Anne Aly (Cowan, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'm sure everybody in this House agrees that it's a national tragedy and a national shame that one woman a week is killed as a result of domestic and family violence. The ABS estimates that two out of every three women who experience domestic violence are in the workforce, so any kind of comprehensive response to domestic violence necessarily needs to look at the workplace and incorporate a workplace response as well. The bill currently before us, the Fair Work Amendment (Family and Domestic Violence Leave) Bill 2018, amends the National Employment Standards to provide all employees with an entitlement of five days unpaid family and domestic violence leave if:

(a) the employee is experiencing family and domestic violence; and

(b) the employee needs to do something to deal with the impact of the family and domestic violence; and

(c) it is impractical for the employee to do that thing outside the employee's ordinary hours of work.

While this bill is a step in the right direction, which is why Labor supports it, we certainly don't think it goes far enough. We're arguing that it should provide paid family and domestic violence leave for 10 days. It's disappointing that it has taken the government this long to move from their absolute opposition to family and domestic violence leave to their belated support for unpaid leave.

I'd like to put to the House exactly what it takes to leave a violent relationship. I'd like everybody in the House to consider whether or not these steps that I'm going to outline can be done with five days of unpaid leave, because here's what you have to go through. The first thing that you need to do is secure some form of accommodation, whether that is in a refuge, if you are facing impending threat to your individual wellbeing and safety and to that of your children, or that is with a friend who'll put you up for a few days, maybe on their sofa. But, in terms of a long-term or sustainable solution to leaving and the ability to leave, you really need some place to go. Apart from sorting out your accommodation and where it is you're going to go while you're escaping from your violent partner, you have to find time to get together your personal belongings just so that you can continue to have some form of normality in your life in that interim period as you leave your violent partner and the violent situation that you're in.

You may need to seek some kind of violence restraining order, and that can take several days of going to court. You may need to put in a police report. Often, at times, you'll have to go to hospital and fill in some hospital reports there, particularly if you've just been victimised. You may have to tend to some serious injuries as a result of that. If you've got children at school, you have to ensure that the school knows what's going on, so you'll have to go and make an appointment to talk to the school. You may have to take your children out of the school, if their wellbeing is also threatened. You may have to find them a different school in the interim as well. You or your children may need some counselling for trauma, alongside medical treatment. My son lost his hair—his hair just fell out. I spent three days taking him to specialists and seeking medical treatment for alopecia that was brought on by the stress and the trauma of what was going on in my relationship with his father. You will have to seek legal assistance and look at your banking and financial situation. You may have to set up a bank account and work out how your bills are going to be paid from that bank account—how you're going to extricate yourself financially from that person who is carrying out violence against you.

I ask the House to consider whether any of those things can be done in five days. Speaking from experience, they can't. Speaking from experience, five days of unpaid leave just doesn't cut it, particularly when that period of finally having come to a decision to leave a violent relationship—the critical period within those first few weeks—is absolutely essential to the continued wellbeing of both yourself and your children. If a woman needs to take time off work to do these vital things to help herself, to keep her family safe and to continue to have some form of consistency so that the family doesn't continue to suffer, she should be able to count on continuing to receive a pay cheque, continuing to have that kind of financial security over the next week, two weeks, three weeks or even a month or two months that it takes to really extricate oneself from a violent relationship.

Last year Labor announced that a Shorten Labor government would introduce 10 days of paid domestic leave into the National Employment Standards. Again, I want to reiterate the disappointment here that the government has refused to join us in this important commitment. I'm sure that members on both sides of the House have spoken to constituents who've been through this situation themselves, and I'm sure that if they continued to listen to those constituents and those members within their communities they would also have a better understanding of just what it takes to leave a violent relationship and just how important it is that women are supported to do that—through the legal process and also, importantly, through their workplace and the continuation of paid entitlements while they are organising themselves and securing a future life for themselves and for their children in the process of leaving a violent situation. We've listened to those victims. We've listened to frontline workers. We've listened to businesses, unions and organisations that deal daily with victims of domestic violence, and the clear message is that people who have experienced domestic violence need more support from their workplace.

In conclusion to my contribution here today, I'd just like to reiterate that yes, this is a step in the right direction, but, speaking from experience, it doesn't go nearly close enough to what's needed in order to prevent family violence and to ensure that those who escape family and domestic violence are able to do so with the reassurances that they will be supported and that they will be able to build a life for themselves, having escaped family and domestic violence.

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