Sally Sitou (Reid, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I appreciate all the contributions that have been made on this issue. It is great to see that this is something that all members of parliament feel strongly about, regardless of what political party they are representing in this place. I think we are all onboard with the idea that violence against women and children needs to be stamped out.

I have been to visit a refuge in my electorate. Whenever people ask me why the woman doesn't just leave, I want them to visit a refuge and experience how traumatic and difficult it is to be in a place like that. That is when you have extraordinary staff who are trying their best to support women and children fleeing domestic violence. But it is a really difficult place to live in. Often your entire family is squeezed into one room, having to share facilities with 20 or 30 other families. You don't have your paperwork in order to get your Centrelink payments set up. You often don't have clothes or other items that you need. It is a really difficult situation, and I take my hat off to the extraordinary people who work in the sector. They are doing extraordinary work to help support these women and children.

I often wonder why it is always the woman who has to leave the home. It is always the woman who has to flee, and we need to change that as well. Because if she is fleeing with children then she is having to uproot their lives, having to figure out what school they are going to go to, how to get help and support for that family. The burden of all of that falls on her, and we need to change that.

I held a domestic violence roundtable in my local community and I appreciate all the men and women who work in the space who came along to share their views. It was a fantastic discussion about what we could be doing locally to help support these families. One of the initiatives that sprung out of some of these discussions was to design a hub to give women the wraparound support that they need, whether it be talking to police, legal aid, Centrelink or a local community organisation or a translator. The police will tell you that sometimes when women are fleeing these situations they don't want to go to police; they just want safety for their kids. They just want to be out of that situation, so turning up to a police station is not necessarily the right course of action for them. Now these women can come to this hub and if they want to talk to the police, they can; if they want to get legal assistance, they can; or if they want to get that Centrelink payment or similar practical help and support to get away from the situation, they can. That would all be available to them there.

I've been talking to principals in my local area who see the firsthand impact domestic violence is having on students. Principles have said to me that they have seen examples where the mother has worked up the courage to leave the situation. However, she wants the child to be able to stay the same school but cannot find a rental property in that area to enable the child to have that continuity of care and support within the school environment, so she ends up going back to the perpetrator. This is a situation we have set up where, when women get up the courage to leave, we force them into refuges and situations where they cannot get housing through the private rental system. This is a government that recognises that this is where the problem lies. We need to be providing housing support and that's why I'm rally proud of the work we're doing to provide $10 billion in funding to increase the amount of social and affordable housing that we will build, and a portion of that will be set aside for women and children fleeing domestic violence. That is going to be critical. Yes, we need to help police; yes, we need to help frontline workers but we also need to get housing sorted for these women who are fleeing some desperate situations.

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