Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Small Business) Share this | Hansard source

I met with one of my constituents a couple of months ago and when I saw this motion I was reminded of her. She was nearly 75 years old, fearful that her ex-husband was about to be released from jail again. He had been in and out of jail since he was first jailed for assaulting her when she was around 30. And every time he gets out of jail, he finds her, somehow, in spite of her name changes, and then ends up back in jail for assaulting her. This went on, for this woman, for 45 years and was still continuing on the day I met her. So we had seriously let this woman down as a community. She had nowhere to hide and lived her life in fear. So this is for her and many other women—even though she is perhaps an extreme example—who have spent significant periods of their life in fear and have been permanently damaged by their experience of domestic violence. In New South Wales alone, the recorded crime statistics for July 2015 to 2016 for domestic-violence-related assault was 29,200 people, and they are the reported incidences. We know that there would have been many, many more that were not reported. This is a major area of crime in our community and one that deserves serious attention by this place.

Most members of parliament would have received representations from Women's Legal Services Australia and 90 other organisations back in May this year calling on us all to put safety first in family law. In response to that, the Labor Party went to the election with a commitment that no victim should be cross-examined by their abuser. We need to be clear that in our courts at the moment victims are being cross-examined by their abusers. The abuse continues in the court itself and through the court processes. Because an unrepresented litigant has the right to cross-examine the victim to test their evidence in a trial, unrepresented perpetrators of violence can continue to put fear into the hearts of the abused even as the court case continues.

Cuts to legal aid exacerbate that situation, as will the cuts to the community legal centres which will take place in 2017, which will see 30 per cent of the funding go from our incredibly effective community legal centres. This is something that we really do have to address.

The processes in our courts affect victims of violence perhaps more than they affect relationship breakdowns where there isn't violence. Where the relationship break-up is civil we often find couples finding their own agreements, but if violence is involved it is very, very likely that the case will end up in court.

In the Parramatta court, which is one of the busiest in the country, we have had incredible delays over the last couple of years. We have 12 great new courts, which were built very recently. In the 2013 elections we had eight judges in Parramatta and by March this year we had four. We lost four and they have not been replaced. One went to Melbourne. After another judge retired it took 560 days before the Attorney-General replaced that judge. In the Family Court in Parramatta, we have had delays of up to 2½ to three years, and sometimes longer, before final orders. Lawyers were increasingly encouraging their clients to go to mediation. Mediation is not necessarily possible in a situation where there has been domestic violence. It is not necessarily possible to put the two people in the one room and find a mediated solution. Those cases were taking incredibly long periods of time in court. We had situations where custody cases were taking three and four years before final judgements were made, causing incredible stress for families and for the children.

I would like to thank the member for Moreton for moving this motion. It is an incredibly important one. We know that far too many people live in fear. There are far too many instances of violence perpetrated, quite often in the home, and we as a community and as a parliament are obliged to support victims of violence in whatever way we can.

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