Women's Safety

The Hon. N.J. CENTOFANTI (15:09): My question is to the Minister for Human Services regarding women. Can the minister please update the council on how the Marshall Liberal government is supporting South Australian women to make informed choices about their safety?

The Hon. J.M.A. LENSINK (Minister for Human Services) (15:09): I thank the honourable member for her important question. Indeed, there are a range of services that the Marshall Liberal government has initiated since we came to office. Indeed, through our partnership with the commonwealth government—through funding which is being provided through the Women's Safety Ministers ministerial partnership money—we have been able to expand on a number of services.

One of the important ones which we took to the last election and which has been funded is the Domestic Violence Disclosure Scheme. What that scheme enables people to do, if it is either someone that they know or someone who is in a relationship themselves, is to contact police to inquire into somebody's history to see if there is a record of use of violence in their past.

I think we have all had the experience, whether it is a sister or a friend or anyone that we know who has formed a new relationship and we have that sense that there is something that is not quite right about that person—the person in the relationship often cannot see that because they are just so over the moon that they have fallen in love with someone, so sometimes that needs to be done on behalf of someone else.

The way that the process works is that an application will be made to SAPOL. SAPOL will examine the record, and they will get in contact with the person who is in the relationship. That has reached a very important milestone. We have now had over 1,000 applications to the scheme, with 360 meetings called between police and a specialist DV support worker to discuss safety issues with that person. So that is a very important way for people to be able, in those earlier stages, to check whether somebody has a history that they may need to consider and receive that counselling.

In this particular program, 98 per cent of the applications were from women; 66 per cent were women with children in their care; 39 per cent were received from regional areas; and nearly 63 per cent of the people who accessed the scheme hadn't been connected with a domestic violence service before. So it is a very important part of some of our earlier services that people can access so that we prevent people from falling in the crisis end.

Anybody who is experiencing domestic violence, that is of course something that we want to be able to prevent in any way, and this is just one of the many ways in which we are working towards keeping women and children safe.