Zali Steggall (Warringah, Independent) | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That so much of the standing and sessional orders be suspended as would prevent the Member for Warringah from moving the following motion immediately—That the House:

(1) notes that:

(a) femicide, family and domestic violence, and sexual violence, are at crisis point in Australia;

(b) Australian Femicide Watch records 45 women and 19 children killed by violence this year;

(c) the 27-year-old Brisbane woman killed on 12 August had reportedly sought police assistance days earlier and had a temporary domestic violence order in place;

(d) the NSW Law Enforcement Conduct Commission, in its 16 June report, found the police response to the fatal assault of Lindy Lucena inadequate, identified systemic failures and made eight recommendations, with no formal NSW Police response yet published;

(e) two high-profile allegations of sexual assault matters are currently being investigated by police and while due process and the presumption of innocence must be respected, these instances are not isolated and allegations must be taken seriously by all institutions, in a way which prioritises victim safety and wellbeing;

(f) research links disrespectful attitudes towards women with violence against women;

(g) Australian women feel angry about violence against women, institutional failures and a culture that leaves women and girls feeling and being unsafe; and

(h) governments have failed to implement a multitude of recommendations arising from numerous reviews and inquiries into domestic and family violence conducted in recent years;

(2) calls on the Government to acknowledge that violence against women remains a national crisis despite government efforts to date, and:

(a) empower the Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence Commissioner to compel information and more consistent public reporting, and to examine the failure of governments to implement previous inquiry recommendations; or

(b) establish a Royal Commission into femicide and domestic and family violence to examine, among other matters, whether police, courts and services have adequate powers, systems and information-sharing arrangements; and

(3) further calls on the Government to:

(a) establish a national domestic violence offender register, including appropriately safeguarded disclosure;

(b) work through National Cabinet to strengthen bail, sentencing and protection-order enforcement, improve monitoring of high-risk offenders, and properly fund frontline services and safe housing; and

(c) affirm that responses to sexual violence allegations must use accurate language, avoid minimisation, and centre the safety, dignity and wellbeing of alleged victims, not institutional reputation or sporting prospects.

We are at a crisis point, and I urge the government to take note of, and to allow debate on, this very serious issue. I have moved that standing orders be suspended because this is something the House should confront. It is a national crisis—the violence against women and girls and the repeated failures of institutions to keep them safe. In moving to suspend standing orders to have this debate, I acknowledge it's an exceptional step, but these are exceptional circumstances. Australian Femicide Watch records 45 women and 19 children killed by violence, already, this year. These numbers are not an abstraction. Each represents a person, a family and a community shattered. This has been a deeply disturbing week for Australian women.

As is set out in the motion, another young woman, a 27-year-old Brisbane woman, was killed last week. Whilst this matter is still under investigation and criminal allegations need to be determined and the legal process followed, and while we should not be prejudging, we can't ignore some of the reported circumstances. This young woman had reportedly sought help from police only days earlier, and a temporary domestic violence order was in place. This compels urgent questions again and again as to why it is that this is still not keeping women safe. Police, courts and services knew. What did they know? Are risks being escalated? Is it being identified appropriately? What protective actions were taken or could have been taken? How are we going to act to address these systems failures, because ultimately women and children are still not safe in Australia?

Of course, this week we've also been rocked by high-profile, serious allegations of sexual assault involving both private-school boys—so, at one end of the spectrum, very young men—and professional AFL players. Again, those involved can't be treated as guilty before legal processes are complete, but what has been concerning has been the response from powerful institutions. Again, when serious allegations of sexual violence emerge, these issues need to be raised. They're important. The first instinct should not be to minimise or distance institutions from allegations or manage reputational fallout. Serious allegations should be described accurately. They should not be softened into euphemisms, treated as public relations inconveniences or reframed about consequences for the institutions or the persons. It's really important that respect for women starts in how institutions respond to these events. Of course we must also make sure that the alleged victims at the centre of allegations are at the centre of the response.

This motion calls on the government to act with urgency on so many issues that remain outstanding. Too many inquiries have urgent recommendations that have not been actioned, and there is no real rational explanation as to why that has not occurred to date. Much work must be done in this space by the government, including establishing things like a DV offender register for national actions. We need to get to a process of elevating this issue to ensure women and girls are safe. These numbers are unacceptable.

