MOTIONS

Ms SPENDER (Wentworth) (09:07): The motion is seconded. Women in my community and around the country are despairing this week. This week we learned that three boys from Scots College, aged just 13 and 14, have been charged with aggravated sexual assault of a 14-year-old girl—a devastating report, every parent's worst nightmare.

This week, several players from the Sydney Swans have been linked to an alleged sexual assault. The Swans are one of Wentworth's favourite teams. As Brooke Boney put it today: These allegations are especially painful because, for so many women, sexual violence is not an abstract issue.

We have experienced it ourselves or watched people we love experience it. In Australia, one in five women has experienced sexual violence since the age of 15. One in five.

Our schools. Our favourite sporting teams. These headlines haven't exposed a new crisis.

Australian Femicide Watch has counted 45 women killed this year alone. This is not only a national issue but, at a personal level, a very local one. Some people think that domestic and sexual violence doesn't happen in the eastern suburbs, in a more privileged area of the country.

They are wrong. Local police tell me that over 50 per cent of their time is spent on domestic violence and family violence matters. Everyone in our community knows someone who's experienced it, and women come into my office, send me emails and stop me on the street to talk about what has happened and how to prevent this.

Now, we cannot minimise this issue. Women are at the centre of the headlines and the stories that we know. These allegations must be taken seriously, and we must centre on those stories.

We cannot minimise those stories. We've got to stop the victim-blaming. I want to acknowledge the government's work and the minister's work in this space.

I know that the minister takes this work and this issue incredibly seriously and personally, and I recognise that the government has done significant work for women in their time of office. I think that should be commended, but we have to acknowledge that we continue to have a crisis here and that we have to go further and faster. That is why we have stopped parliament in this case.

We all know, despite our best efforts and despite all the goodwill, it is not changing the way it needs to. There are limits on what any government can do, but we are not yet pushing those limits. We know that government cannot go into people's bedrooms or into their homes and cannot control the actions of individuals, but there is an onus on government to lead the way on reform and to act on the recommendations of people who have lived it and on all of our institutions to help change the culture that enables this in this country.

We have brought this to parliament today because the matter is urgent and it is chronic and because there are things government should do and could do right now. We know we need to do more on prevention. Factors like gambling, alcohol, financial abuse and access to child care have all been raised with me.

I raise gambling because the government had a choice this week to go further where people wanted it to go, and it chose not to. That is not supporting women. Our digital environments are perpetuating this.

The government needs to move quickly on its digital duty of care and, frankly, needs to move to fix our feeds so that the algorithms which are promoting toxic masculinity can be stepped away from by those young people who want to. Let's be honest. We have this issue that we do not know how to deal with, which is that the greatest perpetrators of sexual violence against young women are adolescent boys.

We, as a country, do not know how to deal with this, but this issue has to be on the table if we are going to protect our young girls and our young boys. This crisis is evolving before us. There have been enormous reviews and recommendations in this, and I respect people who have spent hours of their lives contributing to the reviews that have been in the sector.

One of the deepest frustration that I hear from the sector is about the tracking of these reviews—the tracking of the recommendations and seeing if they're actually being implemented. As Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence Commissioner Cronin has said: We have political will across all governments. We have a national focus through National Cabinet … We now need a razor-sharp focus on coordinated, accountable and agile delivery.

That is where we need to go. They have delivered all these reports, have delivered strikingly consistent recommendations and are calling for a move beyond the fragmented responses to family violence, domestic violence and sexual violence, but we have not got there yet. We need that implementation tracking so that we can see what is being done and what isn't being done.

Finally, we need to support our frontline services more robustly. That is what we all know is required in this country.