Emma Husar (Lindsay, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Recently, I spoke at the National Council of Women's conference about the vulnerability of women. I would like to thank Barbara Baikie for the invitation to be part of the panel discussion. The panel discussion was in response to violence against women. This was followed by a presentation by Sex Discrimination Commissioner Kate Jenkins, who explored the root cause of violence against women, which is gender discrimination.

I was a co-panellist with Nathan Costigan, the cousin of Tara Costigan, who was brutally murdered by her former partner while holding her eight-day-old baby. He attacked her with an axe, and her older children watched on. In Tara's memory, the Costigan family set up the Tara Costigan Foundation to support the thousands of women who need support at the most critical time of their lives. Recently, I was invited to be the keynote speaker for the foundation's ladies' lunch. They were raising money for Tara's Angels, a service that helps women post-crisis in a social work or advocate position. It goes on for two years post that woman leaving that violent relationship.

I would like to see a time when foundations like this are not needed and a government's response is adequate—or, even better, when we eliminate violence against women once and for all. Until we move to a time where we treat women equally in pay and workplace conditions, have women on boards and in the highest levels of management—and represented equally in our parliament—and value women's work as much as men's, I fear we will not see this.

I want to place on Hansard today my thanks to the National Council of Women and to the Tara Costigan Foundation. More than that, I would like to thank them for their continued advocacy towards a continual gender-equal future.