Motions

Royal Commission into Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence in South Australia

The Hon. T.A. FRANKS (16:47): I move:

That this council calls on the Malinauskas government to establish a royal commission into domestic, family and sexual violence in South Australia.

I move this today in conjunction with the Hon. Connie Bonaros of SA-Best in this place, and I note that my remarks will be followed by those of the Hon. Connie Bonaros and the Hon. Michelle Lensink of the Liberal opposition. I move this today because right now we are in the middle of a national domestic violence crisis. We have just seen four South Australian women murdered in one week.

A royal commission will be crucial in identifying barriers, gaps and opportunities for us to save the lives of South Australians. The incidence of violence against women and children is completely unacceptable. We are failing victims and survivors of domestic violence, and we need to target investment where it matters the most. We need to listen to women and centre them in a whole-of-government and whole-of-society solution.

At this critical moment for women's safety, the South Australian community is looking to the government, to members of parliament, for leadership. They seek multipartisan support for a royal commission. To that end, I know myself and other members of parliament were invited to a vigil on Friday morning just gone, 24 November, to remember those murdered four women, and a vigil, organised by a number of groups but in particular Embolden, to call for a royal commission into domestic, family and sexual violence in this state.

Having worked in the women's sector, it used to be that we would often have a vigil when a South Australian woman was murdered at the hands of someone she knew. Those vigils came far too often, but there were never four women murdered in a week. I am sick of going to those vigils. I am sick of standing on the stairs with other women members of this parliament in late January, early February each year, when we count the dead women. We count them in their dozens each year.

This is what a national crisis looks like. Last week, in November, in that one week in November in South Australia, on Wednesday 15 November a woman's body was found inside a home in Felixstow. On 21 November, police arrested a 50-year-old man and charged him with murder. The accused is known to the victim, police said to the media. On Thursday 16 November, police and paramedics tried to resuscitate a 45-year-old woman in the Davenport community, but she died. A 53-year-old man was arrested and charged with murder. The woman and man were known to each other, police said.

On Sunday 19 November, police found a woman, 39, dead at Encounter Bay. A man who was known to the woman was arrested and charged with murder, police say. On Tuesday 21 November, Jodie Jewell, 55, was murdered at the Modbury North home she shared with her husband. Her husband fled the scene, and his body was later found on the Yorke Peninsula.

Four South Australian women, murdered in a week. This is an epidemic. We must increase the urgency of government and community response to tackle violence against women and their children. First Nations women, women from culturally diverse backgrounds, women in regional areas, older women, LGBTIQ+ women and women with a disability are even more likely to experience violence.

The government says it is committed to ending sexual and physical violence against women, but they also say that a royal commission is something to be considered in the future, not now. We are told we must wait. Meanwhile, four women were murdered in one week.

We know from the extensive research and data collection from key bodies such as the ABS and the Australia’s National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety that domestic and family violence is a gendered crime. Advocacy group Our Watch says that on average one woman a week is murdered by her current or former partner in our country.

According to the ABS, one in three Australian women have experienced physical violence since the age of 15, while one in five have experienced sexual violence. One in six women have experienced physical or sexual violence by a current or former partner. One in two women has experienced sexual harassment in their lifetime. In most incidents of workplace sexual harassment, the harasser was male. Women are at increased risk of experiencing violence from an intimate partner during pregnancy. Women often experience multiple incidents of violence across their lifetime.

Four women murdered in a week. We know that minority women, women with disability, and queer women are at greater risk than others and experience violence that intersects with other forms of discrimination and disadvantage. Women with disability in Australia are twice as likely to have experienced sexual violence over their lifetime than women without disability. The type of disability intersects with gender and different forms of violence—for example, one in two women with psychological and/or cognitive impairment have experienced sexual violence.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women experience disproportionately high rates of violence. Three in five women—three in five—have experienced physical or sexual violence perpetrated by an intimate partner. Lesbian, bisexual and queer women experience higher rates of sexual violence than heterosexual women in our country. Transgender and gender-diverse people also experience very high rates of family, domestic and sexual violence. Young women experience significantly higher rates of physical and sexual violence than women in older age groups.

