Lidia Thorpe (Victoria, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

Today, on International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, I want to call out this government for actively fuelling and funding the culture of violence against women, girls, queers, my sistergirls and brotherboys. I want to start with the words of Dr Amy McQuire, a proud Darumbal and South Sea Islander woman, who writes about the First Nations femicide in this country:

Violence is one of the key stories told of Aboriginal communities, and yet Aboriginal women are silenced in these conversations, seen as without agency or as bodies on which acts of violence are perpetrated. In this way, the active resistances of Aboriginal women … are disappeared. To speak is to speak an end to an unsafe space in which these violences are continually weaponised against whole communities, leading to unsafe policy outcomes like more police, more jailing and draconian racist policy responses … which only reproduce the violence, leading to further pain, wounding and harm.

This year Sherele Moody Femicide Watch, which does incredible work tracking the number of murders of women in this country, found that 86 women had been killed. They're just the ones we know of. This violence is no accident and it is far from random. It is deeply embedded in how this government and society, as an extension, operate—a continuation of the violent processes of colonisation, which have never ended. Violence is their tool to keep people in fear, to maintain control and to protect wealth and power.

How can we talk about ending violence against women when this government provides diplomatic, financial and military support to those who bomb, rape and pillage the homes of families overseas, all the while locking up First Nations mothers and children here at home—even handcuffing them while they're giving birth? This is a government that thrives on manufacturing hate and division. It creates enemies and profits from wars, shaping its economy to benefit from human suffering.

Governments that bomb villages in the Middle East and call it liberation have no right to preach about safety in our homes. Research from many, including Joanna Bourke, highlights how the violence we export overseas, whether through wars or imperial domination, inevitably comes home, embedding itself into our culture, shaping institutions and perpetrating harm within our own communities. Like Malcolm X says, that violence will come home to roost. Violence at home fuels violence abroad and vice versa.

The media plays a powerful role in sustaining a culture of violence through selective reporting, sensationalism and biased narratives. It shapes public opinion to dehumanise victims while protecting those in power. It sounds familiar, doesn't it? It allows governments to justify bigger police budgets, more surveillance and more prisons. We're seeing a move towards this in a bill being introduced this week, which will crack down further on those in immigration detention.

All of this happens under a pretence that violence is necessary to bring peace, security and stability, while refusing to acknowledge that it is governments who have always perpetrated chaos and destruction. It's really about control. Those same tools are turned back on us, especially black and brown women. To the politicians who are funding war crimes, who wring their hands over violent porn while defunding public housing, leaving women and children with nowhere to escape: your hypocrisy is violent. To those who pass laws blaming sex workers for society's ills, while ignoring the gendered, racialised and economic violence that governs our lives: you are the problem.

True safety comes from liberation, not domination. It means dismantling the systems that keep us in fear—the endless war machine, the cages called prisons and the unchecked power of police. It means listening to First Nations women, to migrant women, to trans women, to sex workers—to all whose lives and labour erased are exploited. It means housing is a right and health care is a right.