Kylea Tink (North Sydney, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I start today by thanking the member for Goldstein for bringing this motion to the House. Along with others on this crossbench, the member has been an incredibly strong advocate in this place for women's safety since coming here 18 months ago. I thank her for continuing to ensure it stays front and centre on our agenda.

While many of us turn our minds to end-of-year celebrations, based on this year's track record up to seven women could lose their lives at the hands of somebody they have loved before this year ends. The sad truth is: while we may anticipate it based on our experience so far this year, we simply do not have the systems or information to enable us to move in a meaningful way to stop it. Instead it will be the headlines we read or the news we hear that will tell us where and when it has happened, and by then our concern will be worth little to the grieving families and communities.

As this motion asserts, we are in the middle of a national emergency. Yet just how far that emergency spreads, how deeply it simmers and how effectively our efforts to address it are working are simply not known because, as a country, we do not have a dedicated national real-time tracking mechanism. We know that last year 56 women were killed by their intimate partner in the space of 52 weeks. That's more than one woman a week—one daughter, one sister, one friend, one mother, one colleague. Whilst you would think a number like that would have been enough to shock us into action, 2023 has been worse, with one woman killed every five days in Australia.

Alarmingly, Aboriginal women are 11 times more likely to die from family violence than are non-Aboriginal women. Devastatingly, a child is killed by a parent once every two weeks in our country. This happens even though our police are called to family or domestic violence matters every two minutes.

This violence is not confined to a particular postcode. In my electorate of North Sydney, services to support women and families experiencing violence, overbearing control and coercion are overwhelmed and simply unable to meet the growing demand. There would not be a week that goes by where my team and I would not receive a call from a woman desperate for assistance, and I'm sure that, as a member in this place, my experience is not isolated. Surely, then, we should be doing everything in our power to both identify those at risk much earlier and ensure our systems enable us to deploy resources efficiently and effectively to stop this horrendous loss of life, for each of these deaths is preventable. We do need more accommodation, we do need more professional assistance and we do need to flip the system on its head, enabling those that are currently cast as victims to be put in a position of power whilst those who commit the violence are forced to face the consequences of their actions sooner and get help where appropriate.

Yet, despite the tragedy we see play out time and again, tangible action has been too slow. Ideas that have been floated for months, if not years, on how to stop this loss of life have been waiting for someone with the political will to pick them up. That political will has arrived with the crossbench of this 47th Parliament. Along with the member for Goldstein and others, I commit to ensuring North Sydney's voice is heard consistently advocating for us to do better. It is past time the Australian government established and funded a dedicated real-time national toll to accurately track and record fatal violence against women and children, because national real-time reporting mechanisms work. They focus the system's attention on providing valuable insight into whether interventions are working. Just look at the improvement of our road safety, as the member for Goldstein said, since the introduction of national road tolls, or at the increase in the detection of diseases such as breast and bowel cancer since we started tracking them.

To shift something, you must be able to see it for what it is, and to see it for what it is you must be able to measure it. That's why I am proud to add my community's voice to the voices from Goldstein who are calling on the government to go further than it currently has and establish the Australian Family Homicide Index. Once established, this index would ensure all acts of family violence related homicides are documented, and it will provide us with the tools required to develop improved intervention and prevention practices. At the same time, it will also enable independent assessments of interventions and risks and, importantly, provide accessible data that those working in this area can use to inform their work.

While it's not a solution in and of itself, this work, combined with other initiatives under the National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children could very well be the piece that finally shifts the dial—a dial that is well past due to be turned. So let's turn it.

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