TRANSCRIPT
The Coalition have joined Labor in announcing their domestic and family violence package, as advocates express frustration over minimal attention given to the issue during the election campaign.
That's despite the fact 23 Australian women have been killed so far this year, according to Femicide Watch - a national toll of Australian women killed domestically and overseas run by journalist and campaigner Sherelle Moody.
The Coalition's $90 million announcement includes implementing a National Domestic Violence Register, to ensure police and relevant agencies can share information about violent offenders, as well as making it a criminal act to use mobile phones and computer networks to cause an intimate partner or family member to fear for their safety.
The Coalition have also pledged to launch a Royal Commission into sexual abuse in Indigenous communities.
Deputy Opposition leader Sussan Ley says the investment builds on the Coalition's $3.5 billion commitment to family and domestic violence during their government.
“Really, really important funding because the scourge of family violence reaches into every corner of this country and into every cohort of Australian society. And every time we re-commit to new funding like we did today, we make the statement that enough is enough.”
It comes as Labor's Minister for Women Katy Gallagher announced on Tuesday her party's $8.6 million commitment to domestic and family violence if re-elected, focusing on financial abuse and violence prevention.
This comes amid bipartisan support for Labor's $4 billion National Plan to End Violence Against Women and Children, released in October 2022.
Ms Gallagher spruiked Labor's policy at a speech in Melbourne, referencing the work Labor had done so far, while acknowledging the need for further action.
“There are far too many women who live with violence in their lives, and for these women, change is not happening quickly enough. Levels of violence remain high, and in the case of sexual violence appear to be increasing. It is all too frequent that we see a chilling new headline, reporting on the death of another woman, so often at the hands of a current or former partner. And we are encountering new challenges, particularly as we grapple with how our young people, especially boys, are accessing online content.”
Labor say they will address systems abuse including preventing perpetrators from using the tax and corporate systems to create debts as a form of coercive control, by making perpetrators accountable for these debts, and say they will look into ensuring perpetrators do not receive their victim's superannuation after death.
They will also look at making perpetrators liable for social security debts incurred by a victim-survivor due to coercion or financial abuse.
If re-elected, Labor will also invest $8.6 million in innovative perpetrator responses, including electronic monitoring and ankle bracelets on high-risk perpetrators, as well as intensive behaviour change programs and early interventions for young people.
For those working in the preventative space, Labor's focus on early intervention is well received.
Chief executive of No To Violence, Phillip Ripper says these steps are important in addressing the root cause of violent behaviours among men and young boys.
“So we need to disrupt pathways into using violence. We need to work with men to end the use of violence once it's established. We need to invest more in research and we need to do more with children, young men and boys to break into generational cycles of violence. So all of these things need to be done and they need to be done with people using violence in the heart of this strategy.”
This involves innovative responses to work with men at different stages of their journey.
“And we know it starts with identifying the need for change or the desire for change. So that's why we say to men, you could be anywhere in your life's journey. And we have people in their seventies and eighties ringing our men's referral service because they want different, it's never the wrong time to take the right steps towards better for you and your family. And so we say to people, pick up the phone, ring the men's referral service and start your journey of change.”
Tara Hunter, Director of Clinical and Client Services at Full Stop Australia, welcomes Labor's plan to address financial abuse and violence prevention, but points to a lack of sustained funding for frontline services.
“They actually need a front door into services that might actually give them information about financial abuse and where they can go for support. So what we do need is not just that piecemeal approach.”
Ms Hunter also supports the Coalition's investment in frontline services, pointing to their plan to expand emergency accommodation and payments for people fleeing domestic violence.
But Ms Hunter said she was concerned about the Royal Commission into Aboriginal child sexual abuse, calling on the elected government to ensure any interventions or initiatives are led by First Nations people.
“They have their own solutions, and we really need, if we are going to make some change into the rates of violence against Aboriginal women and children, then we actually need them at the table leading the initiatives.”
Advocates also say both parties' funding is inadequate to meet the scale of the problem, as Mr Ripper describes.
“$90 million is a drop in the ocean when we consider the severity of the crisis that's stripping the country at the moment. This is a long-term problem. It needs serious attention, and the coalition have failed to deliver that in today's announcement. The Labor commitment is again, woefully inadequate.”
He's also critical of the Coalition's package which he says fails to provide any detail into how funding would be allocated across initiatives.
“This commitment is opaque at best. There's a number that's been allocated in terms of funding. We don't know what period of time that funding will be allocated or to what specific programs. We've heard the opposition talk about community safety. We know women are most unsafe in their own homes. It appears that the coalition are ignoring that fact or at least doing nothing worthwhile to address this problem at the source. And that is focusing on men's use of family violence.”
