MATTERS OF PUBLIC IMPORTANCE
Dr RYAN (Kooyong) (15:27): I thank the member for Clark for calling this House's attention to what truly is a matter of urgent public importance. Violence against women and children, whether sexual in nature or not, is not a removed or remote issue for any adult in this country. So prevalent and pervasive is this scourge that in Australia one in five women reports having experienced sexual violence after the age of 15—one in five of our daughters, our friends and our mothers.
Tragically, violence against women and children continues to escalate. One in four men in this country has perpetrated sexual violence against women in adulthood, with even more doing that in adolescence. As of today, 49 women and 19 children have been violently killed this year, according to Australian Femicide Watch.
Every nine days in Australia, a woman dies at the hands of her current or former partner. Last week, National Cabinet acknowledged this crisis and acknowledged that the rates of intimate partner homicide and sexual violence in this country remain unacceptably high. On behalf of the women and children of Australia, I call on governments at all levels to do more.
I echo the calls of the members for Warringah and Wentworth to give the Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence Commission stronger powers to hold those governments to account. The commission needs the power to compel information and data to track recommendations and to ensure that governments and agencies deliver the services and funding that they promise. This will lead to better data and greater transparency over how that funding is spent.
While I support the investments that the Minister for Social Services oversees across 583 initiatives under the First Action Plan, including those initiatives which have been delivered with state and territory governments, the impacts of those investments are not yet being adequately tracked. If we're serious about addressing this crisis, we have to know what is working and what's not working, and we have to track every dollar spent in that process.
Federal, state and territory inquiries have now produced more than a thousand recommendations about this issue since 2010. It's two years now since the government received the final report from the Rapid review of preventionapproaches of those 1,000 recommendations, and too many of them are still sitting on the shelf. Australians want our government to deliver results, not platitudes.
This parliament will soon debate the government's digital duty of care, and we know that, every day, social media algorithms are exposing Australians, particularly our young people, to harmful content and that they reinforce toxic and harmful attitudes, particularly towards women. So I thank the government for its announcement this week that it will introduce an opt-in model for social media algorithms, and I salute and pay respect to the work of people like Chanel Contos and the Teach Us Consent group for their remarkable work in this area.
Young Australians are constantly being subjected to violent imagery, acts of sexual violence and information about these in online spaces. Almost 60 per cent of 18- to 35-year-olds report that they have themselves experienced sexual strangulation. There is no safe way to strangle somebody, but these acts are being actively promoted to our children and their friends as normal.
They're being pushed as normalised content online to young Australians, and we have no oversight of that and no vision of that at this point in time. I say it again: strangulation is an act of sexual violence. If we're serious about ending all violence against women and children, we have to confront all of the attitudes and all of the behaviours that precipitate it.
None of us in this country or in this place want to see another woman killed, another child harmed or another family shattered by that violence. We have to create safer online environments and we have to hold governments to account for whether the measures that they fund and introduce are actually working.