In addition to physical and sexual violence, women from migrant and refugee backgrounds are particularly vulnerable to financial abuse, reproductive coercion and immigration-related violence, for example withholding documents, threats of visa cancellations or deportation.

Four women murdered in one single week. This is a crisis. It is costing us. It is costing us emotionally, but it is costing our economy along with our personal safety. It is estimated that violence against women costs $21.7 billion a year, with the victims bearing the primary burden of that cost.

Governments, of course, do bear that cost burden—an estimated $7.8 billion a year, comprising health, administration and social welfare costs. If no further action is taken to prevent violence against women, if we do not act, costs will accumulate to an estimated $323.4 billion over a 30-year period measured from 2014-15 to 2044-45.

What we need to do, first and foremost, is fund frontline services. The demand for crisis services, helplines, support services and legal services far exceeds their current capacity to help everyone who seeks help. Women's legal services in many states have reported having to turn away nearly half the calls that are made to them, particularly during COVID.

We need specialist services that deal with the intersectional issues faced by young women, First Nations women, women with disability and women from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. The federal government's funding under the national plan falls well short of that $1  billion per year that the sector says is needed to ensure that no-one is turned away when they reach out for help. We do need a major investment to keep women safe. Those four women murdered in one week were not in contact with any services to our knowledge so far.

The next thing we need to do is invest in prevention and education, including behaviour change programs. We need to invest in affordable housing—that is, crisis housing, transitional housing and long-term housing, the full spectrum—so that women fleeing abusive relationships have somewhere to go. As we know, those women deserve to stay in the homes that they live in, in the homes where their families are, and the perpetrator, in fact, should more often be the one to go.

Older women are the fastest growing cohort of people facing housing insecurity and homelessness in Australia. Rapid investment to increase housing stock is essential to guard against women staying in abusive relationships because they have nowhere else to go.

We also need to improve women's economic security, first of all by addressing the gender pay gap. Companies are currently required to report on their gender pay gaps, but they suffer no penalties if they do nothing to fix it. We need to improve women's economic security by making the superannuation scheme fairer so that women are not retiring into poverty after a lifetime of unpaid care work or taking career breaks to look after children.

We also need to improve women's economic security by making child care free and requiring employers to provide flexible working arrangements to give families more choice and to allow women to re-enter the workforce. This government needs to start listening.

The Greens stand here wanting action that rewrites the rules for gender equality and improves women's security, safety and wellbeing, but I do not doubt that all of us seek that. We want an Australia where women are safe, respected, valued and treated as equals in their public and private lives. Gendered violence and harassment is a national crisis and it is high time that this parliament and government treat it as such.

We do need a royal commission. Promises made on legislation for coercive control only go so far and they are not even nation-leading, in fact we are nation-lagging, but they are certainly not mutually exclusive of the systemic, whole-of-government response we seek. A royal commission will help our state target that much-needed investment where it will have the most impact across prevention, early intervention, crisis response, recovery and healing.

We must listen very carefully to the voices and experiences of survivors. A significant proportion of women who are killed through intimate partner violence were not in contact with police or services. We have heard the calls from the sector and we have seen in Victoria other instances of royal commissions that have had a real, profound impact, and where the recommendations are those that we can learn from, but we do need a fit-for-purpose royal commission for our state.

I note that there are many people in the gallery today. To paraphrase the Hon. Ian Hunter, it might be unparliamentary of me to mention anyone who might be here in the gallery today, but I would note that the call for a royal commission into domestic, family and sexual violence is supported by Embolden, Our Watch, Women's Safety Services South Australia, Zahra Foundation Australia, Catherine House, the Working Women's Centre of South Australia, White Ribbon Australia, SA Unions, the National Council of Women South Australia, the Zonta Club of Adelaide, the Australian Services Union, the Public Service Association, business and professional women and, of course, in this place by the Greens, SA-Best and the Liberal opposition.

I also note that I have received messages of support today from the member for Mount Gambier, Troy Bell MP; the member for Narungga, Fraser Ellis MP; and the member for MacKillop, Nick McBride MP. I am sure those numbers will only grow.

