Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to contribute to this matter of urgency on the national security crisis of violence against women. In the wake of the truly horrific murder of Hannah Clarke and her three beautiful, innocent children, it is absolutely essential that we as a nation reiterate that violence is never acceptable in any form. There is never any justification. There are no excuses, no ifs and no buts—none. We need to call out the toxic culture of some men and their supporters, some of whom raised these issues in this place, who think they are entitled to exert power and control over women. That is at the heart of this towards women and their children.

Women think that they can rely on the justice system and the police to respond to the violence that is being perpetrated against them, but too often we see that that is not the case. We see in the media today that there's a very brave woman who took her own civil action because the police didn't think it was in the public interest to prosecute when someone doused her in petrol and threatened to set her alight. We see domestic violence orders—they're called other things in other states; AVOs—simply ignored and not worth the paper they're written on.

How can we say that people can have confidence in our justice systems when this is continuing to happen? For every woman—we have heard that one a week that loses her life—there are thousands of women and their children who are living the daily reality of violence and abuse. Exposure to violence against their mother or other caregivers causes profound harm to children and has life-long effects on those children. It is not good enough to say, 'Well, it's okay, we're giving money—we're spending this and we're spending that' when we know that $5 billion is needed to address this crisis.

Just at the end of last year, the National Family Violence Prevention Legal Services were told that their funding of only $244,000 was going to be cut. The government used as a weak excuse the supposed recommendations of a report, when the report made no recommendations at all. The government needs to act to stop that. We just heard Senator McCarthy's contribution about the 32-fold impact of domestic violence on First Nations women; yet the government thinks it's okay to cut funding to one of their essential services. In 2006, the Howard government made the mistake of amending the family law to put parents' shared care above the interest of the child. It was a fundamental mistake, and we called it out at the time.

These mistakes cannot continue. We need to invest; we need to change the laws; we need to enforce the current laws and change the laws to ensure that this doesn't happen. Importantly, we have to call out any excuse for violence. There is no excuse. We have to call it out every single time. (Time expired)