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

I am pleased to rise to speak to the appropriation bill consideration in detail for social services. My question for the Minister for Social Services is: is the rapid review of prevention approaches an acknowledgement that the government has failed to identify and prioritise investment in prevention and appropriate early interventions as a pathway to ending violence in a generation?

I will always work in a bipartisan way with the other side when it comes to domestic violence and tackling the scourge that faces our society. The National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children 2022-2032 is the Australian, state and territory governments' central policy initiative designed to address family and domestic violence. To their credit this government has continued the good work of the coalition government and invested close to $2.3 billion in funding for women's safety measures across the October 2022-23 and the 2023-24 budgets, along with a further $1.1 billion towards the national plan and women's safety. This is needed. This is required. These support services are required to care for and provide those support networks and safety nets for victim-survivors and those escaping domestic violence. However, this budget largely prioritises responses rather than prevention and early intervention. Given the scale of the problem, it is unclear whether the combined effects of the Commonwealth's efforts and that of the states and territories will succeed in mitigating the harm that victims-survivors continue to face.

It's pleasing to see an additional $900 million in payments for escaping domestic violence. This is a continuation of the program that the coalition put in place. It was estimated that there would be some 12,000 applications during the life of the escaping domestic violence payments. There was, in fact, 60,000 payments to the tune of $400 million. It's important that we continue these payments to help those victims-survivors and those women and children who need to escape domestic violence situations. But we have to address prevention and intervention. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting to get a different result. That's exactly what we've been doing. We have been doing the same thing over and over, year after year, and not providing dollar-for-dollar funding for prevention and intervention.

I have travelled, in the role of shadow assistant minister for the prevention of family violence, around Australia, and I have spoken to agencies. I've spoken to service providers. I've spoken to victims-survivors. They all agree that whilst those support services are needed, we have to change our thinking and we have to look at the programs and look at the systems which are not in place that need to be in place and that are preventative programs. These are programs such as men's support programs for male offenders. We're not rewarding the male offenders; we are educating them to change their behaviour. There are waiting lists of hundreds of people on the programs which currently exist. In Queensland, there are over 400 people on one list alone who have self-referred. These programs work.

We as a government need to directly fund those agencies who can show evidence based programs that work to change the thinking generationally. Until we do that, we will keep doing the same thing over and over, and nothing will change. Domestic violence numbers will only get worse. The other thing we have to implement immediately is a national curriculum for respectful relationships—not one day a year, not one day a month, but part of the curriculum: reading, writing, arithmetic and respect. Until we do that, we'll keep going around and around.

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