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

I rise to support the motion put forward by the member for Warringah. Domestic and intimate partner violence in Australia is a national crisis. Every year nearly 8,000 women return to dangerous environments after fleeing violence, because they have nowhere else to go, while another 9,000 become homeless. Crisis-response services are overburdened, and emergency shelters are overflowing. These are just the stories we know of—stories of people who have found a way to leave—with the reality being there are thousands more trapped in violence silently. The words of one North Sydney mother who lost everything after fleeing her violent partner with her three young children push me every day to do better in this place. I share them now in the hope that it will push others. She simply said: 'Surely you can do something at a national policy level. I can't be the only one going through this. It's just too big.'

The truth is she's right. Something must be done at the national policy level, yet, like her, I can't help but question the urgency in which we are responding to this crisis as a parliament. We know we can move with speed when we feel there is a crisis that needs to be addressed. We saw this late last year when this government rushed through laws to deal with immigration detainees in what it perceived to be an immigration crisis. I ask this government today: how many more women need to die before we respond to Australia's domestic violence crisis with the same urgency?

To our shame, programs that have been proven to be effective in offering greater protection and more stability for children are not being rolled out nationwide, with the Staying Home Leaving Violence program being just one example. This program, originally piloted 12 years ago, fundamentally flips the experience of victim and perpetrator, in that it re-empowers the victim to stay in the primary residence. As our current system stands, in the immediate aftermath of violence it is the victim who is largely punished. They routinely lose their home. Their financial circumstances are routinely poor. The children are often uprooted. Yet the perpetrator stays where the violence occurred. The Staying Home Leaving Violence program flips that dynamic and forces the perpetrator out. The program, therefore, stops women from becoming homeless. Shockingly, in the state where it was conceived, New South Wales, it only operates in 91 of 128 local government areas. None of those areas are in Sydney's North Shore. The federal government has an opportunity in the upcoming budget to end this, to stop this inequity, by committing to funding proven domestic violence services right across our country.

We not only have a moral responsibility to take this crisis seriously but also have a responsibility under international human rights laws, with a failure to act seeing us blatantly flout basic human rights like the right to life, liberty and security; the right to a standard of living adequate for health and wellbeing; the right to freedom from torture or cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment or punishment; and the right to not be discriminated against on the grounds of sex, marital or relationship status or pregnancy. Australian women and families are depending on us to ensure these rights are protected. I want to acknowledge the National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children and the respective action plans that are currently in place, as well as the large number of ministers, commissioners and advocates working towards change. But we do not have a generation to stop this; we must address it now. Change is not coming fast enough, and, as the leading federal body in this discussion, we must be focused on enabling everyone to work better together.

I thank the member for Warringah for bringing this important motion forward, and I echo her calls to convene a National Cabinet crisis meeting of federal, state and territory ministers to ensure everyone understands the role they are playing in addressing this crisis. As a federal parliament, we can do three things: we can lead, we can coordinate, and we can provide stimulus, be that financial, human or intellectual capital. It is past time that all of those things were brought to this crisis. I have to say it's particularly shocking during this past week, where we have seen evidence of billions of dollars invested in maintaining an offshore detention centre system which supposedly is in place to protect our community, that those billions of dollars could be far better spent if they were directed to the onshore services that we need to support women and children escaping domestic violence. We choose what we prioritise as a parliament, and it's time we chose to tackle this crisis. Women and children right across the country have nowhere else to turn. It's time we turned to them.

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