Zali Steggall (Warringah, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak to the report tabled by the Standing Committee on Social Policy and Legal Affairs on its inquiry into family, domestic and sexual violence. I thank the committee members—in particular, the chair, the member for Fisher—for guiding what must've been a very difficult and emotional inquiry. I thank the 298 individuals and organisations who took the time to make submissions to the inquiry and, in particular, all of those who appeared at the 16 public hearings. No doubt some of the experiences were incredibly traumatic for those telling and for those hearing. I commend you for your strength and courage and I really hope your contributions will help inform us as decision-makers and assist other victim-survivors in getting the support and assistance they need.

I thank the secretariat for their assistance and professionalism in supporting this vital inquiry. The report is extremely thorough and detailed, with 88 recommendations. My hope, though, is that the report is not just actioned but prioritised. Committees, witnesses, expert organisations and secretariat staff commit a great deal of time resources and energy into these inquiries, which produce well-research reports with a list of much-needed recommendations. But too often, unfortunately, the reports sit idle. So I call on the government to carefully consider the full list of 88 recommendations made in this report, particularly as they draft the new national plan to reduce violence against women and their children.

The reality is that, in this place, we are acutely aware of the scourge of family, domestic and sexual violence. As community leaders, we see it in our neighbourhoods. We work with the shelters and the charities supporting the victims. We attend vigils., we send condolences, and we post about our thoughts and prayers. But what action are we taking in this place to really address the issue? As the chair highlighted in the foreword, in Australia, on average, one woman dies every eight years, making it statistically likely that, over the duration of this inquiry alone, 40 Australian women have lost their lives at the hands of a current or former partner. That is a shameful statistic and it cries out for action.

We should note the origin of the inquiry, which was an embarrassment in itself. We had a complete failure by a Senate inquiry which was supposed to be into domestic violence. It wrapped up three months early, having not taken any submissions or held any public hearings. It was the public outcry that led to this inquiry being put in place. I commend the government for their response back in June to establish this inquiry by the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Social Policy and Legal Affairs. The terms of reference covered a range of areas and were specifically designed to inform the next national plan to reduce violence against women and their children. I was particularly pleased to see reference made to an examination of all forms of violence against women, including but not limited to coercive control and technology facilitated abuse.

There were 88 recommendations in the report and they are grouped into five key things. Firstly, the next national action plan to reduce violence against women and their children should involve a more uniform approach across jurisdictions and one that is more inclusive of the various manifestations of family violence. This should include the development of a uniform national definition of family, domestic and sexual violence that takes into account the non-physical forms of violence such as coercive control, financial abuse and technology facilitated abuse. Secondly, the national plan must seek to engender a culture of accountability and greater workforce support, and all Australian governments should work collaboratively and transparently and be held to account through quantitative targets. It needs to be measurable. Thirdly, education is critical. There remains a need for greater awareness and understanding of the many forms of family, domestic and sexual violence, the causes and impacts of violence, and the ways in which it can be prevented. Fourthly, in response to family, domestic and sexual violence, the welfare of victim-survivors and their children should be paramount. The next national plan should seek to improve victim survivors access to Specialist services as well as housing, legal aid and financial assistance. Fifthly, the next national plan must continue to hold perpetrators to account for their use of violence. This should include increased penalties for breaches of domestic violence orders and improved information sharing about perpetrators.

I strongly support greater deterrence through harsher penalties. I am astounded and quite outraged by this aspect. I contrast the response that we have to domestic violence with the response implemented by state governments to the spate of one-punch attacks which we saw in Kings Cross, Sydney, for example. We saw entire industries shut down with the introduction of controversial lockout laws. I note that Victorian and Queensland governments have also introduced specific legislation with regard to coward punch attacks. A one-punch attack—predominantly a male-on-male assault—has mobilised state governments to implement harsher sentencing and stricter liability laws, but domestic violence, where one woman is killed every eight days, on average, has not done the same. Domestic violence fails to attract anywhere near the same sense of outrage, censure and legislative action.

Between 2000 and 2016, there have been 127 deaths from coward punch attacks. In contrast, the accepted statistic is that one woman dies every eight days at the hands of a current or former partner. So I've done the maths. In the same period as there have been 127 coward punch attacks, 730 women—daughters, sisters, wives, mothers and aunts—have been slain, but there has been no action. The statistics are even more horrific. Even when found guilty, only about 16 per cent of perpetrators will face a custodial sentence, and the average length of incarceration is 370 days for the most serious kinds of assault. On top of that, only 1.5 per cent of perpetrators will complete the full sentence in custody. That is outrageous, and it is so symptomatic.

Because the victims of intimate partner violence are predominantly women, we are completely failing to have the same sense of urgency to act and put in place strong deterrence measures. I do not accept this. If we have harsher laws in relation to coward punch attacks, with mandatory minimum sentencing regimes, why on earth do we not have similar regimes for intimate partner violence? It must change. The point of legislation is deterrence, and we must send a clear and strong message to society that perpetrators will face significant minimum mandatory sentences. I truly hope the government can take on the integrated and holistic approach of implementing all the recommendations, particularly the recommendation to look at strengthening sentencing.

