GRIEVANCE DEBATE
Ms BOELE (Bradfield) (12:30): How many more women? Four years ago, one of Australia's leading human rights lawyers, Jennifer Robinson, asked that question in her book of the same name. The question hasn't yet been answered because every year, every week and every hour, the crisis of violence against women continues.
Australian Femicide Watch records that 49 Australian women and 19 children have been killed by violence this year. According to the Lowy Institute, Indigenous women face a disproportionate femicide burden that data systems too often fail to register. In one particularly horrendous week in July, two women and two girls were killed in a space of four days.
On average, it's one woman every 11 days. Every time there's a horrible spate of violence or a high profile assault, experts and advocates across the country call for stronger action from federal, state and territory governments. Most of the time they're left disappointed, and the cycle continues.
We hear the horrifying news. The media pays attention. Ministers are forced to answer the hard questions.
We have conversations over dinner with our children, our parents, our friends and our neighbours. And then, not much happens. The attention fades, the media moves on to the next political crisis and the public loses interest until the next murder happens.
What will it take to break this cycle of despair and disregard? Years and years of repeated inquiries, inquests and studies have generated an extensive body of evidence and a long, long list of recommendations. The family and sexual violence commissioner counted over 1,000 recommendations from at least eight major royal commissions, inquiries and reviews.
The PM's own department released what it called a rapid review of prevention approaches a couple of years ago, but it hasn't agreed to a clear timetable to implement these prevention approaches. The expert Katherine Berney has said that this isn't a knowledge gap; it's an implementation gap. Recommendations are not supposed to sit in a drawer.
It has taken so many, many years of hard work to get governments to pay attention to this problem. Now they are paying attention, or certainly more attention than they used to, and there's been some progress, but the challenge is getting governments to confront the scale of the problem head-on without trying to minimise or deflect from it and then actually do what the experts and the survivors have been saying that we need to do.
A University of Melbourne study released at the end of August shows that young Australian men are more likely to hold hostile attitudes towards women than their grandfather's generation. Sixteen per cent of gen Z men think it's okay to pressure their girlfriends into sexual acts because that's just how it works these days. Only two per cent of male boomers agreed.
Twenty-three per cent of gen Z men agreed that feminism is damaging to society and should be resisted with violence if necessary. That's compared to 11 per cent of boomer men. This is a heartbreaking trend.
Our society is becoming more divided, and more people feel it's normal to harm others. The same study found misogyny was the greatest predictor of violent extremism, more than political views, religion or time spent online. That means for incels, far-right extremists, white supremacists, far-left extremist, anti-feminist religious extremists—all these extremist movements—misogyny is the ideology that cuts across them.
What does this mean? It means that hostility towards women is not an isolated prejudice. It's at the root of so many of the problems that we face.
Because of this, the research recommended that misogyny and anti-feminism be recognised by our national counter-extremism framework as a kind of violent extremism. Part of what's underpinning these heartbreaking trends is, of course, harmful content that's peddled so easily and so addictively via social media. Tech bros are profiting off these social media algorithms, which governments have failed to regulate for years, leaving kids, especially boys, vulnerable to content that teaches them predatory, divisive, harmful thoughts and behaviours.
People say that they can't believe major parties have waited so long to wake up to this, to regulate social media platforms. I say this is exactly what we can expect from government. We've already seen their failure to protect kids from gambling companies.
We've seen their failure to protect our kids from the impacts of continuing to burn fossil fuels, of causing runaway climate change. And social media companies have shown, time and time again, that they aren't going to be taking it upon themselves to clean up their act. They are making too much money and having too much fun doing so at the expense of our kids.
So, manfluencers and the other online merchants of sexism and misogyny have been left unchecked. But one of the things governments are here for is to step in and force companies to do things that they don't want to do in the name of protecting the people who elected them. I can't fault the intent of the government's social media ban for under 16s, but it is so far off from being effective.
It puts the onus of responsibility onto the vulnerable and onto their families, not on the networks and the platforms that are, in fact, causing the harm. The upcoming digital duty of care legislation this month is going to be absolutely critical. It will need to force big tech companies to prevent harms to users and require platforms to be safe by design.
The overall goal here is to change the playing field so that online companies start to compete to be the safest, just like our car companies do. That gets my support in principle. And although the design of the duty of care isn't out yet—we expect it very soon—the crossbenchers, led by the member for Curtin's advocacy on this issue, will be paying close attention to ensure that the government gets the settings right.
Last week, Chanel Contos addressed the National Press Club to argue for an opt-in mechanism for algorithmic social media feeds. An opt-in system would allow people to regain control over the content that they see by needing to actively say yes to the algorithm. This would go a long way to helping fix our feeds and stemming the tide of misogynistic content, and I urge the government to consider and implement this reform.
Of course, violence is a physical reality, but there is far more to do beyond regulating digital harms—far too much for me to describe in my allocated time. But, as a starting point, I want to remind the House that my colleague the member for Warringah, who has been outspoken on these issues for many years, recently suspended parliament to call for a suite of changes, including empowering the Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence Commissioner to examine the failure of governments to implement previous inquiry recommendations; establishing a national domestic violence offender register; strengthening bail, sentencing and protection order enforcement; and properly funding frontline services and safe housing.
I note that the government voted down the member for Warringah's motion. On that last point, on funding frontline services, just last week I heard that Mary's House, an incredible women's refuge on Sydney's North Shore, will be opening a second location thanks to a philanthropic fund. It's amazing news for our community, but Mary's House only needed that philanthropic funding because the federal government had chosen not to fund it themselves.
Mary's House recorded a 63 per cent increase in referrals in 2025 compared to 2024. It has had to decline 118 women and their children because of a lack of capacity. Critical frontline services are overwhelmed.
The huge demand speaks volumes to the scale of the threat facing women and children. There is no reason that government shouldn't give them the resources that they need to operate, and that's the problem. The government has become much better at saying the right thing, but it's not necessarily much better at following through with the sustained funding and the policy implementation that we need for women and children to be safer.
The speech that I'm giving right now is being made during a grievance debate. It's an old-fashioned term that the UK House of Commons have to give their MPs a chance to air public grievances before they approve government budgets. Today, the debate is a chance to talk about anything we choose.
In this case, the name is appropriate because I am aggrieved. I am aggrieved that I need to worry about my daughter's safety just as much as my mother has had to worry about mine. I'm aggrieved that women are killed every week and that Indigenous women are more likely than others to suffer this fate.
I'm aggrieved that governments aren't acting on the solutions that everyone has been calling on. And I'm aggrieved that we haven't been able to answer the question: how many more women? What will it take to break this cycle?
Why has the government not thrown whatever it takes at the problem? There is an uncomfortable answer to these questions: our leaders haven't prioritised women's safety, and politics is all about priorities. Stopping violence against women requires them to escalate this issue.
It requires them to be courageous. Once more, we have to ask: how many women? And we'll keep asking until the answer is zero.