Peta Murphy (Dunkley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

This was a really important inquiry that the committee, of which I'm proud to be a member, conducted. We shouldn't have had to have it. We shouldn't be in this country that we all love, repeatedly talking about the statistics that a woman dies every eight days at the hands of an intimate partner. We shouldn't still be having inquiry after inquiry after inquiry into domestic and family and sexual violence, because it shouldn't be such a pervasive and enormous part of our society.

I think people throw around the term 'un-Australian' far too often, in all sorts of circumstances. But when you think about the way that we like to consider ourselves as a country and as a people, when you think about the characteristics that we like to portray as being very Australian, they are actually about equality—about an easygoing sort of attitude, 'How are you going, mate?' and everyone should be all right. That is fundamentally, diametrically opposed to a society where domestic violence is routinely described as a scourge and where, no matter which political party you're a member of, no matter which level of government you're elected to, no matter whether you're in civil society or a leader in the workplace, wherever you are, you're committed to eradicating this scourge on society and have been for decades and decades and decades—and yet. And yet we are still here today, on both sides of the chamber—and the chair of the committee is sitting across from me, and I know that he cares about this—talking earnestly about the reforms and funding and changes that are needed to make the amount of domestic and family violence that occurs in this country less disgraceful.

The member for Warringah spoke before me—I didn't get to hear all of her speech—and, again, like everyone else in this chamber and in this parliament, I accept and respect her genuine concern for this issue. She focused in a bit of her speech that I listened to on deterrence and jail sentences, and, absolutely, the criminal justice system has a significant part to play in dealing with domestic and family violence. But what those of us on the committee know, because there was hardly a submitter or a witness that didn't refer to it, is that we have to look at primary prevention and cultural change—not just at the drivers of domestic and family violence but at the solution to reducing it. And we can't just rely on punishing perpetrators when it has occurred.

We certainly can't just rely on the necessary, crucial and, quite frankly, often amazing support services that exist around the country to help women and children once they've been the victims of domestic and family violence. Of course we have to do everything we can to lift them up and support them and enable them to access those crucial services.

But as a parliament and a government we also have to look at what we can do to stop it happening in the first place. That truly is about addressing the actual culture that exists in homes and workplaces and sporting clubs across Australia and changing it. That's why the committee's report, both the bipartisan, unanimous main report and the additional comments from the Labor members—of which I'm one—emphasised primary prevention programs and gender equality. They are at the heart of us becoming the country that we all believe we are and we all believe we want to be. It was, as our report said, the fourth action plan of the national plan which continued the increasing emphasis on primary preventive strategies and declared that primary prevention is the key. It said that the basic premise of the approach is that gender equality is the key to ending violence against women and their children and that women will never be safe if they are not equal.

A division having been called in the House of Representatives—

Sitting suspended from 11:45 to 12 : 17

I've got a lot more to say, which I had prepared, but I can't help but note the irony that my speech was interrupted by voting on, in part, Labor's motion to remove the member for Bowman from the chair of the Education Committee, which he said he was going to do himself—because he had to stand down and get empathy training in order to understand that harassing women online, taking photographs of women in their workplace without their permission when they are bending over and their underwear can be seen—is unacceptable behaviour. And I can't help but note that, despite all the fine words from the government's senior benches over the past two days about equality and a 50-page—or 500-page, or whatever it was—women's budget statement and women's ministerial statement yesterday about respect for women in the workplace, every member of the government voted to keep the member for Bowman in his $22,000-a-year position as the chair of the Education Committee.

So, they can talk the talk. But when it comes to actually demonstrating to all the women out there in Australia who marched for justice—who said, 'Enough is enough: we not only don't want to be killed at the rate of one woman every eight days but also don't want to be subjected to harassment; we don't want to feel that our worth is less because we're female and that privileged men can exercise their power over us whenever and however they want'—apparently they don't count, to this government. And I know that there are members of this government, particularly on the backbench, for whom that vote must have hurt, because they don't like his behaviour either, and they want to be able to walk the walk as well as talk the talk.

But that's what this Prime Minister is forcing on his members of parliament. That's what he's forcing on the Australian people. The standard you walk past is the standard you accept. And what this Prime Minister has accepted—today, yesterday and every day since a brave woman went on television, crying and disclosing that she'd considered killing herself because of the online harassment she was subjected to by the member for Bowman—is that if he thinks there's a vote in it he'll use the words, but if he thinks there's a chance that a member of his government might not vote for him and might put his parliamentary majority into some sort of jeopardy then he won't walk the walk. That's what's wrong.

The first five minutes of my speech—which I wanted to follow up on with some really positive examples of programs that are empowering young girls and a change in the culture of Australia—was about the fact that women will never be safe until women are equal, and we will never change the culture until the people who are the leaders of this country demonstrate the culture that we all should be living. But every time there's a glimmer of hope that this Prime Minister and his government are starting to see, after eight long years of neglect, that something needs to be done, our hopes get trashed by things like a protection racket for the member for Bowman. I'm disgusted and upset. (Time expired)

See this speech in context