MINISTERIAL STATEMENTS

Ms MILLER-FROST (Boothby) (12:09): I'd also like to start by thanking the member for Leichhardt and the member for Groom for their really thoughtful and caring contributions. It is really important that, when we think about family, domestic and sexual violence, we don't think of it as a women's issue specifically. It is also a men's issue.

It's a whole-of-community issue. And, as the member for Groom has said, it is a bipartisan issue. I don't think there is anyone in this place who does not deeply care about what we hear in our communities and what we hear in our media on an ongoing basis, and I think there is a constant sense of frustration that there isn't more we can do directly to stopping it—and stopping it straight away.

So I thank both of those gentlemen for their really thoughtful contributions. One-hundred and thirty-three—according to ABS data, that's how many Australians were murdered in 2025 that police recorded as being family and domestic violence related. That's 133 lives cut short, dreams ended and futures curtailed.

It's 31 per cent of all murders. If there was any other identifiable cause that you could say contributed to that many deaths in our community and that percentage of murders, surely we would be acting. So far in 2026, the number is estimated at 42 women and 17 children, and, sadly, this is only the tip of the iceberg.

In addition to these deaths, there are countless women, children, men and families living in fear, living in violence and living under coercive control. Sexual violence has in the last year reduced by around one per cent, but it still represents almost 40,000 Australians who are victims of sexual assault. The majority are women.

And then there are the other deaths. The Social Policy and Legal Affairs Committee is undertaking an inquiry into suicides in the context of family, domestic and sexual violence. We've received around 230 submissions from people with lived experience, their families and friends, support services, academics and government agencies.

The evidence we've read and heard has been shocking. One of the most profound things we've heard, particularly from lived-experience witnesses, is the impact of coercive control—of feeling trapped and desperate. We've heard from some of the academics that suicide in the context of family and domestic and sexual violence may account for anywhere between 20 per cent and 56 per cent of suicide deaths in women.

People experiencing family, domestic and sexual violence are four times more likely to die by suicide than the general population. Family, domestic and sexual violence is a scourge in our society, and, despite increasing efforts across many decades, it remains seemingly intractable. And now we see a new generation learning hateful, misogynistic attitudes and behaviours from online sources—violence, sexual violence, gender stereotyping.

This government continues to do a lot to tackle the family, domestic and sexual violence. We've made the Leaving Violence payment permanent. That's $5,000 in financial help as well as safety planning support for women leaving violence.

We've taken world-leading action to address the impact of online harms, and we're continuing to do that. I'm very hopeful that we will be able to make a digital duty of care that will actually make a significant difference. We've launched Australia's first-ever standalone plan to address family, domestic and sexual violence for First Nations women and children, backed by a $218 million investment.

We've boosted funding for the 500 Workers Initiative by more than 70 per cent and boosted funding for 1800RESPECT by 40 per cent—sadly, to keep pace with demand. We have $183 million to make the child support system safer and to help more children get the support they are owed. We've legislated to make our social security system so that it can't be weaponised by perpetrators of abuse.

And we've funded programs that intervene earlier with men who want to change their behaviours. We've invested a record $3.9 billion in legal services, with an extra $800 million for family violence legal services, and reformed the family law system so it's safer, simpler and more accessible. We've supported the recovery of children who've experienced violence, investing $81 million for services like child-specific counselling.

And we've invested $82 million to deliver innovative new approaches to better identify high-risk perpetrators and share information about them across systems and state boundaries. Perhaps I'll mention one of the legislative approaches in my state of South Australia, which is called Clare's Law, where somebody who feels that they're in a relationship with someone who may be a perpetrator can inquire of the police whether that person has a history, not just in terms of convictions but in terms of reports and knowledge.

They are given that information while sitting with a counsellor to help them understand what it is they're seeing and make decisions about their lives. We've legislated 10 days of paid domestic violence leave so that workplaces support women to stay financially secure and connected and so that those who are trying to escape violence can actually get the legal, financial, housing and health support that they need without the perpetrator necessarily knowing what they're doing.

We've made it illegal to fire somebody because of their experience of domestic or family violence and we've implemented all of the recommendations of Respect@Work. As I started, I said that this needs to be more than just the women's sector tackling this. It is also housing.

We have put more than $1.2 billion in emergency and transitional housing to ensure women can reach safety. Sadly, my experience in that sector is we probably still need more. It's also the health sector, which is frequently a first stop for someone who's feeling suicidal, self-harming or injured as a result of family and domestic sexual violence.

And it's also, as I've mentioned, big tech through the algorithm that feeds harmful misogynistic content to young people. Both boys and girls learn misogynistic gender stereotypes from the sorts of information that's put through. In a previous role, I ran homelessness services—specifically women's homelessness services—and more than 60 per cent of women seeking emergency accommodation came from a domestic violence background.

But it wasn't just women escaping violence. Now some of these women had an experience of violent relationship even decades earlier, and some had grown up in a violent home. And we know that homelessness in children and teenagers is almost always associated with violence at home.

I think we need to recognise that this has an enormous impact on our community. It is not just the deaths, tragic as they are and unnecessary as they are, or the impact that has on families and friends, but also the impact of the survivors and the trauma that they live with, the trauma that makes it hard for them to maintain relationships, even friendships, have collegial relationships, hold down a job, make good financial decisions—the sorts of impacts that trauma has on people cannot be underestimated.

And it has a long tail. We know that in the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, the average time for somebody to first disclose that they had been sexually abused in that context was 23 years for women and 25 years for men. There was one man who turned up who was probably in his late 80s who had been abused as an 11-year-old and was disclosing for the first time to the royal commission.

He got his son to drive him there and he made his son sit outside because he didn't want him to hear what had happened to him. When we're looking at the impact of trauma, it is lifelong. Family, domestic and sexual violence is certainly a major cause of trauma in our community.

That is, in part, why this is such an important report and why it's an important thing that we continue to pay attention to and continue to measure and discuss. As with all things in social services, the job's never done. There's always something else we can do, and I look forward to our next steps forward.