Tim Watts (Gellibrand, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased to have the opportunity to speak on the Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2015-2016 and related bills today, because as we know the appropriation bills demonstrate the priorities of a government for the next year and into the future. The budget should match the priorities of the nation. Unfortunately, despite all its talk about making family violence a national priority, there is very little in this budget to match these words. The statistics about the incidence of family violence in our community are chilling and depressing. One in three women will experience physical violence during their lifetime. One if five women will experience violence from a current or former partner. This year, 38 women have already died as a result of family violence. That is close to two Australian women a week who are dying as a result of this scourge. However, instead of responding to the growing calls to action from the community on this issue, the government has given us a budget with no increased funding for the vast majority of vital frontline services that are required to fight this scourge.

We are told that there are further announcements to be made by the government on this front, but the parliament, service providers, advocates, the general public, and, most important of all, women at risk of violence are all in the dark about these measures. Last week on The Project Waleed Aly issued a demand that federal and state governments 'show me the money'. Unfortunately, his calls have largely been left unanswered. Fair Agenda's What it will take report clearly outlines the scale of the challenge of responding to this issue.

In 2014, the 1800RESPECT national 24/7 phone counselling service responded to over 50,000 requests for help—18,631 of these requests went unanswered due to lack of funding for staff. These are mainly vulnerable women who are reaching out to seek help but have been unable to receive an answer.

A post-budget announcement—not one made in the budget but in the days following it—of additional funding for this service means that more of these calls will be answered. This is good news to be sure, but a couple of million dollars for counselling services will not do nearly enough to address the huge growth in demand for these services. It is expected that demand for family violence crisis services will grow by 40 per cent in the 2015-16 financial year. As we know, demand for these services is already being unmet, and we know that things are only going to get worse for the sector. There has been an increase in the volume of calls being made to crisis services, as well as an increase in the severity of the abuse associated with these calls.

One of the invidious things about this issue is that, while we need to talk about it to change the community attitudes that enable it, the more that we do talk about it, the more women will come forward—and, sadly, the more women with precarious home situations will be pushed to crisis point. The more that we discuss this issue publicly, giving it the national attention that it does deserve, the more that men are retaliating in their homes—and the more violent men are becoming to reclaim power and control over women in their lives. A perpetrator may watch a news report or a current affairs story on family violence and turned to his wife and say, 'Don't you think that you're going to be able to leave.' I have heard these stories directly from many people in the sector.

Without increased funding for the services, he is right—a woman is stuck. The government may think that they are doing enough by putting family violence on the COAG agenda and prioritising it through that forum. But words are not enough. We need action in the budget and, as in the last budget, we have not seen the dollars to match the words.

It is not just family violence crisis services that need funding. That is just the beginning of what is needed to tackle this issue. We also need to fund specialist women's services that truly understand the complex nature of violence against women and that are able to provide a safe place for women and children to seek the support that they need. Victims of family violence need help to be able to remain safely at home instead of being forced to flee with no support.

These services work together with police and legal services to ensure that women and children are safe. Without these supports, many women are being forced to choose between a violent relationship and homelessness. The risk of homelessness is an important factor in why women stay in abusive relationships. Many women find it difficult to leave abusive relationships because of severe financial disadvantage and a lack of affordable housing in the community. They fear that leaving will mean that they will not have the money to provide for their children or be able to put a roof over their heads, and they stay because their only other option is homelessness.

Family violence is the single biggest cause of homelessness in Australia. In 2013-14, 33 per cent of all people requesting assistance from specialist homelessness agencies were escaping domestic or family violence. The vast majority of these people are women and children. Domestic and family violence is the No. 1 reason why people present to specialist homelessness agencies. Last year, every night, 423 people were turned away from homelessness agencies, including women's refuges designed to provide crisis support.

Yet the budget did not increase funding for homelessness services and it did nothing to address the lack of affordable and available social housing in Australia. The budget is forcing women and children to stay in abusive relationships. That is the reality. We can say all of the good words we want, and I do not doubt the goodwill of those opposite—I have said this many times—but the reality is that we need to match growing demand with increasing resources. It does not give me any pleasure to say this, but there is no way around that point.

We know that the point at which a victim decides to leave is often the most dangerous point for them. If the government will not adequately fund services to help victims, then they are leaving vulnerable women and children behind, trapped and alone. No increased funding for community legal centres and legal aid commissions that provide free legal assistance to vulnerable and disadvantaged members of our community further compounds this issue. The government have deferred making any cuts to funding for community legal centres, but this appears to be a short-term fix and future funding still remains uncertain.

Right now many, many vulnerable women are being forced to attend court alone and without legal accompaniment to seek protection from government and the judicial system. In 2013-14, more than 150,000 people seeking free legal advice from community legal centres were turned away due to lack of resources. More than one third of cases dealt with by community legal centres relate to family violence. That is 150,000 people who are being turned away. One third of them deal with family violence.

Labor believes that we have to put family violence at the centre of the national debate if we are going to change these depressing statistics that say that two women will die next week at the hands of a partner or former partner. Labor believes in the importance of empowering and supporting women in our society. We know that family violence disproportionately affects women when eight in 10 incidents of family violence involve a male perpetrator and a female victim.

