Earlier this week, an online two-day Women’s Safety Summit was held under the Prime Minister’s aegis to discuss the next national plan to stop violence against women and children. But Canberra’s Labor politicians want their Coalition counterparts to do more.
“The summit is telling us what we already know,” said Yvette Berry MLA, Deputy Chief Minister and Minister for Women. “The time for talking is done.”
Delivering the keynote address, PM Scott Morrison acknowledged that many Australian women did not feel safe, and were not safe.
“There is still an attitude, a culture that excuses, justifies, ignores or condones gender inequality that drives, ultimately, violence against women,” he said.
Every nine days, a woman was murdered by her current or former partner, and one in four women were physically or sexually abused by a current or former intimate partner, Mr Morrison stated.
“We need to change behaviours and attitudes, so that we stop violence before it starts,” he said. “Our country must become a place where every woman feels safe, and can live free of fear.”
The Summit was part of the Morrison Government’s response to what he acknowledged were the “long-standing and serious” failings in Parliament House, which broadened into a “conversation about women’s experiences everywhere”.
Among other measures this year, the government launched the Cabinet Women’s Taskforce to address women’s safety and economic security, and budgeted $3.4 billion for women’s safety – the largest announcement of funding for women’s safety of any federal government at any time, Mr Morrison said.
Next, the government will begin a two-year trial to provide financial assistance of up to $5,000 to help women leave violent relationships, and $260 million to expand funding of frontline family, domestic and sexual violence support services (co-funded by states and territories).
Labor criticises government inaction
“The Government’s action, or lack thereof, speaks louder than their words on women’s safety,” said Alicia Payne MP, Labor member for Canberra. “They simply haven’t given it the priority it needs, in spite of the fact that one woman is killed by a current or former partner each week in Australia and the groundswell around violence and sexism against women this year.”
In a joint statement before the Summit, Yvette Berry and other Labor state and territory Ministers for Women had called on the Commonwealth to better address family, domestic, and sexual violence.
They wanted the Commonwealth to invest more in housing for women escaping violence; better fund legal services for victim-survivors and frontline services; help women on temporary visas fleeing violence; implement the recommendations of the Australian Human Rights Commission’s Respect@Work: Sexual Harassment National Inquiry Report (2020); invest in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community-led responses; and legislate for 10 days of paid domestic and family violence leave.
“For years, the Commonwealth’s contribution to national gendered violence efforts has fallen short of what is needed to address the scale of the problem,” they said.
Ms Payne stated that the Morrison Government voted in the Parliament last week to implement only six of the 55 ‘Respect@Work’ recommendations, even though they had promised to implement them all. The Coalition emphatically rejected Labor amendments to implement the other 49 recommendations.
Ms Berry said the Coalition voted against laws to prohibit sexual harassment; requiring employers to protect their workers from sexual harassment; changing laws to achieve real gender equality; protecting survivors against huge legal bills for taking action against their perpetrators; and letting unions and other organisations bring legal action against perpetrators on behalf of survivors.
“If the Morrison Government was as serious about women’s safety as they claim, they wouldn’t have voted the way they did,” Ms Payne said.
“Grace Tame and Brittany Higgins have been rightly critical about the way the Government has conducted itself around this summit. Scott Morrison continues to fail the women of Australia over and over again. Unfortunately, it’s yet another example of the Morrison Government doing the bare minimum to fix what they see as a political problem, rather than taking the serious action to address it,” she said.
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