Ms Catherine King (Ballarat, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government) Share this | Hansard source

To the member for North Sydney, I thank you very much for bringing this really important issue to this place. The women whose voices have been silenced deserve our attention and they deserve us to raise our voices to make sure that what has happened to them, what is happening to women across this country as we meet here, is heard and addressed by this nation. They are our mothers, our daughters, our sisters, our friends, our nieces and our aunts. They're the people that we love.

The fact that one woman a week is murdered by her current or former partner is just simply so shocking to all of us. We see these women on the pages of the newspaper. We hear their stories, but then they fade. We have the opportunity here to actually recognise that these women have died, that these women's incredible opportunity has been lost to this nation and that this is something that we have to do better at. We know that one in three women experiences physical violence up to the age of 15, and that one in five has experienced sexual violence. For one in those three women, that violence is perpetrated by someone they know. For one in four, that physical, sexual and emotional violence is from a current or former partner. These statistics, the number of women who deal with violence, are shocking—one woman a week is murdered. The most recent figures show that two in five Australians do not know where to get help when they are experiencing domestic violence and, as the member for North Sydney said, even when they do, they often go unanswered.

That's why the government has acted to enact the National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children and, in the last October budget, committed funding to it. But I don't think any of us here in this place think that it will ever be enough—that anything we do will ever be enough—and that's why it is so important that we have so many women in this place raising our voices on behalf of those women who no longer can, because these services desperately matter to these women, families, children and the people who love them.

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