Kara Cook (Bonner, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That this House:

(1) notes that during Domestic and Family Violence Prevention Month we raise awareness, support victim survivors and promote zero tolerance for violence in our country;

(2) commends the Government's National Plan to End Violence Against Women and Children 2022-32;

(3) recognises the Government's record investment to end violence against women and children and work undertaken under the First Action Plan 2023-2027; and

(4) supports the Government as it develops the second action plan towards its goal to end violence against women and children in Australia in one generation.

I rise today to acknowledge Domestic and Family Violence Prevention Month, a time when we come together as a nation to raise awareness, support victims-survivors, honour those we have lost and reaffirm our collective commitment to zero tolerance for violence against women and children. I also rise to speak about the Albanese Labor government's National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children, our government's record investment in this work and the important consultation now underway to shape the next phase of reform, including the development of the second action plan and the continued implementation of the First Nations action plan.

As a former domestic violence lawyer and as someone who has sat across the table from countless women at the most terrifying moments of their lives, I've seen the courage it takes to leave. I've sat with women making impossible decisions, women trying to protect their children, women trying to find somewhere safe to sleep and women trying to navigate systems while living in fear. I've also seen their extraordinary resilience. I've seen women rebuild their lives after unimaginable trauma, and I've seen frontline workers go above and beyond to keep people safe, often with limited resources and under immense pressure. Those experiences are one of the reasons that I came to this place. Violence against women is not inevitable. It is preventable, and governments have a responsibility to act. That is why I am proud that this government has made the single largest investment of any Australian government in tackling violence against women and children—more than $4 billion across frontline services, prevention programs, early intervention, behaviour change initiatives, housing, and supports for children. These are not symbolic announcements. They are practical reforms that are changing lives.

This government made the leaving violence payment permanent because no woman should have to choose between violence and homelessness. We legislated 10 days of paid domestic and family violence leave, recognising that safety should not cost someone their job or income. We invested $1.2 billion in emergency and transitional accommodation because escaping violence means little if there's nowhere safe to go. We've boosted funding for the 500 frontline workers program by more than 70 per cent. And, for the first time in Australia's history, we launched a standalone national plan for First Nations women and children, 'Our Ways—Strong Ways—Our Voices', backed by a $218 million investment in this year's budget. In my electorate of Bonner, organisations like the Red Rose Foundation, home to Australia's only strangulation trauma centre, continue their life-saving work supporting victims-survivors because of sustained investment in frontline responses.

This is the kind of reform you see when women's safety is treated as a national priority, not as an afterthought, and it's what happens when lived experience informs policy, when frontline workers are listened to and when governments understand that violence against women is not just a justice issue; it's a housing issue, a health issue and a workplace issue. And, fundamentally, it is a national crisis. That is why the next phase of this work matters so deeply.

Consultation is now underway on the second National Action Plan to End Violence against Women and Children. At the same time, consultation is occurring across several related frameworks, including the next action plans under Our Ways - Strong Ways - Our Voices, Safe and Supported, and the National Strategy to Prevent and Respond to Child Sexual Abuse. Importantly, these consultations are being coordinated so people are not forced to repeatedly relive their trauma across multiple processes. I encourage victims-survivors, frontline organisations, advocates, researchers and community members to have their say, because ending violence against women requires all of us.

I would be doing a disservice if I didn't acknowledge all of the women and children who we have seen murdered in this country, not just in the last few weeks but over the last 10 years in particular. I want to acknowledge the work, through Australian Femicide Watch, of journalist and researcher Sherele Moody, who has documented 3,000 deaths of women and children over the past decade. She herself has said that this count is incomplete because our systems still fail to capture every life lost. An estimated 2.3 million Australians have experienced some form of domestic and family violence in the last year alone. That is the size of the Greater Brisbane population.

I'm proud of what this Labor government has delivered, but there is much more work to do. The women who have been killed need us to continue this work. They need us to fully fund frontline services, to strengthen responses and to ensure that no-one is left without the support they need.

Mary Aldred (Monash, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Is there a seconder for the motion?

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

I second the motion and reserve my right to speak.

Pat Conaghan (Cowper, National Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I commend the member for Bonner for raising this motion, and I agree wholeheartedly with all of her comments. I would firstly like to acknowledge the strength and courage of all the victims-survivors: no-one can understand what you've been through. It doesn't matter whether they're a police officer, a counsellor, an adviser—they haven't been through what you've been through. I'd also like to acknowledge and remember all those victims who did not survive.

