Elizabeth Watson-Brown (Ryan, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Yesterday the Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence Commissioner tabled her inaugural report to parliament, designed to measure progress and impact of the National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children. The commissioner warned that the women's safety sector is already buckling under huge pressure and that, when there's an increase in reporting, frontline services need more support to meet increased demand.

We have an epidemic of men's violence against women, and our frontline services are doing the very best they can in a system that continues to tell them to do more with less. For the National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children to succeed, it needs to be properly funded. We need to be clear here: the true cost of not funding this plan will be women's safety—their lives and their children's lives. The women's safety sector has said for a decade that it needs $1 billion each year to be able to help everyone who reaches out for help, rather than having to turn people away back to situations of violence. So far, Labor has committed less than two-thirds of this amount. I want the government to recognise the horror that this poor system is inflicting not only on those making the brave decision to flee violence but on the staff who have dedicated their lives to helping the most vulnerable. It's traumatising and it could be avoided if Labor provided the funds required for the national plan to actually succeed.

If Labor continue to ignore the calls for more funding, they risk squandering another decade and more women's lives. Already this year, devastatingly, 45 women have been killed by violence—45. We know this number because of the brave work of volunteer organisation Counting Dead Women Australia and their research through Destroy the Joint. The government doesn't even keep a national family and domestic violence death toll. The Greens have been pushing for years for the government to keep an FDV death toll. We need this important data to aid in awareness raising and prevention; yet this work is being done by volunteers. How many more women have to die for the government to actually do something useful about it? What's the price that women have to pay? For many, sadly, it's the ultimate price.

Here's another cruel fact. First Nations women are 33 times more likely to be hospitalised as a result of violence and six times more likely to be killed; yet we know that First Nations women are overpoliced and undersupported. Our so-called justice system is weaponised against them. They experience systemic racism, victim blaming and very poor police responses. This government needs to do better for our First Nations women and children.

We also know that women on low wages or on income support are especially vulnerable, without the resources to escape violent situations. Yet this government persists with the cruelty of keeping income support payments like JobSeeker below the poverty line and has the audacity to cry poor while dishing out hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts and handouts for the rich.

The housing crisis is felt even more acutely by women and children experiencing family and domestic violence. Women are forced to choose between abuse and homelessness because there's just nowhere for them to go. Let's be clear: our social security system is built on shame and humiliation, demonising those who need these supports. It's absolutely a further barrier for people escaping violence. The government could have solved this if they had worked with the Greens on their housing plan. We can scrap negative gearing and capital gains tax handouts, build more houses and put a freeze and a cap on rents to make housing affordable so that people don't have to choose between abuse and homelessness. They could invest the money they make from scrapping tax handouts to wealthy property developers directly into crisis accommodation or funding the absolutely critical services our frontline workers provide to people escaping violence.

While the Labor government continues to underfund frontline family, domestic and sexual violence services, victims-survivors are turned away from crisis accommodation and one woman is murdered every four days in this country. This issue should be above politics—and we've heard some very fine and heartfelt words from the speakers here today. It is well past time the Albanese government fully funded the organisations that actually do the hard work on the front line of this dreadful epidemic. Anything less is a betrayal to women. The more Labor ignores this crisis the more women will die.

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