I urge the House to consider this in relation to the motion, because women are tired. They are tired of facing on a weekly basis these crises and these allegations. They're tired of seeing institutions fail to respond with the adequate seriousness. So I urge the government to consider this.

Milton Dick (Speaker) | Link to this | Hansard source

Is the motion seconded?

Allegra Spender (Wentworth, Independent) | Link to this | Hansard source

The motion is seconded. Women in my community and around the country are despairing this week. This week we learned that three boys from Scots College, aged just 13 and 14, have been charged with aggravated sexual assault of a 14-year-old girl—a devastating report, every parent's worst nightmare. This week, several players from the Sydney Swans have been linked to an alleged sexual assault. The Swans are one of Wentworth's favourite teams. As Brooke Boney put it today:

These allegations are especially painful because, for so many women, sexual violence is not an abstract issue. We have experienced it ourselves or watched people we love experience it. In Australia, one in five women has experienced sexual violence since the age of 15.

One in five.

Our schools. Our favourite sporting teams. These headlines haven't exposed a new crisis. Australian Femicide Watch has counted 45 women killed this year alone. This is not only a national issue but, at a personal level, a very local one. Some people think that domestic and sexual violence doesn't happen in the eastern suburbs, in a more privileged area of the country. They are wrong. Local police tell me that over 50 per cent of their time is spent on domestic violence and family violence matters. Everyone in our community knows someone who's experienced it, and women come into my office, send me emails and stop me on the street to talk about what has happened and how to prevent this.

Now, we cannot minimise this issue. Women are at the centre of the headlines and the stories that we know. These allegations must be taken seriously, and we must centre on those stories. We cannot minimise those stories. We've got to stop the victim-blaming.

I want to acknowledge the government's work and the minister's work in this space. I know that the minister takes this work and this issue incredibly seriously and personally, and I recognise that the government has done significant work for women in their time of office. I think that should be commended, but we have to acknowledge that we continue to have a crisis here and that we have to go further and faster. That is why we have stopped parliament in this case.

We all know, despite our best efforts and despite all the goodwill, it is not changing the way it needs to. There are limits on what any government can do, but we are not yet pushing those limits. We know that government cannot go into people's bedrooms or into their homes and cannot control the actions of individuals, but there is an onus on government to lead the way on reform and to act on the recommendations of people who have lived it and on all of our institutions to help change the culture that enables this in this country.

We have brought this to parliament today because the matter is urgent and it is chronic and because there are things government should do and could do right now. We know we need to do more on prevention. Factors like gambling, alcohol, financial abuse and access to child care have all been raised with me. I raise gambling because the government had a choice this week to go further where people wanted it to go, and it chose not to. That is not supporting women.

Our digital environments are perpetuating this. The government needs to move quickly on its digital duty of care and, frankly, needs to move to fix our feeds so that the algorithms which are promoting toxic masculinity can be stepped away from by those young people who want to.

Let's be honest. We have this issue that we do not know how to deal with, which is that the greatest perpetrators of sexual violence against young women are adolescent boys. We, as a country, do not know how to deal with this, but this issue has to be on the table if we are going to protect our young girls and our young boys.

This crisis is evolving before us. There have been enormous reviews and recommendations in this, and I respect people who have spent hours of their lives contributing to the reviews that have been in the sector. One of the deepest frustration that I hear from the sector is about the tracking of these reviews—the tracking of the recommendations and seeing if they're actually being implemented. As Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence Commissioner Cronin has said:

We have political will across all governments. We have a national focus through National Cabinet … We now need a razor-sharp focus on coordinated, accountable and agile delivery.

That is where we need to go. They have delivered all these reports, have delivered strikingly consistent recommendations and are calling for a move beyond the fragmented responses to family violence, domestic violence and sexual violence, but we have not got there yet. We need that implementation tracking so that we can see what is being done and what isn't being done.

Finally, we need to support our frontline services more robustly. That is what we all know is required in this country.