As a former police officer, detective, prosecutor and then lawyer for 18 years, and having done a lot of pro bono work for women's refuges, I understand. I can never completely understand what victims-survivors have been through, but is so important and so incumbent upon government on both sides. We do work together on this because this is above politics. It has to be bipartisan, and I commend the government in its budget for continuing the good work that the coalition did over its last three terms, acknowledging that we have so much more to do—so much more.

I was privileged in the last term to be the shadow assistant minister for the prevention of family violence. I took that role extremely seriously, and I travelled the breadth of Australia. I went to every single state and territory on a number of occasions. I met with advocates, with survivors, with men's groups—across the board—and the message was the same: unless the funding model changed and unless certain things took place, they would always be the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff. What they meant by that was that we need to concentrate more on prevention and intervention, as opposed to response and recovery.

I'm not suggesting in any way that we defund response and recovery. That needs to be paramount as well. But during the last term the total of the funding for prevention and intervention amounted to 17 per cent. If we know what the root cause is, then we need to fund that. We develop policy that concentrated predominantly on prevention and intervention, because you see statistics like: as of December 2025, 3,565 people in New South Wales prisons had domestic and family violence offences recorded against them. That increased 39 per cent over five years. Despite 34,000 men receiving an apprehended domestic violence order each year, there are only 900 men's behavioural change program places funded each year across the state. That is a broken system.

What we need and what we should be working to is, firstly, increasing funding dollar for dollar for the delivery of prevention and intervention services versus response and recovery funding. We need to develop a nationally accredited men's behaviour change program. We know that men are the problem, but men are also the answer. Healthy men are good men and become active men in society, and women want men to be healthy both mentally and physically. We need to develop a national accreditation pathway for people facilitating men's behavioural change. It needs to be a profession. We need to establish a national workforce strategy to address family and domestic violence. Most importantly, we need to incorporate accredited respectful relationships education into the national curriculum from kindergarten to year 12. Hopefully, that will take the step in the right direction.

Gabriel Ng (Menzies, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to 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.

Andrew Wallace (Fisher, Liberal National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This is a topic which is near and dear to my heart. I thank the member for Bonner for moving this motion. The zero-tolerance language around this motion is correct. The sentiment is right, but sentiment without accountability is not policy; it's just another press release. I rise having chaired the bipartisan inquiry into family, domestic and sexual violence, which reported to this parliament in March 2021. Eighty-eight recommendations were made. They were bipartisan and they were unanimous on the core findings. We said as a nation we can do better. We said we must do better.

Five years later, this government asks us to commend them. Let me put some numbers on the table. The ABS released data in March this year showing that the number of family and domestic violence offenders rose eight per cent in 2024-25 to approximately 97,800—the largest-single increase since national data collection began. More than three-quarters of this number are male. This government's own oversight body, the Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence Commission, found a 35 per cent increase in women killed by intimate partners in 2023-24—35 per cent in a single year under this national plan and under this government's watch.

The Australian Institute of Criminology's most recent homicide data records 46 intimate partner homicide victims, most of them women. In 2025, 28 women were killed by a current or former partner. This government declared gender based violence a 'national emergency'. Those were their words. For the community facing the most severe exposure—First Nations women in remote Australia—the Prime Minister stood in Alice Springs and announced $842.6 million, with women's safety explicitly cited. Documents produced in the Senate reveal that not one dollar of that $842.6 million has been paid. When pressed, the government said funding would be done retrospectively. Tell that to the women and children who've been waiting for help. This is the pattern: announcement, architecture, silence. In the meantime, another family is shattered.

DV is not simply physical or psychological harm; it is the slow erosion of one's identity. It's a woman or a man who stops trusting their own judgement because they have been told, day after day, that they are wrong, that they're worthless and that they're unwanted. It's permanent vigilance—reading a room, reading a mood and calculating the safest response to an unpredictable threat. Children who grow up witnessing this are more likely to experience mental health difficulties. They struggle at school and enter violent relationships themselves. The cycle does not break itself. The deeper cost is harder to measure. It's the child carrying a nervous system shaped by chaos into a classroom, into friendships and into their own relationships one day. The bruises may fade and the wounds may heal, but the research tells us that women who have lived inside violence carry it in their bodies and their minds for years, sometimes decades, after they leave. Rebuilding a shattered family is years of painstaking, expensive work, and we ask chronically underfunded services to carry that weight.

