MINISTERIAL STATEMENTS

Senator KOVACIC (New South Wales) (18:08): I rise to speak on the Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence Commission's third yearly report, and I thank the commissioner and her team for their work. The minister said today that we cannot mistake progress for success. The member for Lindsay put it more simply: Expenditure is an input; safety is the outcome.

The national plan promises to end gender based violence in a generation. Billions of dollars have been committed. But this report exposes a basic problem.

We still cannot reliably tell Australians whether that investment is making women and children any safer. Firstly, we do not have the data to measure whether the plan is working. The plan has 131 performance measures.

Data is unavailable for around 68 per cent of them. Even the headline target to reduce female intimate partner homicide by 25 per cent each year has been missed in both years since the baseline. This is not a technical data gap; it is an accountability gap.

A government can't demonstrate progress against outcomes that it can't measure. The commission itself says that those data gaps mean reporting remains focused on activities and services funded, rather than whether they are actually improving safety. The report also exposes a gap in how we deal with sexual violence.

Reports of sexual violence are at their highest level since national recording began, yet around six in 10 incidents occur outside the family or an intimate-partner relationship. That matters. Sexual violence cannot simply be folded into the domestic and family violence framework when most incidents occur outside it.

The commissioner is right to say it needs to be treated as a distinct resource priority. The spending in this space remains highly reactive. Crisis services are essential, but we are spending more than $7 responding to violence for every dollar spent intervening early.

That is a system still overwhelmingly designed to deal with harm after it happens. Last year, the commission made 30 recommendations. This year it says it hasn't undertaken a formal implementation audit and again asks for the information-gathering powers needed to independently assess programs.

If we expect the commission to hold governments accountable, then we should give them the tools to do so. Question agreed to.