Allegra Spender (Wentworth, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on this motion. I want to acknowledge the 21 women we have lost to intimate partner and family violence in just this year alone according to Destroy the Joint's Counting Dead Women project. I want to acknowledge the children who have been left behind, the families torn apart and the trauma which has touched far too many in our communities.

This month is Domestic and Family Violence Prevention Month, an opportunity to be taking an honest look at whether we are doing enough to prevent future violence. The statistics tell us we are not. Our communities tell us we are not. I do not believe we are doing enough either. There is no question that this government has invested. There are plans, reviews, frameworks and funding. I acknowledge that. But rates of femicide and domestic and family violence have left Australians understandably questioning whether our investment is working and where it is actually going.

I understand why many are turning to the idea of a royal commission. But I want to be honest about what that means. As a national alliance of domestic and family violence specialists have said plainly, there is no time to wait for another report. Our national Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence Commissioner, Micaela Cronin agrees. We have thousands of recommendations already. We have already experienced delays. Frontline workers have told us what they need.

The problem is not a lack of answers but that we are not joining the dots in action, in accountability or in funding. We know that, right now, we do not have a clear national picture of where our funding goes. We do not have consistent data frameworks that monitor deaths or near-deaths of women. We do not have strong enough perpetrator accountability or national high-risk intervention systems. These are not new recommendations. Some have been agreed to, some half implemented and some not responded to or actioned at all. This is not good enough.

The renewed federation funding agreements in this sector commit to publishing state and territory plans on the DSS website, but there is no definition of what those plans must contain—no standardised expenditure categories, independent oversights, outcomes, reporting requirements or consequences for noncompliance. They are plans about future spending, not a retrospective account of where the money goes, what it has achieved, what works and what doesn't.

MinterEllison and ANROWS, in the first national report examining the funding of the fight against domestic and family violence, found there is simply no source of information that monitors our funding, despite our ambitious national targets. This has to change. That is why I'm calling for four things.

The first thing is a legislated national DFSV funding mapping framework, embedded in all bilateral federal funding agreements. States and territories should be required to identify and report annually against standardised expenditure categories, publicly accessible and independently overseen, with outcomes reporting attached. If we want to know whether our investment is working, we need to know where the money goes and whether it makes the difference that it said it was going to do when it got the money in the first place.

The second thing is a dedicated DFSV implementation unit within the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, to drive whole-of-government accountability and to ensure commitments are actually delivered, not buried across portfolios. The third thing is to legislate the DFSV Commission as a full statutory authority, as I've called for previously, with powers to compel agencies to provide data and information.

The fourth thing is to create and maintain a publicly accessible national register of all DFSV recommendations from royal commissions, parliamentary inquiries, independent reports and coronial findings, and, every single year, to update it with the status. We've made all these reports, we've got all these recommendations, but we do not know if they're being implemented. We need to have one place to look to be able to hold governments of all levels to account against the implementation of reports that everybody says we need to act on.

Finally, technology-facilitated abuse is central to primary prevention across the field. The Fix Our Feeds campaign, which allows people to opt out of harmful algorithms, is a first step and one I support.

The evidence is in front of us. The recommendations are on the table. What victims-survivors and frontline workers need from this parliament is not more reviews; it is action—coordinated, funded and accountable. When it works, support it more; when it doesn't, pull it back. We owe those people nothing less.

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