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

Every nine days a woman is murdered by a current or former partner. Countless more are assaulted, hurt, raped, scared, trapped. Although black women are the most impacted by this violence, we are never seen as the experts on our own experiences. Missing from all of the recent conversations about gendered violence are the voices of black women. Without our voices being centred in this conversation, we cannot dismantle systems of violence.

We know that more police and prisons have never reduced violence or made women safer, especially not black women and our families. We know that this government has created deep poverty and inequality in this country, which is only growing. Poverty plus the same old colonial gendered and racial violence are a deadly mix, leaving women trapped in dangerous situations, unable to leave, as funding cuts for vital services leave them with nowhere to run.

We need urgent investment in community controlled, culturally safe services to support people who are experiencing or trying to escape violence. In the words of Afrida Imrose, policing is never going to fix what is essentially a public health crisis—especially when police are some of the greatest perpetrators and enablers of femicide. It is urgent and necessary to force our governments to reckon with how they are making things worse.