Four women murdered in one week is not something I ever want to see our state go through again. Enough with the platitudes, enough with ignoring the impact of financial insecurity and housing stress on women's capacity to leave, enough with underfunding the services that women need when they reach out in a crisis—enough is enough. Women deserve better, and funding a royal commission is a very small price to pay to end this ongoing epidemic of violence against women and children, so that we never, ever again in this state see four women murdered in a week.

The Hon. C. BONAROS (17:02): I start by saying that I think it hurts each and every one of us that we are in this place having to move this co-sponsored motion today. At the outset, I would like to echo the sentiments of the Hon. Tammy Franks and thank the Hon. Michelle Lensink for her contribution that will come shortly.

In 2023, so far, 54 women have been killed by violence. It alarms me that I had to go and check that statistic to make sure that there was not another death overnight, another murder overnight, before I came in here to repeat that figure. In South Australia, as the Hon. Tammy Franks has alluded to, we have just seen the deadliest week on record, with four women killed. In that same week, two other women were killed in other Australian jurisdictions. Six women; one week. This is, as one journalist put it, one national emergency our leaders refuse to address.

On 21 November, Jodie Jewell died from gunshot wounds inflicted by her husband before he fled and took the coward's way out. On 19 November, an unnamed 39-year-old woman was found dead at Morphett Vale, with a 41-year-old man arrested at the scene and subsequently charged with murder. On 16 November, a 45-year-old woman was allegedly murdered by a man known to her. On the previous day, 15 November, a 44-year-old woman was found deceased in her Felixstow home, and a man known to her was later located and charged with her murder. All four deaths were right here in South Australia.

There are so many statistics that we could refer to: the fact that one in four Australian women have experienced family violence and domestic violence since the age of 15; the fact that one in six were at the hands of a male relative; that 12 per cent witnessed partner violence against their mothers when they were children. One that shocked me was that each and every day across Australia 15 women are hospitalised because of domestic and family violence, and that does not include hospitalisations for sexual violence, because I could not find that statistic quickly enough to add it to those figures.

We know, as the Hon. Tammy Franks has said, that those figures are disproportionately higher for our Indigenous women; we know that migrant women are over-represented in those figures. We know that about 60 per cent of victims do not go to police, and we know the reasons why, or at least some of the reasons why. In 2016, Annabel Crabb pondered, and I quote:

…it bothers me that a woman gets killed by her male partner every single week, and somehow that doesn't qualify as a tools-down national crisis even though if a man got killed by a shark every week we'd probably arrange to have the ocean drained.

I reckon she is right: 11.3 per cent may sound like a low figure when you are talking about adults who have experienced violence from a partner, but that is 2.2 million adults; 5.9 per cent may sound relatively low when you are talking about violence experienced by a boyfriend or a girlfriend on a date, but that is 1.1 million adults.

We have heard what the government has said so far in relation to this issue, and that is that it is something that it would consider. We have also heard—one of the first things I heard—that this will cost a lot, but as the Hon. Tammy Franks knows, the cost we are paying for this in the long term far outweighs the cost of having a royal commission now.

Even if that were not the case, how on earth do you put a price on the lives of four women in South Australia killed in the space of a week? How do you look their families, friends and loved ones, their kids—whoever it is—in the eye and say, 'We'll consider it, but we're not quite sure if we're there yet'? That does not sit well with me, and I know it does not sit well with anyone in this place.

A royal commission, we are told, might not be necessary because we have something that happened in Victoria; well, that happened in 2016. There were 227 recommendations. I would love to know how many of those recommendations we have actually looked at in South Australia before we have even contemplated saying, 'Well, we've got a recommendation list there'. How many of them have we looked at to see whether or not we should be implementing them in South Australia? They are outdated—they are 2016 recommendations, and things have changed.

If we know anything we know that COVID has turned domestic violence, family violence and sexual violence as we know it on its head. We should not be looking at what Victoria has done for that reason alone, but there are so many other reasons that we should not be looking at Victoria—we are just not the same jurisdiction, we have our own unique set of circumstances.

We need to be looking at this through the lens of South Australian lives and South Australian demographics, of our regions, at how we invest our money, where the gaps are, where we have not invested, where we are over-investing perhaps and where we are blatantly ignoring the risks. We should not be afraid to do that as a jurisdiction.

