Sharon Claydon (Newcastle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I too want to thank my friend the member for Holt for bringing this motion before the House this evening. I echo her serious concerns about the safety of women in Australia. It's been a tragic year, but let's not pretend that 2024 has been wildly different from previous decades. We've all seen on the news—and Counting Dead Women Australia have recorded—that 32 women have been killed by male acts of violence so far this year. Many of them have been intimate partners of their killers. They have been found dead in their own homes where they should have been safe. They have been found in a bin, killed in shopping centres or while out jogging or walking or, indeed, killed in their cars.

We know violence can happen anywhere anytime. It doesn't respect demographic boundaries. It can be in public or it can be private. But what we should also know is that violence is not inevitable. We don't want a world where our girls are growing up in fear or our boys somehow think this is normal behaviour. One in four women have experienced violence from an intimate partner since the age of 15, and too many women and children feel scared and unsafe in their own homes. It is violence that we can and must stop. We need our culture, behaviour and attitudes towards women to change. Enough is enough.

That's why the Albanese Labor government has set a goal of ending violence against women and children within a generation through our National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children. It's a big ambition. There are some people saying we can't do it, but I say to those people that no government has set this ambition before. We know it is not going to be easy, but this is the first time Australia has ever had a female majority government in our nation's history, and we are extremely determined. It should not be beyond us as a parliament and as a nation to turn around this epidemic of male violence.

We've got a national plan to help guide those actions for the next 10 years and address some of what we know are key drivers of family, domestic and sexual violence. The Commonwealth's focus will be very much around the prevention and early intervention spaces. I'm not going to have time to go through those this evening, but there have been allocations in the budget to ensure that we look at both prevention and early intervention. We know that this is critical in order for change to take place.

I want to assure the Australian people that this is a government that is deeply committed to that goal of ending violence against women and children, and we will work every day to ensure that it is a reality.

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