Maria Kovacic (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister to the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We mark the 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence knowing that violence against women is not a series of isolated tragedies in our country. Statistically, the most reliable way to predict a domestic violence homicide is to actually believe the victim. When researchers in Queensland catalogued data from seven years of intimate partner killings, they found one thing in common in more than half of those cases: the victim had already expressed fear that they would be killed. Hannah Clarke had the same intuition six weeks before she was murdered in 2020. She said:

I have been unhappy and wanting to leave the relationship but I have been terrified of his reaction and what that would mean to our children.

She wrote in an affidavit seeking a domestic violence order:

I believe that Rowan is totally capable of killing himself and killing our children to get back at me. This scares me beyond words.

In the weeks before she was murdered by her partner in 2021, Kumanjayi Haywood warned police:

When I go back to Tennant Creek, he's going to stab me again, and he's going to kill me.

A few days later her partner set fire to the house where she was hiding. She died inside. She had endured decades of extreme violence at his hands, and in the days leading up to her death she and her family sought help time and time again.

In 2024 Molly Ticehurst told police that her ex-partner had laid out the precise plan by which he would kill her, including saying that he would climb through her bedroom window while she slept. She texted a friend, saying:

If I end up dead, he 100 per cent did it.

Six weeks later, he did exactly that.

These examples are real people. They are real women who were terrified. And the many others we never hear about show how far abuse can escalate before a woman is murdered by a current or former partner. Despite huge public investment, countless peak bodies and bipartisan commitment, these women still fell through the gaps. The consequences are horrific.

Women experiencing domestic violence often report responses from institutions that are slow, inadequate, culturally unsafe or flat-out dismissive. Just this week, the Guardian reported that Hannah Clarke's killer was coached by Queensland police on how to challenge a domestic violence order after he abducted their daughter. One officer said:

Talk to your friends about, you know, someone who might be willing to provide a reference …

Another police officer advised:

To say you are a good dad and … don't need any conditions.

After Hannah and her children were murdered, detectives prepared a briefing for the state coroner. The first issue listed for investigation was the veracity and motives of Hannah's allegations. I don't for a moment suggest that our police don't do a great job, or that they don't do difficult and challenging work, but these are examples of problems that still exist within the system that are a danger to women. We have to ask ourselves why being murdered is not evidence enough that a woman is a victim of domestic violence—we're talking about a brief for a coroner, where someone has already been murdered. We don't know whether those officers remain in the force, whether they were retrained, whether there were other circumstances here that we don't yet understand or whether similar failures have occurred again. The cases I mentioned should be warnings about what happens when we wait too long to intervene. They make one thing absolutely clear: if we want to stop violence before it reaches this point, prevention must be front and centre of what we are doing. Governments must shift focus upstream into prevention. Prevention is far cheaper, far safer and far more humane than crisis response.

A 2015-16 report from the DSS estimated the national cost of domestic violence was $21.7 billion a year. Adjusted for inflation, that's $33 billion today, per year. Our prevention efforts are undermined by a fragmented national data system. National bodies like AIHW and the ABS are clear that there is no single national dataset that captures all family, domestic and sexual violence in Australia and that data on things like repeat victimisation and coercive control remain incomplete and inconsistent across jurisdictions. This is because police, courts, hospitals and child protection agencies each define and record domestic violence differently and because there is no nationally consistent legislative definition of family and domestic violence. We cannot reliably frame or measure the scale of the issue at a national level.

Meanwhile, early drivers of violence are accelerating online. Nine out of 10 of our boys aged 13 to 17 have already been exposed to pornography. The median age for first exposure to pornography is 13 for our boys, and for many it occurs even earlier. The most popular pornographic categories overwhelmingly depict violence. Up to 90 per cent of mainstream pornographic content contains physical, verbal or sexual aggression towards women. That's what our boys are seeing online. Australian research shows that young people exposed to violent pornography may be more likely to hold attitudes supportive of violence against women. Seventy-two per cent of young people in a recent survey said that the porn that they are watching often shows aggression and violence against women.

Algorithmic escalation is now understood by researchers as a risk factor for harmful and violent behaviours against girls and women in adolescence and adulthood. If we're honest about the scale of gender based violence in this country then we need to be honest about this. Sixteen days of activism will never meet the moment—not when women who are murdered told police they feared they would be murdered; not when our national data can't even give us a full, accurate picture of the harm; and not when boys are growing up in online environments that normalise misogyny, degradation and violence, causing great harm to them and causing great harm to the women in their lives. We need to protect our children from the dangers of these algorithms.

Marking these 16 days matters, but it's a prompt, not a plan. The real test is what we as lawmakers do in the other 349 days of the year. Women are not dying because we lack awareness; they are dying because our systems are slow, fragmented and too often dismissive of risk. So these 16 days cannot be the peak of our effort. They must be the bare minimum, the baseline we build from, because ending gender based violence doesn't come from reflection alone. It comes from year-round evidence based discipline, proper resourcing and political will that doesn't evaporate once the campaign posters come down.

We owe every woman who has warned us, every woman who was afraid and every woman who never got the chance more than our sympathy after the fact. We owe them systems that listen, data that tells the truth and a culture that raises boys who see women as their equals, not algorithms that make them believe that women are objects. We also owe our children—our girls and our boys—a future free of the influence of harmful online algorithms that the billionaire tech giants profit from, harming our children—the tech giants and their algorithms that push violent, sexualised content and distort our children's understanding of healthy relationships. We owe our children and Australian women more.