MINISTERIAL STATEMENTS

Ms SCRYMGOUR (Lingiari) (11:16): Domestic, family and sexual violence festers and erupts locally, but it happens everywhere around Australia. It is a dangerous pathology which affects every federal electorate, especially my own electorate of Lingiari, where remoteness and limited safety and support options can exacerbate the already dire impact. In my own life, I have firsthand experience of how this kind of violence tears individuals—usually women—and families apart.

Alcohol, drugs and toxic social media can make bad problems worse. State and territory governments are responsible for important frontline services such as police, sexual assault referral centres and child protection. The Commonwealth government funds a whole range of complementary critical non-government services, but domestic, family and sexual violence constitutes such a threat to our national wellbeing that the Commonwealth's role and responsibility necessarily extends well beyond just being a funder.

An Australian government needs to be front and centre when it comes to working in collaboration with both government and non-government bodies throughout the country to develop effective protective strategies. At the beginning of July 2022, one of the first things the Albanese government did was establish the Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence Commission. The commission is a national resource which undertakes research and shines a light into dark nooks and crannies, identifying issues and data which might otherwise remain unacknowledged.

Its purpose is to promote and drive national solutions. The overarching framework for this is the National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children 2022-2032. As well as preparing and publishing reports on various specific topics, the commission publishes national annual reports.

This year's annual report will be the third. The 2026 report touches on many things which were already depressingly familiar to some of us. Far too often, violence is experienced from a young age, and the combination of substance abuse, mental health issues and, in particular, poverty can create a vicious cycle which can be hard to escape from.

For women and children in remote communities in the Northern Territory, there simply isn't the same amount of crisis accommodation or healthcare access as there is in cities and towns. This means that violence goes unreported for far too long, if it ever does get reported. An estimated 90 per cent of violence to First Nations women and children goes unreported altogether.

We know Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women are seven times more likely to be victims of intimate partner homicides and 27 times more likely than non-Indigenous women to be hospitalised due to family violence. This increases to 41 times more likely in regional and very remote communities. As the commissioner notes in her report, there is no day or data point which can tell you that violence is over.

Indigenous women and families need special focus and strategies to try and achieve safer outcomes. The launch of the new Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander domestic, family and sexual violence peak body, Our Ways Strong Together, is an important step on that journey. It was led by community and by survivors, and that is the only way we'll be able to make progress—making sure that those survivors have wraparound support in accommodation, with their finances and with their health, helping to stop people from falling through the cracks.

As regards health, a fundamental aspect of human health is brain health. In the period since handing down the landmark report by the Northern Territory coroner into the domestic violence homicide deaths of four First Nations women in the Northern Territory on 24 November 2024, the incidences of CTE in the brains of such women is becoming increasingly apparent, just as it is in the brains of deceased former footballers.

I want to recognise the Menzies School of Health Research in the Northern Territory, in partnership with the Central Australian Aboriginal Congress, the Alice Springs Hospital, and all of the dedicated nurses and doctors and the work that they are doing in this space to make sure that Aboriginal women presenting at the hospital are informed about the impacts of concussion.

I look forward to working with ministers Butler and Plibersek and assistant ministers Kearney and White to make sure this program receives the support it deserves. I thank Assistant Minister White for her visit to Mparntwe Alice Springs earlier this year to meet with the team at Menzies School of Health Research and to talk about their program. The report also shows that hospitalisation rates of First Nations children as a result of family violence assaults are up again and on the rise.

This is devastating. The best way to make progress isn't just to increase support after violent episodes have been reported; it is to stop the violence before it happens. That means we have to do better in engaging with men and boys, both those who are at risk of using violence and those who are victims of violence.

Recently, in a remote community in my electorate, a young woman aged 16 was murdered by her partner. It's a story that is too often unreported. There's a shock—there might be a little piece in the newspaper—and then the next day everyone forgets and walks away.

We have to stop that. The attitudes of Indigenous men and boys are shaped and warped by algorithms and social media just as we're seeing with the attitudes of men and boys throughout the country. Young men in parts of my electorate need role models who can demonstrate respect for women and healthy relationships, and what we're seeing in social media is the complete opposite.

The only people those young men can look at are their fathers and uncles that are in prison, and that is not a good thing. I'm proud that our government is taking on those tech companies, and we're doing something about social media. Is it the solution?

No, there's more work to do, and we have to continue to do that, because I think the futures of our young people, both women and men, depend on us making sure that we can make inroads. I worked in the health and community sector in the Northern Territory for years before I started my political career, and when we came to government in 2001 it was under the stewardship of Clare Martin, the first female chief minister in the Northern Territory, who actually made mandatory the reporting of domestic and family violence in our hospital systems and our clinics.

It changed, but it seems to have fallen back a little bit. Both the Commonwealth and Northern Territory governments need to work together to try to deal with some of these things. Housing options have to be looked at, and that's one of the things that was in the 2026 annual report.

Housing options have to be looked at because housing is central to personal safety, and its role in policy responses must be considered across the continuum from prevention to recovery and healing. That came directly out of the report. Many Lingiari constituents fleeing domestic violence in Top End remote communities, particularly women, have found sanctuary in a well-operated facility in Darwin called YiSSA.

I have to acknowledge the leadership of our Minister for Indigenous Australians for reaching a co-funding resolution with the Northern Territory government to secure that, because the Chief Minister of the Northern Territory was on the record saying that putting further funding into a facility that was housing vulnerable women and children was a waste of taxpayers' money.

This is the same chief minister who doesn't mind putting millions of dollars towards the gas company and looking at those projects. It's just a bit of a disgrace. So I want to give a shout-out to our Minister for Indigenous Australians, who has put funding on the table to try and look at securing better facilities for those vulnerable women and children so that they've got somewhere safe to stay and are not being put back into the environment that a lot of these women and children are running from.

Because those perpetrators are there, and we shouldn't be putting those women and those children back into those circumstances they are coming out of. I commend our government and our ministers. We've got more work to do, but at least that has started.

I certainly look forward to making sure that, over coming months and years, we can stop seeing the headlines of another woman losing her life or a child in these terrible circumstances.