Larissa Waters (Queensland, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

because I was giving voice—and I'll take that interjection from Minister Ruston, who obviously concurs that it's somehow a politicisation to ask for more funding for organisations that exist on the smell of an oily rag, trying to stop people from being killed when they reach out for help and who have been saying over and over and over again that they don't have enough resources to keep women and children safe. If you think that's politicisation then every single person will be disgusted at that response.

The funding that this government has provided is woeful. They often bang a drum about how they've put a little bit of money here and a little bit of money there, and that it's better than ever before. Well, great, but it's still not enough. Nine women now have been killed this year. Last year it was 61. It's been in the order of one woman or more a week for many, many years now. The funding is clearly not enough. When are you going to fix it?

We saw late last week that the minister gave, I think, $2.4 million for men's behaviour change programs, but what a drop in the ocean. Clearly vastly more investment is needed in support programs like that, as well as frontline services for crisis response, and clearly for other prevention programs; $2.4 million is an absolute insult to all of the women and children who are living in fear of their very life. If the incidents of last week are not enough to shake the government out of their reverie, out of their denial about their ability to fix this problem, I don't know what is.

We've seen cuts to frontline domestic violence services by former administrations. The Abbott government did that. Thankfully, after pressure from this Senate, after an inquiry that I initiated and that reported in 2015, we saw the government overturn some of those cuts. But it didn't ever actually have a funding increase. And we've seen in recent years funding for National Family Violence Prevention Legal Services, or FVPLS, which is an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women's service, being cut. We've seen the funding for a safe phone program—which allows women, who are often being tracked, to get free and to have those telecommunications without being bugged—reduced as well. In fact, they're facing funding uncertainty.

So don't sit here and tell us that you're doing everything you can when you are cutting funding to frontline services and when you are deaf to their calls for increased funding to help everybody that reaches out. In 2015, the sector said, 'Women are being forced to choose between violence and homelessness because there is not enough investment in crisis housing, and nor is there enough investment in long-term affordable housing.' You've had at least five years of that very poignant remark being put to you, and there is still inadequate funding for homelessness services and a failure to recognise that the largest—and growing—cohort of homeless people is older women, and many of those are fleeing violence.

There are so many things that this government could be acting on: paid domestic violence leave, proper funding for the courts to address some of those backlogs, proper training for judges and for the police to properly deal with family violence and domestic violence situations, and axing the shared parenting presumption where violence exists. There are so many things, yet all you do is give the deputy chairship of a family law inquiry to Senator Hanson, who thinks that women lie about domestic violence and who this morning was excusing the actions of a murderer. It is disgusting, and it will not be forgotten.