ADJOURNMENT

Ms STEGGALL (Warringah) (19:30): Violence against women and children remains a national emergency. We do not lack the evidence about what needs to change. We have had inquiries, reviews, national plans and hundreds of recommendations, yet there is something clearly obvious.

The failure is implementation. Too often women escape one form of abuse only to encounter another through housing, child support, the legal system, migration processes or technology. Our measures of success cannot be how much money is announced or how many programs are launched.

That is what government tends to do. It must be whether fewer women and children are being killed, injured, made homeless, impoverished or forced to navigate systems that make them less safe. I've heard directly from frontline services in Warringah about where the system is failing.

At a domestic and family violence roundtable I convened, services describe rising demand, too little crisis and transitional housing, complex legal needs and women being turned away because services were already at capacity. These organisations do extraordinary work, but frontline services cannot compensate for a fragmented national system. The scale of violence remains unacceptable.

Twenty-three per cent of Australian women have experienced violence by an intimate partner since the age of 15, 22 per cent have experienced sexual violence, and 16 per cent have experienced economic abuse by cohabiting partner. Violence is often perpetrated through economic abuse, systems abuse and technology facilitated abuse. Child support can be withheld or manipulated to maintain control.

Technology can enable stalking, surveillance, impersonation, image based abuse and coercive control. Dating apps can still give perpetrators repeated access to potential victims. We still don't have mandatory ID verification.

We cannot keep asking women to identify the danger, navigate the system and manage the risk created by perpetrators. We need a national system that shifts the responsibility back where it belongs—onto perpetrators and the institutions with the power to intervene. First, housing must be treated as safety infrastructure.

Leaving violence payments are important, but come on! They cannot solve a lack of safe and affordable housing. Second, economic safety must be treated as a key part of physical safety.

Child support should be an early priority for reform. It should be easier and safer to move from private collect to agency collect when arrangements break down. Enforcement of payments must improve, and, if child support is not actually being paid, government should not treat it as though it has been received and create a debt on, too often, the women.

Otherwise a parent can be hit twice—first by not receiving the child support and then by losing the government assistance payments on the assumption that they did and being assumed to have incurred a debt. We also need stronger digital protections. Dating apps should have a statutory duty of care to protect users from foreseeable harm.

That should include robust identity and age verification requirements, stronger systems to identify and remove perpetrators, and safeguards to stop banned users simply creating another profile. These protections should not depend on inconsistent voluntary policies. Children must be recognised as victims-survivors in their own right and have access to appropriate therapeutic support.

Migrant women and women on temporary visas must have access to interpreters, culturally safe services and secure pathways so visa status cannot be weaponised against them. Perpetrator interventions, information-sharing and accountability must be stronger and more consistent nationally. We need system reforms that make it harder for perpetrators to continue abuse and easier for victims-survivors to become safe and independent.

That means secure housing, economic security, safer digital platforms, properly funded frontline services and clear accountability. I continue to support a national royal commission into domestic violence, because we need to examine the repeated recommendations that have not been implemented by government and where systems continue to fail, which includes the Albanese government.

Violence against women and children is preventable. What is missing is not the evidence; it is the urgency and accountability to act on what we already know. It was shameful of the Prime Minister to describe a royal commission into domestic violence as a lawyers' picnic.

We need to elevate this issue and act on the recommendations, and we need accountability as to why government—this government—has not had the political will to act on the many recommendations that it already has before it. The DEPUTY SPEAKER ( Ms Scrymgour ): I give the call to the member for Solomon.