Zoe Daniel (Goldstein, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That this House:

(1) notes that:

(a) violence against women is a national emergency;

(b) in October 2023, six women in Australia were killed within a fortnight, five allegedly by men known to them;

(c) approximately one Australian woman is killed every nine days by a male intimate partner;

(d) Aboriginal women are 11 times more likely to die from family violence than non-Aboriginal women;

(e) intimate partner violence is the biggest preventable threat to the health, wellbeing and safety of Australian women; and

(f) eliminating family violence requires national leadership, coordination and investment to build the evidence base needed to identify definitive points of intervention to prevent violence and change perpetrator behaviour;

(2) acknowledges that:

(a) Australia currently has no national toll recording fatal violence against women and children;

(b) Australia currently has no funded national reporting mechanism dedicated to the detailed reporting of femicide, and the killing of children; and

(c) tolls are an effective tool for prevention and awareness; and

(3) calls on the Government to establish The Australian Family Homicide Index to generate the evidence required to inform new and improved responses to family violence and help save lives.

On 20 October the body of Krystal Marshall is found after a house fire at Aldinga Beach in South Australia. A man is later arrested and charged with murder and arson. On 23 October police are called to an address in the ACT following reports of a woman with stab wounds. Thi Thuy Huong Nguyen is pronounced dead at the scene. Her husband is charged with murder. On 25 October the body of Lilie James is found with horrific head injuries in the gym toilets at a Sydney private school. She was allegedly murdered by her ex-partner and colleague Paul Thijssen. On 29 October Analyn Osias is found dying at her home in Bendigo, where her two primary school age children are present. A man who is known to her is charged with murder. On 30 October the body of Alice McShera is found at Perth's Crown Towers resort. A man believed to be in a relationship with her is charged with murder.

In October 2023 six women in Australia were killed within a fortnight, five allegedly by men known to them. This month, November 2023, six women in Australia were killed in seven days, five allegedly by men. These deaths were preventable. Intimate partner violence is the biggest preventable threat to the health, wellbeing and safety of Australian women. Approximately one Australian woman is killed every nine days by a male intimate partner. Aboriginal women are 11 times more likely to die from family violence than non-Aboriginal women. Every fortnight in Australia a child is killed by a parent. Every two minutes across the country police are called to a family and domestic violence matter. Across south-east Melbourne, including my electorate of Goldstein, half of the police case load is family and domestic violence.

We must do more if we're going to end violence against women and children within a generation as the government's national plan sets out to do.

That's why I've put forward this motion today. To quote former senator Natasha Stott Despoja's address to the National Foundation for Australian Women two weeks ago, 'We need to turbocharge our efforts.' Natasha is an eminent South Australian. In South Australia, four women were killed last week, allegedly by intimate partners. The list of killings goes on and on and on. I say to everyone in this place: what better time to speak to your communities than now, during the global 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence? Eliminating family violence requires leadership, coordination and investment to build the evidence base needed to identify definitive points of intervention, to prevent violence, to change perpetrator behaviour and ultimately to change the attitudes and inequalities that drive violence across the community.

On Saturday the government announced that it'll resource the Australian Institute of Criminology to report quarterly on rates of intimate-partner homicide. Reporting matters, but it does not prevent. While I welcome this announcement, it doesn't address the full range of Australians killed by domestic, family and sexual violence. Child victims will be invisible in this reporting, a curious omission given the national plan's commitment to children as victims-survivors in their own right. Reporting via the dashboard will be retrospective, published once every three months. How is it that we can report live on the road toll but only four times a year on intimate-partner homicide and never on children killed?

State based and national road tolls have driven public awareness around road deaths and driver behaviour. This is why I'm calling on the government to establish the Australian family homicide prevention initiative to work in partnership with their announced dashboard and to generate the evidence required to prevent future deaths. It would provide the evidence base, tools and guidance required to inform improved intervention and prevention, document all acts of family violence related to homicides, and offer an independent assessment of when interventions could have taken place and what risks were present prior to those deaths. This would provide an accessible, interconnected data repository of all domestic and family violence related killings, for use by practitioners, policymakers, researchers and the media. It would sit well alongside the National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children's goal to reduce the number of women killed by their intimate partners by 25 per cent each year.

As you leave parliament tonight, I ask you to look up at Parliament House illuminated in brilliant orange, the universal colour that brings recognition to this epidemic, and think about what you can do as a leader in your community to stop men from killing women. Enough is enough.

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