Tanya Plibersek (Sydney, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Social Services) | Link to this | Hansard source

I'm very pleased to speak to this motion today, and I thank the member for Warringah for bringing it on. We've met, most recently on 12 February, to talk about family, domestic and sexual violence, and I thank her and the other crossbench members who are speaking about this for their continued engagement.

Our government is absolutely committed to reducing rates of family, domestic and sexual violence and ending violence against women and children. Every single death is a tragedy. Every death is one too many. Just last week, we heard of another woman in Queensland killed, allegedly, by a former partner, which the member refers to in this motion. This parliament grieves every time we hear a tragic story like this with the loved ones of the woman killed.

It's absolutely correct that the Commonwealth, as well as the states and territories, must be held to account for our progress on ending family, domestic and sexual violence in Australia. We are resolute as a government on facing up to that accounting and making sure that we keep all Australians safe. We are focused on implementing the change we need, including by rolling out more than $4.4 billion worth of measures for frontline services, prevention programs and behaviour change programs for children right across government

We're working right now on how we can expand on these efforts with the next action plan to end violence against women and their children. Just last week, the Prime Minister and I met with 14 national organisations to discuss where we can make the most impact over the next five years of our second action plan. This is one of more than 160 roundtables our government has held in recent months with over 1,100 people. We've received 1,300 survey responses and 535 submissions from organisations about our next action plan. I want to thank every victim-survivor, every frontline worker and every concerned Australian who has contributed to this process.

This suspension motion deals with a number of topics, and I can't do justice to each of them in the short amount of time that I have, so let me focus on just a few. The member has called for a royal commission. I understand that this call comes from a very good place. It comes from the concerns that people have and the desire to see an end to family, domestic and sexual violence in this country. But we don't need another report. As the members themselves have said, last year's Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence Commissioner's annual report to parliament pointed out that we have 1,000 recommendations already from a variety of reports across eight major royal commissions, inquiries and reviews to guide us.

I want to show this to the chamber. These are the recommendations. We don't need another royal commission. These are the recommendations of those reports alone. The South Australian royal commission took 17 months from its beginning to its end. I don't want to spend another 17 months examining the same issue that we've examined in eight major reports recently. We need to get on and act, and that's what frontline workers, domestic violence survivors and experts have told us. Every family violence peak body in the country released a statement that says:

Royal Commissions have an important role in the Australian system, including gathering compelling evidence when we have no other way to get to the root of a problem. That is not the situation here.

The evidence is clear. We know what needs to be done to prevent, respond to and help people heal from family violence.

Ending this crisis requires action, and that's what I'm determined to do. It requires conversations at home, in our community and at workplaces. It requires legislative change. It requires our collective efforts at every level. As a government, our investment has been heavily focused, and rightly so, on response and recovery for women victims-survivors. About 80 per cent of our $4.4 billion investment goes to response. So far, we've funded 1,400 organisations to help about half a million people, including through things like making the leaving violence payment permanent, providing an extra half a billion dollars to fund 500 new frontline workers and investing $1.2 billion in crisis housing so that women and children can safely leave domestic violence. But the demand on frontline services will never decline until we deal with the root of the problem, and that is stopping the violence before it happens.

When we see state governments and territory governments actually cut their investment in the face of this violence, it's incredibly disappointing. Unbelievably, Queensland, where we've seen this most recent tragic death, has cut $40 million from domestic and family violence services and hidden a report that made 350 important recommendations. In this morning's CourierMail, we read that domestic violence services that have criticised these cuts have been threatened with further funding cuts and hauled into the minister's office.

The same case has occurred in the Northern Territory. The Northern Territory has shocking rates of family, domestic and sexual violence—shocking rates—and we've seen horrific murders there recently. They have cut their funding by 11 per cent. That's more than a 10th of their budget that they have cut in recent times. The dollars matter. We will continue to invest, and we expect states, which are responsible for delivering important frontline services, to continue to invest as well. But, as the member for Wentworth said, we are fighting a losing battle unless we directly address the online misogyny that is driving so much of this behaviour.

