Domestic, Family, and Sexual Violence
Ms Cate Faehrmann: I speak in support of this motion. However, from the outset I say that it is not really good enough that members are not in the Chamber this week voting in support of ambitious reform of the type that domestic and family violence stakeholders have been calling for from governments on both sides of politics for decades.
Instead of the Government putting forward something significant that would actually make a difference to women's lives, we have an hour of debate this week on a day that is reserved for private members' business to acknowledge and recognise this issue. All members are well aware of the problem of men's violence against their partners. The death of one woman every four days at the hands of a current or former partner is finally getting the media attention it deserves. Survivors and their advocates have been calling for action and investment for decades. They are sick and tired of bandaid fixes, of acknowledgements, of words, and of thoughts and prayers, all of which are coming far too late.
As many members of this Chamber have said today, this year alone at least 27 women have allegedly been murdered at the hands of men. Some 34 women were killed by an intimate partner between 2022‑2023. That number was an increase of nearly 30 per cent compared to the previous year. Eighty-nine per cent of victims of all intimate partner homicides between 2022 and 2023 were women. There is no doubt that this is a crisis and an emergency, and it is very clear that something more than words and platitudes is desperately needed. My colleague Ms Abigail Boyd has been advocating for many years for the sector's demands. It demands a massive injection of funding into domestic and family violence prevention and support services that are proven to work. We must see significantly more from this Government in this space. The chief executive of Women's Community Shelters and chair of Domestic Violence NSW, Annabelle Daniel, toldThe Sydney Morning Herald recently:
We know calls to domestic violence hotlines spike on the nights of football grand finals. We know that alcohol is in the mix there. We know financial stress, gambling, drinking: while they don’t cause domestic violence, they can certainly increase its impact.
Yet, most of those areas remain in the too-hard basket as successive governments continue to pander to vested interests from the gambling and alcohol industries. In terms of having some effect on the violence impacting women and their families, surely looking at the links between alcohol and gambling as many experts have been calling for, for many years, must be done urgently. I note Premier Chris Minns has publicly apologised for not developing an emergency package for domestic and family violence sooner, acknowledging the Government had to do more to address this crisis, but right now is the time to do that. The $230 million emergency package, with just $46 million in primary prevention, is not enough and does not begin to compare to investments made by other States, as my colleagues and other members of this House have noted.
I comment on the contribution of the Hon. Damien Tudehope about the Yarra Valley school where students were ranked. That has been happening in many schools for decades. Something is not suddenly happening to kids because of technology. In the '80s, at my school—a private Catholic school—in Toowoomba, Queensland, girls were ranked as they arrived. I remember first walking down the "emu steps" in year 8, so called because of the ungainly walk that we did as we walked down. Every single girl was rated by the guys. That has been happening in schools for decades and is not a new thing; it is called misogyny and we need to address it. We need to look at what more we can do to change the causal factors behind men's violence, and not just continue to be in denial about bandaid fixes for this national emergency. I commend the motion to the House.