MATTERS OF PUBLIC IMPORTANCE

Ms KARA COOK (Bonner) (15:32): I thank the member for Clark for bringing this matter of public importance to the House today. There is no more pressing issue facing our country than preventing violence against women and children. We must confront the attitudes that excuse violence, the behaviours that normalise it and the systems that allow it to continue.

I want to also acknowledge the victims and survivors of family, sexual and domestic violence and remember the Australian women whose lives have been stolen. As we've already heard, according to Australian Femicide Watch, 49 women have been killed this year, 79 women were killed last year and 106 women were killed the year before. We honour them through how we act as a government and through what we are prepared to change.

I am proud to be part of an Albanese Labor government that is acting. As a former domestic violence and family lawyer, I saw how a perpetrator's control could reach into every single part of a woman's life—her finances, her housing, her children, her ability to seek help. Leaving does not automatically end that control.

In fact, leaving is the most dangerous time for a woman and her children. That is why practical reforms matter. Labor introduced 10 days of paid family and domestic violence leave.

Labor is investing $183 million to make the child support system safer and to help more children receive the support they are owed. Labor delivered Australia's first and only standalone plan to address family, domestic and sexual violence against First Nations women and children, backed in by $216 million. Labor has increased funding for 1800RESPECT by 40 per cent, invested $1.2 billion in emergency and transitional accommodation and funded programs that intervene earlier with men who use violence.

We are also investing $82 million to better identify high-risk perpetrators and share critical information across systems and state borders. And, through a record $3.9 billion investment in legal assistance, including an additional $800 million for family violence legal services, we're ensuring justice systems protect victims-survivors rather than becoming another instrument for abuse.

We must also prevent violence before it begins. That means confronting what our children are learning online. As parents, we work hard to teach respect to our kids, but we are doing so in an online environment where misogyny can be packaged as entertainment, control can be presented as masculinity and humiliation can be rewarded with attention.

We cannot leave parents and teachers to take on some of the wealthiest tech companies in the world alone. That's why Labor's proposed digital duty of care matters. Released for consultation this week, it would require digital services to address risks of harm, including protecting people under 18 from content promoting hostility towards women and gender equality, pornography, abuse and bullying.

It would reach beyond social media to services including online games and AI chatbots. But, when someone needs help today, that help must be there. That's why our frontline workforce is so important.

Last month I was proud to join Assistant Minister Ged Kearney in Bonner at the Red Rose Foundation to announce more than $67 million to strengthen frontline services through the 500 Workers Initiative. The Red Rose Foundation's work supports survivors of non-fatal strangulation, and that expertise is critically important. They're the only organisation of their type in Australia.

Across government, we've invested more than $4.4 billion to tackle violence including funding 1,400 organisations that have helped almost half a million people who have experienced violence. I want every child in Australia to inherit a country where women and children are safe and free from violence. There is so much more work to do, but we will keep acting as a government to keep them safe.

We will keep listening to victims-survivors and we will keep working together until every woman and every child is safe and free from violence.