I was pleased to see in the budget, released yesterday, nearly $1 billion over four years for initiatives to reduce the incidence, and support the victims, of family, domestic and sexual violence against women and children. I welcome the increase from the $150 million announced in the COVID response package in March last year. The budget papers note that violence against women is estimated to cost Australia $26 billion annually. Money certainly can't fix everything, but $250 million a year to fix a $26 billion problem seems like a very small investment to address the issue. Whilst I commend the government for addressing it, it's clear that a lot more needs to be done. The family law system needs reform, but, from my experience in the courts and on the family law committee inquiry, funding is a major problem when it comes to ensuring access to justice and appropriate protection. We need to do more in that respect, and I note that some funding was provided to that system as well.

We cannot have a proper conversation about addressing domestic and family violence without the honest discussion of broader cultural change, and for that we need to make sure respect for women—respect for all—is above and beyond all else. There are many actions in this place where we've failed to uphold that standard, and that needs to change. Leadership is important. We will only get cultural change if it comes from the top, and it must come from this place. We must determine the standard that we simply will not allow to drop. We have to raise the standards. We have people in this place who have behaved appallingly, and that needs to stop. We have to act on intimate partner violence.

Peta Murphy (Dunkley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This was a really important inquiry that the committee, of which I'm proud to be a member, conducted. We shouldn't have had to have it. We shouldn't be in this country that we all love, repeatedly talking about the statistics that a woman dies every eight days at the hands of an intimate partner. We shouldn't still be having inquiry after inquiry after inquiry into domestic and family and sexual violence, because it shouldn't be such a pervasive and enormous part of our society.

I think people throw around the term 'un-Australian' far too often, in all sorts of circumstances. But when you think about the way that we like to consider ourselves as a country and as a people, when you think about the characteristics that we like to portray as being very Australian, they are actually about equality—about an easygoing sort of attitude, 'How are you going, mate?' and everyone should be all right. That is fundamentally, diametrically opposed to a society where domestic violence is routinely described as a scourge and where, no matter which political party you're a member of, no matter which level of government you're elected to, no matter whether you're in civil society or a leader in the workplace, wherever you are, you're committed to eradicating this scourge on society and have been for decades and decades and decades—and yet. And yet we are still here today, on both sides of the chamber—and the chair of the committee is sitting across from me, and I know that he cares about this—talking earnestly about the reforms and funding and changes that are needed to make the amount of domestic and family violence that occurs in this country less disgraceful.

The member for Warringah spoke before me—I didn't get to hear all of her speech—and, again, like everyone else in this chamber and in this parliament, I accept and respect her genuine concern for this issue. She focused in a bit of her speech that I listened to on deterrence and jail sentences, and, absolutely, the criminal justice system has a significant part to play in dealing with domestic and family violence. But what those of us on the committee know, because there was hardly a submitter or a witness that didn't refer to it, is that we have to look at primary prevention and cultural change—not just at the drivers of domestic and family violence but at the solution to reducing it. And we can't just rely on punishing perpetrators when it has occurred.

We certainly can't just rely on the necessary, crucial and, quite frankly, often amazing support services that exist around the country to help women and children once they've been the victims of domestic and family violence. Of course we have to do everything we can to lift them up and support them and enable them to access those crucial services.

But as a parliament and a government we also have to look at what we can do to stop it happening in the first place. That truly is about addressing the actual culture that exists in homes and workplaces and sporting clubs across Australia and changing it. That's why the committee's report, both the bipartisan, unanimous main report and the additional comments from the Labor members—of which I'm one—emphasised primary prevention programs and gender equality. They are at the heart of us becoming the country that we all believe we are and we all believe we want to be. It was, as our report said, the fourth action plan of the national plan which continued the increasing emphasis on primary preventive strategies and declared that primary prevention is the key. It said that the basic premise of the approach is that gender equality is the key to ending violence against women and their children and that women will never be safe if they are not equal.

A division having been called in the House of Representatives—

Sitting suspended from 11:45 to 12 : 17

I've got a lot more to say, which I had prepared, but I can't help but note the irony that my speech was interrupted by voting on, in part, Labor's motion to remove the member for Bowman from the chair of the Education Committee, which he said he was going to do himself—because he had to stand down and get empathy training in order to understand that harassing women online, taking photographs of women in their workplace without their permission when they are bending over and their underwear can be seen—is unacceptable behaviour. And I can't help but note that, despite all the fine words from the government's senior benches over the past two days about equality and a 50-page—or 500-page, or whatever it was—women's budget statement and women's ministerial statement yesterday about respect for women in the workplace, every member of the government voted to keep the member for Bowman in his $22,000-a-year position as the chair of the Education Committee.

So, they can talk the talk. But when it comes to actually demonstrating to all the women out there in Australia who marched for justice—who said, 'Enough is enough: we not only don't want to be killed at the rate of one woman every eight days but also don't want to be subjected to harassment; we don't want to feel that our worth is less because we're female and that privileged men can exercise their power over us whenever and however they want'—apparently they don't count, to this government. And I know that there are members of this government, particularly on the backbench, for whom that vote must have hurt, because they don't like his behaviour either, and they want to be able to walk the walk as well as talk the talk.

