Royal Commission into Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence

The Hon. D.G. PISONI (Unley) (15:07): My question is to the Premier. Will the Premier deliver on his promise to act swiftly on the findings of the Royal Commission into Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence? With your leave, sir, I will explain.

Leave granted.

The Hon. D.G. PISONI: The royal commission delivered 136 recommendations, yet the government has accepted only seven and allocated just $1.5 million to respond. Advocates say implementation will require hundreds of millions. While Victoria committed $3.86 billion following its inquiry, South Australia still has no comprehensive domestic violence strategy.

The Hon. P.B. MALINAUSKAS (Croydon—Premier, Minister for Defence and Space Industries) (15:08): I thank the member for Unley for his question. Between a team within the Department of the Premier and Cabinet and an extensive piece of work being done by the Minister for Women in South Australia—not just the Minister for Women; the Minister for Women and also efforts against domestic, family and sexual violence in our state—there is a comprehensive response being developed.

We enunciated our intention to release that before the end of the year. We made it clear that we are going to work through our response to the royal commission in a very deliberate, iterative exercise, and we made some initial announcements when we responded to the report and mapped out the way we are going to deal with this over time.

I draw the member for Unley's attention to very specific recommendations in the royal commission report about the need to take time and to do this thoroughly. It actually almost explicitly says, and these are my words not the commission's words, but the commission almost makes very clear that rushing to accept recommendations is ill-advised, that we have to do the work to make sure that we are not just accepting a recommendation but thinking about how we are going to implement a response to that recommendation. I actually thought the royal commissioner and the commissioner's report in that regard was pretty well thought through and—I keep using this word—very deliberate in the way it went about it.

One of the things the member for Unley quite reasonably refers to is the Victorian experience. The royal commission also made sure that it sought to learn from the Victorian experience because there is a legitimate set of questions to be asked about whether or not, given the size of the investment made in Victoria, all of that money, they have indeed got the outcomes they were looking for. What our royal commission sought to do was learn from that experience in a way that someone else might learn from ours in the future, and make sure that our response in terms of the funds that we expend is able to best achieve the outcomes that we are looking for here, which are sustained and over the long term.

The commitments that we make—and this is something that the minister along with the Treasurer and I have met and spoken about, along with a range of officials. What we are also very conscious of is we don't want to see investments being made that then get undone again. The investments that are lasting and likely to make a difference are those that get put into the budget and then baked into the budget. Often in government we try to avoid expenditure being baked into the budget. I think if we're serious about this, given that it is a long-term problem and it requires a long-term effort, we have to make our decisions in the full knowledge, or in the full commitment, that many of the expenditures we make are recurrent, ongoing and they need to be baked in, hopefully with bipartisan support, which in turn demands of the government quite a considerable effort to make sure that where we are baking in recurrent expenditures, they are going to deliver us the outcome we are looking for.

On this subject of all subjects, I will avoid partisanship but suffice to say this: I can't stress enough that when policy commitments are made, people need to appreciate—and I know members opposite will be conscious of this too—there is a big difference between the capital, once-off infrastructure investment that has a capital hit on the budget versus an ongoing recurrent hit on the budget, the cost of which is astronomical in the long term. So that is what we are working through in a great degree of detail. We look forward to honouring our commitment to announce our response before the end of the year.