Pat Conaghan (Cowper, National Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Social Services) Share this | Hansard source

I don't stand here at the dispatch box and pretend to know how it feels to not be able to go for a walk on your own or walk down an alleyway by yourself, or be under a roof with a partner and not be sure how they're going to react when they come home at the end of the day. I don't pretend to know how that feels at all. What I do know, having been in the role of shadow assistant minister for the prevention of family violence and having travelled around Australia and spoken to the agencies, victims-survivors and police officers, is that we have to—we must—invest in prevention and intervention. We must match dollar for dollar in every single budget until we resolve this critical issue. We have to look at changes in prevention and intervention rather than to response and recovery.

I appreciate this motion on gendered violence, and thank you to the member for Warringah for putting the motion on. I agree with everything that's in there. But much of it is reactionary. It is response and recovery. What I am being told on the ground out there by the agencies—by those who provide the services to victims-survivors, to women and children—is that, until we treat the root problem, this will continue. From when I was a young police officer in Kempsey in 1989 up to my being the member there today, nothing has changed. In fact, domestic violence has only become worse, because we're not treating the root cause.

Let's not make any bones about it: the root cause is men with behavioural issues—broken men. Until we deal with and treat those broken men, this will continue. We've got to invest in men's behavioural programs. I've seen extremely successful ones in Queensland and in Tasmania. This isn't rewarding men for their behaviour. We have to put that mindset aside. It's about trying to change their core. I've seen men who have been offenders and should be punished go back and become presenters on those men's behavioural changes, because what they learnt was so profound. They identified their behaviour, and it broke that generational cycle. We know that young boys who see and experience domestic violence from their fathers or from their mothers' partners are more likely to become offenders when they get older. If we can break that cycle, we can make real change. We also need to insert respectful relationships into the national curriculum—not one day a year, not one day a month; it has to be reading, writing, arithmetic, and respectful relationships.

I had the pleasure and the privilege of speaking to the education minister of Indonesia. He's a tech billionaire, and the president asked him to become education minister. The first thing he did was implement respectful relationships in their curriculum, from kindergarten to year 12. After two years they were seeing, in the classrooms, a change in the way people treated each other—not just boys to girls, but the way children and teenagers treated each other, because it was in the curriculum every week. They're tested on it, and they have to pass that test to matriculate. Just as the support workers say to me: until we implement all of these measures and deal with the root cause, we will eternally be the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff.

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