Gabriel Ng (Menzies, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to support this motion, and I want to begin by acknowledging the member for Bonner. Before entering this parliament, she founded Australia's first domestic violence law firm. She sat across the table from victim-survivors and has advocated every single day for victim-survivors. That experience matters, and this parliament is a better place for having her in it. I'd also like to thank the member for Cowper for his comments in support of this motion. His experience is in the justice system. I hope that all members of this parliament would agree that more needs to be done in addressing the scourge of family and domestic violence, regardless of which political party or which political persuasion we are.

Last week in Campbelltown, police entered a home and found three bodies: a woman and two young boys, aged four and 12, allegedly murdered in a domestic violence incident. This is a stark and devastating reminder of the consequences of domestic violence and the scourge that it remains across our society. A family is gone, and, sadly, it is not the only family that has been devastated by this absolute tragedy that is playing out across our country.

On average, a woman is killed every eight days by a man's violence—almost always a man that she knows. Domestic or family violence is a leading driver of homelessness for women, and burden-of-disease studies point to domestic violence as one of the leading causes of death, illness and injury in Australian women aged between 18 and 44. These are not statistics that we can gloss over. These are mothers and daughters, neighbours, friends, colleagues—people in our communities in the streets we walk every day. And the deaths, as horrific as they are, are only the tip of the iceberg, because, for every woman killed, there are thousands more that are carrying wounds both physical and mental. The trauma does not end when the violence stops. It follows people into their schools, their workplaces, their sleeping hours. It shapes educational outcomes. It affects economic participation. It costs people their health, their stability and their sense of self.

For some, it creates a cycle of trauma that passes to the next generation unless we do more to intervene. I've seen this firsthand when volunteering at community legal centres, and I've sat in a county court for intervention order appeals. I've met women navigating a system that can feel designed to exhaust them before it protects them. As the member for Cowper mentioned, the inadequacy—often—of intervention orders and the way that systems abuse can be perpetrated are what we must reckon with. I've seen what it costs someone to come forward, to relive what happened, and to fight for an order that should never have been necessary in the first place.

In my community of Menzies, the services working on this every single day are extraordinary: the team at the Box Hill Orange Door; the remarkable counsellors and workers at Doncare, with their unique locally based model of support that focuses on recovery, which has counsellors and mentors who are able to support victim-survivors on that journey; and Eastern Community Legal Centre, whose volunteer recognition night I recently attended and where I had a chance to acknowledge the extraordinary contribution of people like Michael Smith and Belinda Lowe for providing support every single day to people who experience family and domestic violence, as well as the range of other services they provide to vulnerable people in Melbourne's east. They show up day in and day out for families in crisis. They deserve our respect and they deserve our continued support.

As the member for Cowper said, this is an issue that men must reckon with. The vast majority of this violence is committed by men. That's just the reality. Not all men, of course, but it is a problem that we must own and that we must step out. We must call out disrespect when we see it at the pub, on the footy field, in the workplace. We must call out unacceptable behaviours, show our children what respectable relationships look like, and refuse to stay silent when somebody that we're friends with crosses a line. That's why I was proud to attend with Assistant Minister Ged Kearney and Special Envoy for Men's Health, Dan Repacholi, at the launch of the Healthy Men Community Conversations project, because we need to have cultural change as well as the resources that the member for Bonner spoke to.

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