Prior to these announcements, both major parties were confronting criticism over their virtual silence on the national endemic.
Fran, whose name and voice have been altered to protect her identity, is a victim-survivor of coercive control.
“Early in the relationship, I had a gut feeling something wasn't quite right, but didn't trust my intuition. There was something odd about the level of intensity. There was a sense of controlling a need to have me to himself After marrying, having kids, things escalated as they often do. His mask of empathy started to slip off. He shook me and screamed at me with our baby around. He followed me around the house, berating me, pushing me out of doors, forcing himself into rooms when I was trying to escape him and shut him out. It was classic coercive control.”
She separated from her former partner 10 years ago, but the coercive control persists from afar.
Fran says they can't successfully co-parent due to her former partner's inability to cooperate, citing ongoing incidences of legal and financial abuse.
“I still experience coercive control in forms of misleading emails and text messages, sometimes copied into friends, family, schools, counselors, all to try to humiliate and shame me through deceitful claims about me as a mother. Then there's ongoing financial abuse and the huge issue of ongoing assistance abuse, particularly legal abuse.”
Fran says she's disheartened by the lack of conversation around violence against women and children over the course of the campaign.
One of the key issues she'd like to see addressed is systems abuse - whereby perpetrators exploit aspects of justice, financial and other institutions to cause harm to their victims.
“Legal abuse is an extremely common and wasteful form of systems abuse perpetrators, especially with money. Use the family court system unnecessarily and threatened to take victims to court. I see that as an extension of their emotional abuse for a decade now. He has threatened legal action, threatened me in legal letters from his highly paid lawyers while I self represent. Despite the great new coercive control laws, apparently it's very difficult to prove coercive control. And so far only a very small number of offenders to date have actually been able to be prosecuted. If this difficulty continues, I'd very much like to know how politicians will review these laws and create tougher deterrence models to stamp out controlling behaviour.”
Anti-violence advocacy group, No To Violence, which focuses on preventing violent behaviours among men - hosted an online forum allowing attendees to put questions to a number of politicians represented to address this quiet.
On the panel was Labor Minister Amanda Rishworth, Coalition Senator Kerryne Liddle, Greens MP Larissa Waters and Independent MP Zoe Daniel.
The first forum question was from organisation No To Violence, asking the politicians present whether they were willing to commit to a dedicated strategy around people using violence.
Minister for Social Services Amanda Rishworth says her government will engage with men and boys at the prevention area, particularly in the space of online misogyny, while Coalition Senator Kerryne Liddle says while it's vital to support these early interventions, it was also important to tackle drivers of violence, using the example of lifting alcohol restrictions in the Northern Territory as a catalyst for what she described as a subsequent increase in violence.
In response to that same question Greens Senator Larissa Waters emphasised that violence against women and children is a problem that men need to fix, while Independent MP Zoe Daniel also stressed that online misogyny is presenting huge challenges for how men model behaviour.
Tara Hunter says politicians have been "disappointingly quiet" on the issue up until now.
“I actually don't understand it. I think this time last year there was a national crisis meeting called, there were a number of significant announcements. There was a rapid review around prevention evidence implemented. So there have been lots of good work done in the last year and perhaps there's this sense of it's done and dusted, but we know that if we, and the national plan very clearly states we want to end gender-based violence in one generation. So if we want to do that, there needs to be a really consistent effort.”
Karen Iles works in the sexual violence advocacy and legal space - as director and principal solicitor at Violet Co Legal and Consulting - and is also disappointed by a lack of conversation around the issue.
She entered this work from her own personal experience of trying to access justice following sexual assaults she was victim to as a child.
Almost nine in 10 of victims do not report sexual violence to the police, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics - an issue Ms Iles witnesses on a daily basis.
“Practically no one reports to police, and there's a number of reasons for that. But high on the list is an absolute distrust that police will handle their reports sensitively in a compassionate and victim-centred way, but also that if you do report to police, that the police will even bother to do anything. And that's a damning indictment, I think, on the state of our criminal justice system because if victim survivors don't trust police to report to them, then how can victim survivors achieve any sense of justice?”
She calls for politicians to immediately implement recommendations from inquiries and the national plan, including the inquiry into missing and murdered First Nations women, and the law reform commission into the justice system.
“It's surprising. I think if we look back at the 2022 election, that was an election that was really spoken about of being won for Labor by women, by the women's vote, and it is interesting that issues of domestic family and sexual violence are low on the agenda. These are not issues that are not widely felt and widely experienced by our community. When you are someone who has experienced domestic family or sexual violence, or you're a family member of someone, or you are a friend of someone, these are issues that cut to your core.”