We've seen a couple of recent reports that are very disturbing, as the motion refers to, but I would say this: organisations like schools and sporting clubs provide the real-world role models and heroes that our young men look up to. When they're being fed a diet of violent pornography before they've had their first kiss, it is no surprise that we are seeing rates of sexual assault exploding amongst under-18s. The best antidote to that is the work that we're doing as a government to limit the exposure of young people to violent misogyny online. But real-world role models have the power to change this, and they come through our families sitting at the dining table, they come through our sporting clubs and, of course, they come through our schools as well.

The issue of family, domestic and sexual violence will soon return to the National Cabinet. The Prime Minister has said that he wants to go back to the National Cabinet with issues around family, domestic and sexual violence. We are absolutely, as a Commonwealth government, prepared to play a leadership role, to invest, to drive change and to make legislative reform, but we need the partnership of the states and territories as well.

So far in recent times, as I say, we've invested more than any other government. We've made the leaving violence payment permanent. We've launched the first ever standalone plan for family, domestic and sexual violence for First Nations women, backed by an additional $218 million investment. We've boosted funding for that 500 workers program by more than 70 per cent. We've boosted funding for 1800RESPECT by 40 per cent. We've invested $183 million to make the child support system safer. We've legislated to make sure our social security system can't be weaponised by perpetrators of abuse.

We've funded programs that intervene earlier with men who want to change their behaviours. We've invested in emergency and transitional accommodation. That $1.2 billion is absolutely life changing. It's a safety lifeline for women escaping domestic violence. We've invested a record $3.9 billion in legal services, with an extra $800 million specifically for family violence legal services. We're reforming the family law system, so that it's safer, simpler and more accessible. We're reforming the child support system so children get the support they need. We supporting the recovery of children who've experienced violence, including an $81 million investment specifically for child-specific counselling.

We've invested $82 million to deliver innovative approaches to better identify high risk perpetrators and share information about them across state and territory boundaries. We've legislated 10 days paid domestic violence leave. We've made it illegal to fire someone because of their experience of family and domestic violence. We've launched an inquiry into domestic, family and sexual violence related suicide, and there is so much more.

Sophie Scamps (Mackellar, Independent) | Link to this | Hansard source

I first of all would like to thank my colleague the member for Warringah for bringing forward this incredibly important suspension motion. I'd also like to acknowledge and thank the minister and the government for all the efforts that they've done to date to address this really important issue. We know that you are genuinely addressing this issue, and we do thank you for that.

But we also heard that the rates of sexual assault are exploding, particularly for under 18-year-olds, and it is extremely alarming. I think the finish line is moving ahead of us the whole time. Everything we do is not enough. We are not getting there. We need to change our tactics. We need to be looking a whole lot more at prevention.

I was at the Northern Beaches police awards the other week, and I spoke to the Acting Assistant Commissioner and what she told me was really alarming. 80 per cent of the work that they do is related to domestic violence. 80 per cent of their call-outs are related to domestic violence. That is absolutely stunning. It floored me completely. That is what they are focusing on. Whatever we are doing is not enough. This is a crisis and we do need to keep looking at this. I know we've got a lot of reports and we've got a lot of information, but whatever we're doing is not working.

I also just want to call out Pauline Hanson's comments from the other week. She illustrated, quite frankly, a stunning level of ignorance. She told women who were getting abused by men to not 'put up with it'. That ignores so much. So many times when you try and leave a relationship that is violent, that is what triggers the violence. Hannah Clarke is the example. She was separated from her husband. She had left. She was living somewhere separately with her three children. She had a domestic violence order, and yet she and her children were still killed. It is not simply about not putting up with it.

There's a severe lack of crisis accommodation and frontline services. On the Northern Beaches, for example, we have only 10 government funded crisis rooms available for women and children escaping domestic violence. Women & Children First is one of the shelters on the Northern Beaches. They turn away over 10 women and their families every single week. That organisation is hugely funded by philanthropy, so we need greater investment in these crisis accommodation and support networks.

Children who are victims of domestic violence are victims in their own right. There's very little funding that goes into supporting them, and that's something that keeps coming up. The number on social housing waitlists in the Northern Beaches has risen to over 850 cases. The typical wait for a three-bedroom home exceeds 10 years. I thank the government again for the work that they're doing on social housing. Legal Aid, tens of thousands— (Time expired)

Question negatived.