MINISTERIAL STATEMENTS
Ms KARA COOK (Bonner) (12:47): This year's report from the Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence Commission contains a pretty confronting message. Despite important progress, we are not yet delivering the scale or pace needed to alter the trajectory of violence and actually save lives. I want to acknowledge Commissioner Micaela Cronin and her team and the more than 1,000 individuals, services, researchers and advocates whose contributions informed this report.
In particular, I want to acknowledge the victims-survivors who shared their experiences, including what happens when the very systems they turn to for safety fail them. Their experience must not simply be heard; they must shape what we do next. The report identifies two areas requiring sustained national attention: sexual violence and our family law and justice systems.
Reports of sexual violence have increased by 64 per cent over the past 15 years. In 2024, they reached the highest level since national recording began 33 years ago. We have now seen the first national decrease in 15 years, but it was less than one per cent.
That is exactly why the Albanese Labor government has made tackling sexual violence a priority under the second action plan under the National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children. We have implemented every recommendation of the Respect@Work report, introduced a positive duty on employers to prevent sexual harassment and established a new national higher education codeto prevent and respond to gender based violence.
But this report is clear that we need to go further, particularly when it comes to prevention. In 2024, 56 per cent of recorded sexual assault victims were under the age of 18. Young people are being exposed to violent pornography, misogyny and harmful ideas online about women and relationships.
Teachers are reporting that kids as young as six are using language drawn from the 'manosphere'. Labor are acting on online harms through our world-leading social media minimum age laws and the proposed digital duty of care. If technology companies are profiting from Australians using their platforms, they must accept responsibility for keeping Australians safe.
The report is also direct about our family law and justice systems. For too many victims-survivors, the systems they turn to for protection are weaponised to continue coercive control as well as controlling behaviour, compound trauma and prolonged recovery. I saw this firsthand, as a domestic violence and family lawyer.
I've worked with women who were repeatedly failed by our systems, women whose experiences of coercive control were not properly understood by the courts and our systems, women who have faced repeated legal proceedings designed to exhaust and intimidate them, and women whose children were removed from their care and placed with dangerous perpetrators who continued to use those children and our courts as instruments of abuse and control.
For too many victims-survivors, the systems that should provide safety instead become another place where the abuse continues. The commission calls for the family law courts to be recognised and enabled to act as family violence courts capable of identifying risk early, protecting adults and children, and providing access to confidential therapeutic support. It also makes an important distinction about children.
Children must be recognised as victims-survivors in their own right, not merely as witnesses to violence experienced by a parent. That distinction matters. When we recognise children as victims-survivors, we assess their risk differently.
We listen to their views. We design our systems and processes around their particular needs. We support their safety, recovery and healing.
Labor have already undertaken significant reform in this space. We have invested $3.9 billion through the National Access to Justice Partnership, including an additional $800 million for legal assistance services. However, we have also invested significantly in the child support system, with $183 million to prevent it from being used as a tool of financial abuse.
These reforms recognise a fundamental truth: leaving a relationship must also mean being able to leave the control behind. But, while women and children continue to be failed, there is absolutely more work to do. We cannot stop until every woman and child is safe.
The report makes eight recommendations for the next stage of our national response. Together, they call for a mature system that intervenes earlier, learns from evidence, listens to lived experience and accepts responsibility across every part of government. Violence cannot be treated as the responsibility of one minister, one department or one level of government.
Decisions about housing, immigration, taxation, social security, child support, health, education, employment and justice can either strengthen safety or unintentionally create new risks. Every part of government must understand its responsibility. The report also calls for policies and services to be co-designed with those who face the greatest barriers to safety.
That includes Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and children, women and children with disability, culturally and linguistically diverse communities, LGBTQIA+ communities, migrants and refugees, older women and people living in regional and remote communities. Lived experience cannot be a story added to the end of a policy process or just simply a box to be ticked.
It is expertise. It is essential knowledge that could help us define the problem and design the solution. The report also makes clear that crisis response alone will not end violence.
Of the $4.52 billion mapped across 147 Commonwealth initiatives, 68.2 per cent is directed towards response, while 9.4 per cent is being directed towards early intervention. Crisis and frontline services, of course, are essential and must continue to be properly funded. When a woman is in danger, help must be available immediately—but we must also intervene earlier.
We must work with boys and young men to build healthy understandings of masculinity, relationships and consent. We must intervene with men who are using, or are at risk of using, violence before their behaviours escalate. We must use the places where people already seek help, including schools, health services, men's programs and community organisations, to deliver those programs.
Prevention starts long before a woman reaches a courtroom, refuge or emergency department. It starts with what we teach young people about respect and consent, with the behaviours we model and with the relationships that we present as normal. That is why initiatives such as the Great Mate Awards, facilitated by Beyond DV, a grassroots DV organisation in my community of Bonner, are so important.
These national awards recognise men who are standing up, speaking out and helping to build safer communities. I had the opportunity this week at parliament to congratulate Queensland's winner, Tim, whom I've known for more than 10 years. I first met Tim after his sister-in-law was murdered.
Tim has turned his absolute grief into action. For more than a decade, he's advocated for change, contributed to parliamentary inquiries and pushed for systems that better protect victim-survivors. Men like Tim demonstrate the role men can play in challenging violence and changing the culture that allows it to continue.
The report also recognises that safety means more than escaping an immediate act of violence. Lasting safety requires secure housing, financial security, legal assistance, health care, counselling and practical support. Almost one in four specialist homelessness service clients experiencing family and domestic violence still has unmet need for accommodation.
Persistent homelessness among women and children affected by family violence has increased since the national plan began and is now at its highest level in the period reported. A woman should never be forced to choose between violence and homelessness, and she should never have to calculate whether she can afford to keep herself and her children safe. The report also calls for stronger evidence, monitoring and accountability.
We know what is working for women, for whom it is working and where people are still falling through the cracks. Significant data gaps and reporting delays remain. Only five of the nine measures currently reported against in the national plan targets have post-baseline data.
We cannot properly measure progress without timely, consistent and meaningful information. Labor will keep investing, reforming and pushing for change, because women and children deserve more than promises of progress. They deserve progress that they can see, they deserve systems that protect them and, above all, they deserve to be safe.
Debate adjourned.