Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

This week is the global Week Without Violence, but, while government senators in Canberra were busy voting for motions grounded in white supremacist violence, the crisis of family violence continues. Media reports indicate that, in the last two weeks, eight women around Australia have been killed by male partners. Destroy the Joint has counted 55 women killed by violence this year, already more than the 53 women killed in the whole of 2017. This is a crisis. Can you imagine the same silence from government if 55 people were killed by terrorism?

Wonderful organisations in my electorate are doing important frontline work to respond to violence against women, but they need governments to back them. The Greens have long urged federal and state governments to build more public housing instead of selling it off, so that women don't have to choose between homelessness and danger. And we must give non-permanent residents like international students access to refuges and services.

Governments need to tackle the underlying power dynamic that leads to family violence. As our Greens candidate for Richmond in the Victorian election, Kathleen Maltzahn, who has worked intensively to combat violence against women, said:

We cannot address men's violence against women of one kind without addressing men's violence against women of all kinds. We need a new approach to sexual harassment and a focus on reproductive coercion, online abuse, trafficking, the denigration of women in public life, and the links between all of these.

I want to also heartily back the motion introduced today by my Greens colleague Larissa Waters for urgent action.

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