But that's what this Prime Minister is forcing on his members of parliament. That's what he's forcing on the Australian people. The standard you walk past is the standard you accept. And what this Prime Minister has accepted—today, yesterday and every day since a brave woman went on television, crying and disclosing that she'd considered killing herself because of the online harassment she was subjected to by the member for Bowman—is that if he thinks there's a vote in it he'll use the words, but if he thinks there's a chance that a member of his government might not vote for him and might put his parliamentary majority into some sort of jeopardy then he won't walk the walk. That's what's wrong.

The first five minutes of my speech—which I wanted to follow up on with some really positive examples of programs that are empowering young girls and a change in the culture of Australia—was about the fact that women will never be safe until women are equal, and we will never change the culture until the people who are the leaders of this country demonstrate the culture that we all should be living. But every time there's a glimmer of hope that this Prime Minister and his government are starting to see, after eight long years of neglect, that something needs to be done, our hopes get trashed by things like a protection racket for the member for Bowman. I'm disgusted and upset. (Time expired)

Mike Freelander (Macarthur, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak in relation to the Standing Committee on Social Policy and Legal Affairs inquiry into family, domestic and sexual violence and our report. At the outset, I'd like to express my gratitude to the committee's secretariat, particularly Shennia Spillane, Kathleen Blunden and Ashley Stephens, for their dedicated work in facilitating the inquiry and the report over the past almost one year. Their work has been incredibly invaluable. They put a lot of time into the report, and I'd like to acknowledge their efforts and commend them for their excellent work. A great deal of the evidence we received throughout the inquiry I found quite confronting, to be perfectly honest. Some of it was very distressing and very sensitive, and our secretariat and the committee members have worked with the highest levels of professionalism and sincerity throughout the process.

I want to thank everyone who took the time to prepare a submission and give evidence to the committee throughout this very lengthy process. The information that was shared with us was sometimes very personal and sometimes, as I've mentioned, extremely confronting. It's been very valuable to the committee in finalising the report, and I appreciate the selflessness with which each and every one of the contributors provided our committee with their insights, their experiences and their views. Through its inquiry the committee received almost 300 submissions, and each of these were crucial in formulating the report's 88 recommendations. Many of these submissions were from survivors, and certainly many were from people who'd experienced long-term family violence. I want to express my admiration and utmost gratitude to those who presented to us.

I also want to pay tribute to our committee members, including the chair, the member for Fisher, for his untiring efforts. It's been a pleasure to work with everyone on the committee. I want to pay special attention to our deputy chair, my good friend and colleague the member for Newcastle, Sharon Claydon, whose work I know has been absolutely tireless, even until very late at night and at all hours of the morning, in trying to make sure that our report was a valuable one. She worked very well with the member for Fisher, Andrew Wallace, to try and make sure our report was timely and had the most appropriate recommendations. The member for Newcastle, of course, is one of the hardest-working members not only of this committee but in this parliament, and she's truly dedicated herself to the rights of women and families during this report. Therefore we have a really important, well-researched and timely report.

With the additional comments from the other members, I also pay tribute to the member for Bass, Ms Archer; the member for Dunkley, Peta Murphy; and the member for Grey, Rowan Ramsey, all of whom made very valuable contributions to our report. I also pay tribute to the member for Jagajaga, who, in spite of juggling a new baby, put a lot of effort into the report. The other members also made their contributions, but I think the ones I've mentioned deserve recognition.

As we've said in our comments on our report, the report is a bipartisan one. It reflects our concern that there needs to be urgency about acting on our recommendations. This is not a report that should sit in a drawer to be viewed by successive parliaments as past history. It is urgent that we do something about this. One woman every week is murdered in Australia by a partner. Children are exposed to domestic violence and are victims of domestic violence. A significant number of children are murdered every year due to domestic violence. I myself have cared for children who've been severely injured and emotionally damaged and even gone on to be murdered by perpetrators of domestic violence. I think we can no longer in Australia pretend that this is something we just have to accept. The need for urgency has been mentioned by every other committee member who has spoken and is very, very important.

The statistics paint a really harrowing picture of the state of our society when we see this as something that we can expect regularly. A woman is murdered every week and one child is murdered every month in Australia. This is just not what we should see in a developed country. The statistics don't tell the real human stories, and we certainly heard some of them in our committee. My heart goes out to the victims and families who've been exposed to these terrible crimes. It's a blight on our society, and it's incumbent upon us all to address the crisis and make sure that action happens on an urgent basis.

I don't want to talk for too long, as I know other members have mentioned all the different organisations that have provided submissions and what they've done. I'd just like to mention the Macarthur domestic violence support group, who've been really terrific in my own electorate. I have sat on their meetings on a monthly basis, and I'm in awe of the work that they do to support victims of family violence. I pay tribute to the others involved in the healthcare system, in the law enforcement system and in the courts, but this report should now be taken as something that requires urgent action, and I implore the government to do so.

Debate adjourned.