Zaneta Mascarenhas (Swan, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I fully reject the statement put before the House today. The thing that I'd like to think we can agree about in this place is the truth that this government wants to put the safety of our citizens at the heart of our policies. I'm an engineer by trade and you'd think I'd know a little bit about safety. When we look at safety, we look at different aspects of it: physical safety, mental safety, financial safety and psychological safety. One of the things we're seeing in Australia at the moment is women being the targets and victims of horrific violence in our community, and it's deeply saddening and distressing. Women losing their lives to violence is something that I've spoken about before. It affects me and, I'd like to think, it affects all of us. That's why we need to keep on talking about it: because it is a national issue, and we need to do more, not less. It has to stop.

That's why this year, the small part I got to play was about launching a national inquiry into one of the forms of domestic violence: financial abuse. Eighty-five per cent of women who experience physical and domestic violence have also experienced financial abuse. I did this because I listen to people in my community: women who were exhausted—exhausted victims or survivors of violence, exhausted from hearing from their friends and families who were victims of abuse and violence. Ending violence against women and children is my responsibility, our responsibility, everyone's responsibility. We need to do this together, and everyone needs to play a part.

The Albanese government is looking for new ways to make women feel safe from the macro level right down to the grassroots through tangible fixes that have lingered under a neglectful coalition. I'll give you an example. Just the other day, the Minister for Sport, the member for Lilley, announced funding for new lighting at local sporting grounds in my electorate. This new lighting will improve safety for local sporting reserves and increase training and competition areas for female sports. It will help improve safety for women and girls. This is just one more thing that the Labor government is doing that the Liberal government failed to do. These issues were highlighted back in 2020 by the City of South Perth. It said that females felt unsafe to participate in sport and recreation due to poor lighting conditions, but what did the Liberals do? Nothing.

Fortunately, safety and women's safety are at the forefront of this government's mind. We know that it's a national issue. We want women to feel safe, we want them to be safe and we want them to be heard, whether they're playing sport or doing another activity that they love. We as parliamentarians can voice the experience of vulnerable people in our community. This is how we create change and create safer places for women. Doing nothing is not acceptable. Now is the right time to take action.

Funding in the budget handed down by the Albanese government brings our government's total investment to $3.4 billion for women's safety. This is what we're doing. Whether it's sporting grounds, parliamentary inquiries or a national budget that is investing in women's safety, this is what action looks like. This is what will make Australia safe. I know the Albanese government continues to look at the diversity of our public but also the diversity in the parliament to make sure that we make better policies, and that's something we didn't see in the previous parliaments.

We continue to do this, and I think we can make a real difference, but that diversity isn't just about gender; it's also about cultural backgrounds. The words that we say in this place make a significant impact, and we need to remember the impact that they have on different communities. Sometimes I think that we forget that one in three Australians are born overseas or have one parent born overseas. It's a pretty extraordinary number. One of the things that I sometimes see in this place is a term called 'othering', where we treat another group as an other and we create division. This could be a place that's unifying and continues to make Australia a better place, or we could have really divisive arguments that incite hate, division and fear.

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