issue that continues to cause devastation across communities and we haven't been able to address it, despite genuine efforts. I agree with the member for Cowper that the community want to know that more is happening than words. I don't think that any of the words of any of us in this place, no matter what our political party or Independent status is, are simply platitudes. I genuinely believe they come from deeply held beliefs and a deeply held desire to address this issue. But we can't keep talking about it and not find solutions.

In my opinion, informed significantly by my decade and a half of experience working in the criminal justice system, we can't continue to focus on assisting people only once they're in the position of having experienced domestic violence, and we can't continue to focus only on punishing people who have perpetrated domestic violence, if we want to actually crack this cycle. Both of those measures are very important, and this legislation is very important to that first measure of assisting people who have experienced and been subjected to domestic violence to be able to do what they need to do to secure their and their children's safety without also having to lose work and income. They are both incredibly important things to do, but we also have to do more to prevent it happening in the first place. We have to change the culture that exists, which allows the continuation of attitudes in this country that are based on outdated gender stereotypes, perpetuate gender inequality and somehow turn a blind eye to violence. The experts tell us, and have been telling us for a long time, that the driving factor causing this ongoing scourge of domestic violence is gender inequality and outdated, entrenched gender stereotypes.

So, whilst we must do everything we can to assist people to get out of situations of domestic violence—which includes non-physical violence such as financial or other coercion—and make sure that people who engage in those unacceptable behaviours are punished for them and held to account, we also have to do more to do more to make sure that the perpetrators can break their personal cycle of perpetrating and get out of the cycle of reoffending, or that it doesn't start in the first place.

Nothing I'm saying is particularly surprising or innovative—it's what we have known for some time. People who work across the system—social workers, counsellors, police officers, lawyers—tell us this. We can't keep treating the symptoms and the consequences; we also have to address the causes. Many state governments, particularly my state government in Victoria, have acknowledged the link between gender inequality and outdated gender stereotypes and domestic and family violence. In Victoria there is a Gender Equality Strategy to address it. We know that we need to invest more in prevention, as the member for Cowper and other people have said, through education—respectful relationship education, starting with really young children.

We need gender equality, starting with very young children, making sure that the way we used to see ourselves perhaps a generation ago in Australia, where men were tough and played footy and drank beer while women were pretty and wore bikinis and were good at cooking, is not what young people see as the role of men and women only. Young people in our communities and families know that to be a man you can be sensitive, vulnerable, supportive and kind. To be a woman you can be strong, assertive and successful in whatever endeavour one takes on—or vice versa. The old gender stereotypes where the man is the head of the house and the woman is subservient—believe it or not—still exist in too many parts of our society, and we have to do more to make sure that children aren't shackled by those stereotypes, that they are free to be who they want to be and to be equal.

We also have to keep on the path that this government has started—and there was some work done by the previous government—for economic security and equality for women. One of the reasons it's so important to have paid domestic violence leave is because of the fact that so many women say they don't leave because of the financial consequences of leaving. That's because they often work in highly feminised industries, which are the lowest-paid industries in the country. They often have significant periods out of the workforce, so their superannuation balances are significantly lower than men's. They may not have equity in a home. They have responsibilities, particularly if they take the children with them, for child care. That's another gender stereotype that we can do more about in a public policy sense to help with the culture in this country; give men more opportunities to be carers for their children and women the more opportunities to go to work. Again, that goes towards gender equality.

We have to keep working in that field. We also have to continue to invest in services for perpetrators to prevent reoffending. For most people there's an instinctive thought of: 'What? Why would we support perpetrators?' I absolutely understand that, but unless we have programs that we know will work, that are evaluated and that are successful in helping men learn how not to reoffend, to change their behaviours and to change their attitudes, then we aren't going to stop those individual cycles of offending, and it's going to be much harder to stop the macro-cycle of offending. Until we are able to do that, and move towards a society where, for example, if the local hero of the footy team is also up before the courts for domestic violence, the club says: 'We don't support you. We actually hold you accountable for that behaviour,' and until things like that are commonplace, we have to keep supporting victims.

In my community in Dunkley, in Frankston, we have higher than average instances of domestic violence, so we do need to keep supporting the people who are the victims. One of the things I am very pleased about, as a result of the election of the Albanese Labor government, is that there will be seven new support workers for domestic violence victims provided to my community. That will be very important. I'm also keen to make sure that children who have experienced or witnessed domestic violence are given the supports and counselling they need to ensure that the experience doesn't predispose them to falling into the cycle of being either a victim or a perpetrator when they are an adult, because we know there is that cycle. So support for children is incredibly important alongside that education.

I am very much looking forward to the next three years in government, to being a part of working on gender equality in sport, in work and at home, because it's the right thing to do. It's the right thing to do for men and for women. It opens up opportunities that are either legally or—in many cases still—culturally not available to both men and women. It's good for productivity, it's good for the economy and it's also a really important plank in dealing with things like domestic violence, which so many people have said for so long is intolerable and we must address. I look forward to the day that we don't have to say that anymore because we have been successful in changing culture, behaviour and attitudes in this country. I commend this bill as a very important step in that direction.

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