Tim Ayres (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Trade) Share this | Hansard source

I want to use the few minutes that I have to speak directly to men and boys who might be listening. Violence against women—the violence so regularly perpetrated against women and girls—is an issue for you. It affects women, sure—in small ways and in big ways. Sometimes it's the immediate trauma; sometimes it reverberates in the months and years to follow. It does affect women, sure. But it is perpetrated by men against women and girls. Of course it's a human rights issue. It really is, though, I think, a men's issue. It is men who perpetrate the violence, after all.

Why should women and girls bear the burden of dealing with the violence that is perpetrated against them? Individual women and girls bear that burden, of course, when they speak up about the violence that is perpetrated against them, or against their friends or their daughters; when they speak to the police, or to their parents; or when they go through the long and difficult, unlikely and often fruitless process of seeking justice or just trying to stop it happening again.

Imagine then—consider, for a moment—the courage and determination of young women like Chanel Contos or Saxon Mullins. What courage, what determination, what decency—to put aside their own interests, to put themselves into the public, in the interests of all Australian women and girls. And the hundreds of young women with whom they spoke, who spoke up themselves to policy-makers about their experience—that, I think, is real courage. We should celebrate their courage, their resilience and the dignity with which they spoke. And we should listen.

I don't know if you know, but so often, when women get together, if you overhear, they talk about this violence. It's violence perpetrated against them at home, at work, at school, at university, at their friends' homes—in so many public and private settings. Mostly what men should do is listen, reflect, act and lead, because the burden of acting on violence against women should fall on men—all of us. If so many women are the victims of intimate-partner violence or of sexual assaults in the home, in social settings or in public or if they are subjected to sexual harassment at work, then an awful lot of men are engaged in violence. That means that the problem is wide and deep in Australian culture.

From brutal, catastrophic assaults to the accumulation of small, daily, physical or verbal assaults and intimidations that leach the joy and confidence away from so many women—it's the boys at high school, the men at the pub or the club or the BBQ, the male students and lecturers at uni or TAFE, the workmates and the supervisors who need to show the same courage and the same decency that all those women like Ms Mullins and Ms Contos have shown to stand up to take the wind out of the sails of men who say things that denigrate women, make light of violence or commit violence.

Culture is critical. It doesn't remove individual responsibility or agency, but leadership matters and so does culture and behaviour at work, school, uni and TAFE. Workplace sexual harassment is violence perpetrated against women in their workplace. Again, it's women who have provided leadership here. I saw that the Attorney-General made some appointments today to the Respect@Work Council, and I want to recognise some of the women who I know who have been appointed to that council. I congratulate everyone who has been appointed to that council, but Emeline Gaske, Julia Fox, Jo Schofield, Mel Donnelly and Abbey Kendall are women in the trade union movement who have led the fight against sexual harassment in the workplace. I congratulate them in anticipation of all the leadership that they are going to show again.

Violence against women and girls happens everywhere—in families, at school, at work, in political parties and parliaments, in the street, in our clubs, in our organisations and in our unions. When men see it, they must act. Call out thuggishness, violence, misogyny, whether it is deliberate and calculated or careless or reckless. That's my message to men and boys. Stand up with the courage of the women and girls in our lives.