David Pocock (ACT, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

It's a national disgrace that, in the middle of a crisis of family and domestic violence, with 47 women murdered so far this year—almost two per week—we have more than a thousand people being turned away every day from community legal services in this country.

This morning I attended a roundtable organised by the member for Goldstein, from the other place, with frontline family and domestic violence service providers from around the country. They are despairing at their funding shortfalls. Here in the ACT, DVCS is facing a $1.6 million hole in their operating budget after the federal government didn't increase funding for services that are more in demand than ever. They're already at a point where they can't answer every call. This means that even more cries for help are going unanswered. Last week I met with a huge delegation from the National Family Violence Prevention Legal Services Forum, who told the same story of overstretched resources and being unable to meet demand.

I was proud to sign onto Senator Thorpe's letter to attorneys-general this morning. I thank her for putting forward this urgency motion today. I do not understand how or why a government can commission an independent review, receive a report saying that $215.3 million is urgently needed to sustain critical legal services until a new agreement can commence and then only provide only $41.4 million in the budget—a fifth of what is needed and a fifth of what has been recommended by a report that you commissioned. In the same budget, $45 million has been provided to explain the stage 3 tax cuts to Australians. Apparently, this is stage 3 tax cuts week; that's all the government has wanted to speak about. Australians would be horrified to know that they have a government that is spending more on advertising stage 3 tax cuts to Australians than they've provided in additional funding to overstretched community legal services around the country.

The government have to step up and match their soaring rhetoric of ending family and domestic violence in a decade with the measures that need to go alongside that for there to be any chance of that happening. How can you have a report telling you the breadth and depth of the problem, and the funding required, and then just put in a little bit and say, 'Here you go. Thanks for the work you do. Good luck with it'?

I understand the budget's under pressure. We know that. We also know that we're happy to give our gas away for free. When the government has the petroleum resource rent tax and the Treasury recommends changes to get more from this gas that we're happy to give away to multinationals to be shipped overseas, with no PRRT and very little corporate tax paid, the government goes for the weakest and most cowardly option. They say: 'We'll just bring forward some of those payments. We don't need more to be able to fund the sorts of services that women and children desperately need around this country.' I think this is shameful. Thank you, Senator Thorpe, for raising this. The government needs to step up and do better.