Family violence is a crime of power and control, which men use to treat women as property and as objects to be threatened, assaulted, isolated and controlled. Family violence is not just about sudden physical attacks from people who lose their temper, who lose control, who lose it or who suffer from mental health problems or alcohol or drug abuse or who come from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. Family violence does not discriminate on the basis of age, income or ethnicity. Family violence is about the systematic undermining of a woman's sense of safety and autonomy in order to control them. Family violence is caused by gender inequality, the attitude that women are worth less than men and an unequal society that enables this to occur.

Labor understands that there is no clearer symbol of continued gender inequality than violence against women. We know that the biggest risk factor for being a victim of family violence is being a woman. We have called on the Prime Minister to hold a national crisis summit on family violence so that we can bring advocates, academics, service providers and survivors to the table and coordinate a national response to this issue. If further measures are coming from the government on this issue, I welcome them, but at the moment the entire nation is in the dark. A national summit would enable people to discuss these issues openly and agree on a way forward together. We have offered the Prime Minister our support if he chooses to go down this path but if this offer is not adopted we have said that we will hold a national crisis summit within 100 days of the election of a Shorten government.

It is clear that the response to this issue has been too slow and too fragmented for some time. Women and children across Australia are currently being subjected to what the CEO of Domestic Violence Victoria, Fiona McCormack, calls the postcode lottery—a situation where women experience vastly different experiences of the legal system, of homelessness support services, of crisis services depending on where they live and whether they can access local support services or state or federal services. In the meantime, while we await a national summit, we have a responsibility to ensure that women can get the legal support that they need and that women always have somewhere safe to go. No woman should have to endure abuse because she been abandoned and left to fend for herself by society, community or the government.

Labor has recently announced a package of almost $50 million to invest in legal services, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander legal services, to ensure that women suffering from family violence have access to appropriate legal assistance and to ensure that no woman is forced to navigate the legal system alone. We have also announced $15 million in 'safe at home' grants to ensure that victims can remain safely in their own homes rather than being forced to flee because of a violent partner. It is a little-known fact that at the moment when a woman seeks crisis accommodation she is often required to move four times after leaving her home—once to go to crisis accommodation, another after a short period in crisis accommodation to temporary housing, again to establish a more permanent residence and then frequently again after that when that expires.

We need to start thinking about our response to family violence differently. It is one thing to keep pouring money into homelessness services, and as I said today in a crisis situation we are morally obliged to do this, but we need to start thinking about every woman who arrives at a crisis service, at a homelessness service, as a failure of government. We need to create an environment where women are able to stay at home safe from abusive partners. This will mean many different things in many different circumstances. There is a range of innovative programs being initiated in Victoria using technology to keep women safe at home—GPS locators on recidivist and high-risk male offenders, close-circuit television cameras in victim's homes to ensure that there is a documentary evidence trail to enable intervention orders to be enforced and panic buttons that women can carry with them that locate their location 24 hours a day and enable police to be sent directly to where they are. Seeing these panic buttons is one of the more depressing things that I have seen in my job. But talking to the women who hold them they tell me that it gives them a sense of agency and control over their life that has been lacking for some time. It is a depressing thing to have to exist, but their presence is important. A national safe at home strategy that ended the postcode lottery and enabled more women stay at home rather than forced to go to homelessness services is an important change in the paradigm of our response to this issue that we need to embrace.

Labor have also said that we need to invest $8 million to improve perpetrator accountability and tracking so that perpetrators will be diverted from a path that leads to violence. Unfortunately, the current situation is that a small number of men perpetrate against multiple women. Often a man is not only beating their current partner but also their former partner and sometimes the former partner before that. Unfortunately, however, in most states in Australia we are not able to track these patterns of behaviour and, as such, police struggle to intervene to prevent them.

Similarly, there is no national strategy for dealing with men's behaviour change therapies. I have personally attended men's behaviour change counselling services with groups of men who have been referred to these counselling sessions by the courts in Victoria. While the evidence is mixed about their effectiveness, I know that the men who are intrinsically motivated, the men who continue to go there beyond the court mandate, get a lot of out of it and that the families of the men who go there speak very highly of them. So I urge the Prime Minister and the government to work with Labor, to reach across the aisle, to develop a joint approach to responding to violence against women. This is not an issue that ought to be fought over in the culture wars; it ought to be a priority of this nation to empower women and enable them to be treated as equals.

We know the victims of family violence do not leave their abusers for a number of reasons. They may stay because they fear for their safety if they leave. They may lack the financial resources to leave. They may want to be able to properly care for their children and keep a roof over their heads. When women are making decisions about whether or not to leave violent relationships, they have to consider whether they have the financial capacity to do so. Tackling violence against women also means ensuring that women have the equality of opportunity to be financially secure. Two budget changes in particular—the changes to child care and paid parental leave—will increase the difficulty for women leaving violent situations.

Labor have said that we believe that paid parental leave is vital to ensuring that women remain in the workforce. That is why in government Labor put in place Australia's first ever fair and accessible national paid parental leave scheme. But the recent changes jeopardise this arrangement. By reducing government assistance to women with child-caring responsibilities, low-income women will find it more difficult to leave because of financial restraints. Empowering and supporting women to leave abusive relationships does not just mean increasing funding for family violence crisis services; it also means reducing the gender pay gap, increasing women's workforce participation and making child care more accessible and more affordable. Budgets are about priorities; however, regrettably, on the evidence available to date, this budget reveals that tackling family violence simply is not a priority for this government. (Time expired)

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