Finally, I want to send a shout-out to Ashton Wood of DV Safe Phone from my electorate, who has donated thousands of phones to victims of domestic violence, thousands of phones that get distributed around the country at no cost to people. He does a great job and he should be commended.

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

I rise to support this motion. I really want to add to the words of the member for Menzies and congratulate the member for Bonner for bringing this motion before the House today. May is Domestic and Family Violence Prevention Month. Domestic violence is one of the most important issues confronting us as a nation. It has a huge impact on too many people and too many families. This is a national crisis. No-one would say otherwise. It demands exactly the kind of national, coordinated and long-term response that the Albanese Labor government has prioritised.

The National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children 2022-2032 is the national framework agreed by all governments to end violence against women and children in one generation. It recognises that this work must happen across the whole system—prevention, early intervention, response, recovery and healing—and this government is implementing that plan. We have invested more than any other Commonwealth government in Australia's history to address violence against women and children—more than $4 billion across frontline services, prevention, housing, legal assistance, behaviour change programs, support for children and financial assistance for women escaping violence. We've legislated 10 days of paid family and domestic violence leave, and we've made the leaving violence payment permanent, providing up to $5,000 in financial support alongside safety planning for women leaving violence. We're investing in emergency and transitional accommodation because women and children cannot leave violence if they have nowhere safe to. We are also strengthening frontline services, including through the 500 Workers Initiative, and reforming systems that, all too often, have been weaponized by perpetrators, such as the child support allowance.

A critical part of this national work is Our Ways, Strong Ways, Our Voices, Australia's first dedicated national plan for ending family, domestic and sexual violence against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and children. This plan has been driven by the lived experience, leadership and advocacy of First Nations women, children, families, communities and organisations. It is focused on what Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have asked for: culturally safe, community led, trauma informed responses that support safety, healing and long-term change. It's backed by $218.3 million over four years, including support for Aboriginal community controlled organisations to deliver specialist family, domestic and sexual violence services.

In my own community of Newcastle we know how important these services are to meet women and children where they are. I was very pleased to support recent investments in innovative domestic, family and sexual violence health programs in my community, like the Supporting Outreach Healthcare pilot and the Hope in Healing project. The Supporting Outreach Healthcare pilot delivers multidisciplinary primary care clinics directly into refuge accommodation across Newcastle, Lake Macquarie and Maitland.

The Hope in Healing project, funded through the Medical Research Future Fund, will help identify and respond to one of the hidden impacts of domestic and family violence: traumatic brain injury. Local screening by a local service found that more than 80 per cent of women, young people and children who've experienced potential head injury do not seek medical help. This is deeply concerning, and it shows why this work is so important.

I also want to acknowledge another important local project: the digital trauma informed Technology Facilitated Abuse Playbook. This web app is designed to strengthen the capability of frontline workers supporting victims-survivors of domestic and family violence. Developed through a partnership with the Hunter Domestic and Family Violence Consortium, WorkVentures and the Newcastle Permanent Charitable Foundation, it was launched at the Newcastle Museum just last week. The Hunter Domestic and Family Violence Consortium is a unique collaboration of specialist domestic family violence and homeless non-government services in the Hunter, including Family Support Newcastle, Got Your Back Sista, Jenny's Place, Wariga Ngurra, and Nova for Women and Children.

This work before us is urgent. It needs to be long term. It requires governments to lead but all of us to change. All of us need to keep this at the front and centre of our lives. It is a national emergency that requires all of us to lean in urgently.

Allegra Spender (Wentworth, Independent) Share this | Link to 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.

Sam Lim (Tangney, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

When I was a police officer, I came across many victim-survivor families. Too often, we would get a call and rush to the family's home. Too often, we would arrest a perpetrator of domestic violence. And too often, the perpetrator would be someone who we police officers had seen before, many times.

During Domestic and Family Violence Prevention Month, I wish to add my voice to the voices in Tangney and across Australia lending our support to victims-survivors. There is zero tolerance for violence in our country.

I wish to acknowledge the victims-survivors who come to my office in Tangney to seek assistance with federal services and to share their personal experiences. These women have spoken about coercive control—about their former partners being able to track their every move, hack into their phones and make them fear for their lives. Their stories are very moving and very scary. If, by some chance, they hear this speech, I want to let these women know that I am working hard to ensure that no-one needs to live with family, domestic and sexual violence.

