MOTIONS

Ms PLIBERSEK (Sydney—Minister for Social Services) (09:12): I'm very pleased to speak to this motion today, and I thank the member for Warringah for bringing it on. We've met, most recently on 12 February, to talk about family, domestic and sexual violence, and I thank her and the other crossbench members who are speaking about this for their continued engagement.

Our government is absolutely committed to reducing rates of family, domestic and sexual violence and ending violence against women and children. Every single death is a tragedy. Every death is one too many.

Just last week, we heard of another woman in Queensland killed, allegedly, by a former partner, which the member refers to in this motion. This parliament grieves every time we hear a tragic story like this with the loved ones of the woman killed. It's absolutely correct that the Commonwealth, as well as the states and territories, must be held to account for our progress on ending family, domestic and sexual violence in Australia.

We are resolute as a government on facing up to that accounting and making sure that we keep all Australians safe. We are focused on implementing the change we need, including by rolling out more than $4.4 billion worth of measures for frontline services, prevention programs and behaviour change programs for children right across government We're working right now on how we can expand on these efforts with the next action plan to end violence against women and their children.

Just last week, the Prime Minister and I met with 14 national organisations to discuss where we can make the most impact over the next five years of our second action plan. This is one of more than 160 roundtables our government has held in recent months with over 1,100 people. We've received 1,300 survey responses and 535 submissions from organisations about our next action plan.

I want to thank every victim-survivor, every frontline worker and every concerned Australian who has contributed to this process. This suspension motion deals with a number of topics, and I can't do justice to each of them in the short amount of time that I have, so let me focus on just a few. The member has called for a royal commission.

I understand that this call comes from a very good place. It comes from the concerns that people have and the desire to see an end to family, domestic and sexual violence in this country. But we don't need another report.

As the members themselves have said, last year's Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence Commissioner's annual report to parliament pointed out that we have 1,000 recommendations already from a variety of reports across eight major royal commissions, inquiries and reviews to guide us. I want to show this to the chamber. These are the recommendations.

We don't need another royal commission. These are the recommendations of those reports alone. The South Australian royal commission took 17 months from its beginning to its end.

I don't want to spend another 17 months examining the same issue that we've examined in eight major reports recently. We need to get on and act, and that's what frontline workers, domestic violence survivors and experts have told us. Every family violence peak body in the country released a statement that says: Royal Commissions have an important role in the Australian system, including gathering compelling evidence when we have no other way to get to the root of a problem.

That is not the situation here. The evidence is clear. We know what needs to be done to prevent, respond to and help people heal from family violence.

Ending this crisis requires action, and that's what I'm determined to do. It requires conversations at home, in our community and at workplaces. It requires legislative change.

It requires our collective efforts at every level. As a government, our investment has been heavily focused, and rightly so, on response and recovery for women victims-survivors. About 80 per cent of our $4.4 billion investment goes to response.

So far, we've funded 1,400 organisations to help about half a million people, including through things like making the leaving violence payment permanent, providing an extra half a billion dollars to fund 500 new frontline workers and investing $1.2 billion in crisis housing so that women and children can safely leave domestic violence. But the demand on frontline services will never decline until we deal with the root of the problem, and that is stopping the violence before it happens.

When we see state governments and territory governments actually cut their investment in the face of this violence, it's incredibly disappointing. Unbelievably, Queensland, where we've seen this most recent tragic death, has cut $40 million from domestic and family violence services and hidden a report that made 350 important recommendations. In this morning's CourierMail, we read that domestic violence services that have criticised these cuts have been threatened with further funding cuts and hauled into the minister's office.

The same case has occurred in the Northern Territory. The Northern Territory has shocking rates of family, domestic and sexual violence—shocking rates—and we've seen horrific murders there recently. They have cut their funding by 11 per cent.

That's more than a 10th of their budget that they have cut in recent times. The dollars matter. We will continue to invest, and we expect states, which are responsible for delivering important frontline services, to continue to invest as well.

But, as the member for Wentworth said, we are fighting a losing battle unless we directly address the online misogyny that is driving so much of this behaviour. We've seen a couple of recent reports that are very disturbing, as the motion refers to, but I would say this: organisations like schools and sporting clubs provide the real-world role models and heroes that our young men look up to.

When they're being fed a diet of violent pornography before they've had their first kiss, it is no surprise that we are seeing rates of sexual assault exploding amongst under-18s. The best antidote to that is the work that we're doing as a government to limit the exposure of young people to violent misogyny online. But real-world role models have the power to change this, and they come through our families sitting at the dining table, they come through our sporting clubs and, of course, they come through our schools as well.

The issue of family, domestic and sexual violence will soon return to the National Cabinet. The Prime Minister has said that he wants to go back to the National Cabinet with issues around family, domestic and sexual violence. We are absolutely, as a Commonwealth government, prepared to play a leadership role, to invest, to drive change and to make legislative reform, but we need the partnership of the states and territories as well.

So far in recent times, as I say, we've invested more than any other government. We've made the leaving violence payment permanent. We've launched the first ever standalone plan for family, domestic and sexual violence for First Nations women, backed by an additional $218 million investment.

We've boosted funding for that 500 workers program by more than 70 per cent. We've boosted funding for 1800RESPECT by 40 per cent. We've invested $183 million to make the child support system safer.

We've legislated to make sure our social security system can't be weaponised by perpetrators of abuse. We've funded programs that intervene earlier with men who want to change their behaviours. We've invested in emergency and transitional accommodation.

That $1.2 billion is absolutely life changing. It's a safety lifeline for women escaping domestic violence. We've invested a record $3.9 billion in legal services, with an extra $800 million specifically for family violence legal services.

We're reforming the family law system, so that it's safer, simpler and more accessible. We're reforming the child support system so children get the support they need. We supporting the recovery of children who've experienced violence, including an $81 million investment specifically for child-specific counselling.

We've invested $82 million to deliver innovative approaches to better identify high risk perpetrators and share information about them across state and territory boundaries. We've legislated 10 days paid domestic violence leave. We've made it illegal to fire someone because of their experience of family and domestic violence.

We've launched an inquiry into domestic, family and sexual violence related suicide, and there is so much more.