Christian Porter (Pearce, Liberal Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

This is my first speech from the dispatch box, and I would not think that there is a more important subject to speak on.

Before politics, I was a crown prosecutor and I prosecuted a very large number of matters at trial and sentenced a very large number of matters that involved sexual offences and offences of extreme violence against women that would fall into what is known generally as a broad category of domestic violence offences. There are a small number of matters that I remember distinctly and that still, from time to time, invade my thoughts. One in particular involved a young Indigenous woman in Derby, in the north of WA. There is nothing particularly to be gained by relaying the facts of the matter, other than to say that it was a very serious matter. Because of the remoteness of Derby, my efforts to proof that key witness and the victim had proved completely fruitless. I arrived the day before the trial, and I sat in a very hot room in the courthouse in Derby, and I simply could not convince this young woman to take her allegations to trial. The allegations thereby were never tested or proved, and it could not have been said at law that an offence was committed. I felt certain that the trial should have proceeded. As a citizen, I felt that the young woman should go to court, speak the truth and put the alleged assailant to the test before the jury, but, as an officer of the court, my efforts to persuade her had to require a level of dispassion that I felt—and now in retrospect feel—completely mismatched the moral reality of the circumstances.

This young lady had no mother there, no sister and no friend—no-one who would give her any comfort or support and give her the massive courage that she needed to get into that box. The outcome is one that I feel in my deep conscience was completely and utterly unjust, although it was procedurally and in every legal sense fair. In recollection, I think nothing could have been done at that particular point, because at the point that I entered that causal chain of misery that had led that young woman through that courtroom door it was far too late.

After trials, I always had a sort of pervasive and sombre mood, but I remember during the long drive back to Broome from Derby just being gripped by sheer despondency. I must say in retrospect that I had a not very constructive loathing of the alleged perpetrator, and that slipped very easily into this complete sense of despair that the scene I had left was nothing but a wilderness beyond the effect of human improvement. It was completely wrong to feel that way. Things can definitely be done and human lives can be improved, and there can be retreat from the violence against women that we see all around us, on our doorsteps as well as courtroom doorsteps. Even if that retreat from violence is incremental and improvements are hard-fought for, and even if some of them can be overturned at times and reversed, that effort is always worthwhile.

I would say to the Leader of the Opposition, my friends in the opposition and to my own side of this parliament: the key is to enter that causal chain as early as you possibly can in terms of public policy and to do so in a way that is eminently practical and measurable. I tried to do that as a state Attorney-General in a way that I thought was most immediate and most important. Whether there is a summit or whether this conversation continues at COAG, I would put to all of you present that if this is a crisis and if we want to do one thing immediately to make things better then we must ensure that violence restraining orders are worth the paper they are written on. As a state Attorney-General I changed the law, and I was persuaded out of allowing for mandatory imprisonment of those who breached restraining orders, and I now regret it.

In Western Australia—and this plays out in every state and territory in the Commonwealth—at the time that I was Attorney-General you could have breached a violence restraining order against your partner four or more times and have only a 25 per cent chance of imprisonment. My government changed the law in Western Australia to be just short of mandatory imprisonment, with the strongest possible legal presumption for imprisonment if you were a three-strike breacher of a violence restraining order against your partner, and that figure of 25 per cent increased to 30 per cent. That is, on any assessment, a colossal failure of response.

I do not entirely blame the judiciary, as it is a very difficult thing to show mercy on an individual basis and then have to face the statistical fact that that mercy causes misery at large. But I would say that in a country where an Aboriginal woman is three to four times more likely to be a victim of sexual assault, where an Aboriginal woman is 40 times more likely to be hospitalised after an assault and where 50 to 60 per cent of Aboriginal spousal assaults involve a weapon, we must do something. It is a crisis, and if I could point to one thing for all of the members of this House to think about it would be making violence restraining orders work.

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