Carina Garland (Chisholm, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Yesterday Minister Clare made a very important statement regarding student safety and sexual assault on university campuses in Australia, announcing that he had appointed Ms Patty Kinnersly, the CEO of Our Watch, to be part of the working group on the prevention of and response to sexual assault and harassment, which formed part of the commitment that our government has made, through the interim report for the Australian Universities Accord process, to ensure that we do more to coordinate a national approach to doing better on the issue of campus safety.

This is an issue that affects me both personally and as a member of parliament representing a community with two universities in it. Every time I visit one of the campuses, whether Monash or Deakin, I speak to students—predominantly women—about their concerns for student safety on campus and the need to do more. At the outset here, I really want to commend all the people who have spoken to me and who have spoken to other members of parliament, or who have shared their stories with the expert panel of the accord to advocate for change and to raise awareness of this really terrible issue.

Unfortunately, it's not a new issue; it's an issue that has been pervasive and persistent for far too long. I remember my own experiences as an undergraduate student and as a postgraduate student living in a residential college and witnessing the devastation that sexual violence wrought on people's lives. I remember accompanying friends to hospital on many occasions. I remember calling people's parents in the middle of the night to tell them that their daughter had been sexually assaulted. I remember trying to navigate complaint processes; it was seemingly nobody's responsibility that violence had occurred on campus. It wasn't the responsibility of colleges, it wasn't the responsibility of the university and students had nowhere to go beyond the police—and sometimes that's not the place people want to go to raise their complaints.

As a researcher and someone who loves archival research, who finds comfort in understanding history to give me a perspective of issues in the world, I remember spending time around 15 years ago in the archives of the State Library of New South Wales. I realised that the issues I was confronted with, the experiences that I had myself and those of my peers around me, were not new things. There were media reports and reports in student newspapers for decades and decades about how unsafe campuses were for women, and nothing had been done. Every few years, it seems, issues were ventilated in the press and nothing happened. Nothing has changed, and we hear of the horrible cultures that exist—the horrible hazing rituals, the harassment, the assaults, the sexism and the entitlement that often enable abuse to happen on campuses.

I'm really pleased that at last our government, in partnership with advocacy groups and universities, is doing something about this problem. It has been a long time coming. Earlier, I praised the advocates who shared their stories and raised their voices in this particular accord process. But I also want to reflect on the work that so many have done on campus for generations to try to elevate this issue. It's hard not to think, too, about all the lives that have been disrupted and the futures which had their trajectories changed, often not for the better, because of the violence experienced on campus. I know too many people who disconnected from study, whose lives and relationships were absolutely devastated after they experienced violence on campus. I know that I too struggled through my own academic career due to not always feeling, and not being, safe on campus. I think of those generations of women who could have forged a place in the world different to the one they ended up with because they disconnected from studying. They walked away from really bright careers, and we will never know the potential that was lost because nobody acted to make sure they were safe on campus. I don't want any other generations of women to have to go through that

It's a really ambitious thing that we're taking on here. It's ambitious that we take on the National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children and, in doing so, get rid of gendered violence within a generation. But if we don't, too many lives will be destroyed. Enough is enough, and I look forward to the progress that we will make to end violence on campus.

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