Marielle Smith (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Our country is hurting. We have a deadly crisis on our hands, and it is a crisis that is seeing women's lives cut short, often at the hands of men that they know. There has been a lot of discussion in recent weeks about violence against women and just how we solve this complex, layered and tragic problem and how we meet the worthy objective of the National Plan to End Violence Against Women and Children in a generation. This year alone, 28 women have been killed at the hands of men—women whose lives have been violently stolen by partners, by husbands and by sons. It has sometimes been by strangers, but it has mostly been by men they've known, men they've loved and men they've shared some part of their lives with.

We know it's not all men, just as we know that men need to be driving the solutions here too, because this isn't a women's issue. It's not confined to one generation either. The same fears and feelings that have led to the social media phenomenon that has exposed that women feel safer in the woods with a bear than a man have persisted and pervaded for our mothers, for our grandmothers and for our great-grandmothers. For some of us, this issue is deeply personal. For all of us, it is deeply and extremely important, because ending violence against women is—and needs to be—everybody's business. It needs to be men's business too. We all have a responsibility here.

I am hopeful that we can stop this scourge in our society. We can stop it at the start. But, to do so, we have to change the way we talk to our children to keep them safe. The way we talk to our sons matters just as much as the way we talk to our daughters—actually, it matters more. All of us can change that and all of us can prioritise that, because we cannot let this continue to be seen as a women's issue to solve.