One in four women and one in 14 men have experienced intimate partner violence since the age of 15. This is totally unacceptable.

I want to acknowledge the work that has been done in my electorate of Tangney by Zonta House, a specialist provider of family and domestic violence services. Zonta House offers important refuge and support and transitional accommodation, as well as services for employment pathways, justice reintegration, awareness and education. I really commend the work that Zonta House does in Tangney and in the whole of Australia.

Our government has invested more than any other government to improve the safety of women and children, with more than $4 billion across frontline services, preventive programs, behaviour change and programs for children, across governments. This investment includes measures such as making the leaving violence payment permanent. This payment is $5,000 in financial help as well as safety planning for women leaving violence. We have also launched Australia's first ever standalone plan to address family, domestic and sexual violence for First Nations women and children. This is backed by $218 million in funding in this budget. We are investing $1.2 billion for emergency and transitional accommodation to ensure that women can reach safety. We have increased funding for family violence legal services and legislated 10 days paid domestic and family violence leave. This work also includes funding for intervention programs and for programs to support recovery for children who have experienced violence. This work has supported 1,400 organisations, helping more than 440,000 people across Australia who have experienced family, domestic and sexual violence. New child support reform announced in the budget will help prevent the weaponisation of the child support system, protecting children and parents from financial abuse. There is more than $1.9 billion of unpaid child support in Australia. This government is investing $183 million in the budget to make our child support system safer and fairer, because child support should never be used as a tool for control or coercion. We need a system that is safer for parents and children.

We know there is more to do. Too many people continue to live with family, domestic and sexual violence every day.

Nicolette Boele (Bradfield, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on this important motion in support of victims-survivors of domestic violence. It's heartbreaking and it's unacceptable that Australians—men, women and children—continue to suffer from domestic and sexual violence. It's unacceptable that when women—it's happening predominantly to women and children—try to leave an abusive household, they struggle to find anywhere safe to go. It's unacceptable that people should feel like one of my constituents did. She wrote to me recently and explained how the financial stress and the housing insecurity that she faced after leaving a violent household made her feel like she should never have left in the first place.

The persistence of these problems burns through our communities and is a blight on our nation. Protecting the most vulnerable in our community must be a priority, yet for too long leaders have failed to treat this crisis with the urgency and the seriousness that it deserves. But where leadership has fallen short community organisations are filling the gap. Bradfield is home to a number of services supporting people experiencing domestic and intimate partner violence, and they do incredible work.

One of those is in St Leonards. It's called Taldumande—or, as we like to call it, Taldy. Taldy has been supporting young people for decades. This year marks 50 years of operations. Children and young people can go to Taldy for help while facing some of the most difficult challenges any person can face. They support young people at risk of homelessness with crisis accommodation and finding a long-term home. They help young people who are in police custody or who are out on bail to navigate the justice system and meet their bail conditions by arranging transport and legal support. They operate a youth hub where people can get informal and formal support in a comfortable and non-threatening environment, and they run group education programs, preparing young people for work and helping them learn practical skills to navigate their lives.

The young people and their families who turn to Taldy for help are in crisis for many reasons, but many of them are there because of family violence. One-third of Taldy's clients were victims of violence perpetrated by either a parent or a guardian. We know that family violence is a significant cause of children and young people's mental distress and is a major reason why children end up homeless. When children have nowhere to go, it's organisations like Taldy that step in to help them

We need more Taldies. As is always the case, Taldy is at full stretch. Their housing service is at capacity 24/7, and Taldy was forced to turn away over 400 young people last year. It just shouldn't be this way. Organisations doing such important work should not be so underresourced. They should be given everything that they need to continue their important work. But they're facing challenges because of siloed funding—the siloed funding approach that doesn't clearly account for the overlap between domestic violence and youth homelessness.

The National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children focuses on four main areas: prevention, early intervention, response, and recovery and healing, and organisations like Taldy are essential to our ability to make progress towards two of these four areas—responding to support victims-survivors and helping people heal. We will not be able to meet the national plan's goals of ending violence against women and children in one generation without ensuring that frontline organisations are sufficiently resourced. As the government develops its second action plan towards ending violence against women and children, I urge it to provide greater support to community organisations like Taldy. They do the hardest work of all, and they should be supported to do so.

I thank the member for Bonner for her motion raising the awareness of this issue, and I echo her call to promote zero tolerance for violence in this country, and I commend this motion to the Chamber.

Helen Haines (Indi, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The time allotted for this debate has expired.