There will not be any finger-pointing or blaming; this is not about politics but about genuinely wanting to fix a problem that is plaguing us. If we do not do that right now, what will we say to the next family? God forbid, there will be one this year. We all know, one woman a week. We all know that that next woman is coming, we know it is going to happen. What do we say to that family? Do we wait for another friend to pen an open letter in the press and plead for a royal commission now? What will it take for us to give this matter the respect that it deserves?

Like I said, we are not Victoria, and we do not have the same laws. We do not have the same services, we do not have the same opportunities—nothing is the same between here and Victoria—but I doubt any of us have looked at those recommendations in any event to see what we can do.

When I first thought about this motion the other day, I wanted to go through the policies of the Labor government and former Liberal government and commend them for everything they have done. There is a list there. There is a great list there, and we have all been part of that journey with them. The Hon. Michelle Lensink has done amazing work in her former role trying to address this issue. We know that we have passed laws in this place that address domestic abuse and protect victim survivors and their families in public life. We know that we have done things to ensure that there is GPS tracking. We know that just yesterday we passed reforms for residential tenancies to make sure that someone can leave their lease safely if there has been domestic violence. We know that coercive control laws are coming—that is great.

I personally am disappointed that gender equality action plan laws got knocked out of this parliament. We know that the previous government implemented a domestic violence disclosure scheme whereby a person can apply to SAPOL for information about a partner or prospective partner—fantastic. We know that we removed application fees for private intervention order applications. We know that we had new safety hubs in our regional areas. We know that we amended our Evidence Act for vulnerable witnesses. We know that we expanded our Domestic Violence Crisis Line to operate 24/7. If these things were enough, four women would not have been killed in South Australia in the space of a week. They are all amazing things that we have done together, but they are not enough.

What we do know is that there is no silver bullet and there is no easy fix—no-one has suggested that. What we do know is that, despite everything we do, there will be another woman who is killed. But have we done our level best? Have we done our level best to prevent that risk to that woman or to her children? Have we done our level best to prevent her partner from taking his or her life as a result of that? No, we have not. That is why we are standing here today in support of this motion.

I am not going to keep talking for much longer, but I will end by saying this: I know our Premier to be a very good man, and I know him to be a very good leader. I think there are many in this place who would agree with that summation. We know that great leadership takes people where they do not necessarily want to go, and this is one of those times. Right now, our social conscience demands of us and it demands of the Premier nothing less than a royal commission.

It is not about politics and it is not about political pointscoring. The same can be said for the Minister for Women and the Prevention of Domestic and Family Violence, who has advocated for reforms in opposition and I know is doing her best in government. The same can be said for the former Liberal minister who filled that portfolio, but promises regarding coercive control sometime into next year are not the answer. Saying we will consider this—when, I do not know—is not the answer. There is only one thing that can help us turn this around, and that is a royal commission.

God forbid that in the meantime another is woman killed, because I do not know what we are going to say to that woman's family. I do not know what our response will be, but I do know that if we do something now there will be, across this chamber, unanimous support, I am sure. The Premier does not need to come asking for this. We are here ready, willing and able for him to make this happen. All he needs to do is say the word.

I do not profess, by any stretch of the imagination, to have any of the answers that we need, and I know that none of us in this place has any of the answers we need. But I know that there are some wonderful people represented here today who do know a lot about what needs to be done in this space, and they have all backed this call for a royal commission. They are doing that because they are dealing with this issue at the coalface. They are dealing with the reality, the human reality of this issue on a daily basis.

I do not want to ignore their pleas, but what I do want to ask of each and every one of them today—and to plead with them—is to keep doing what they are doing until we fix this, not just for us but for every single woman who does actually find the courage or the way to seek out the services that you provide.

The Hon. J.M.A. LENSINK (17:15): I wish to associate myself with the comments of the previous speakers. I do not think I need to repeat the statistics, but we do know the situation that we are in at the moment, in the middle of 16 days of activism—which is ironically terrible—we have had this worst week in history.

I wish to make a few remarks on why the Liberal Party is supporting a royal commission into this matter. As the Hon. Tammy Franks said, we have all been there on the steps of Parliament House. We all stand and hold the placard, and we are reminded that behind each number was a woman with a family, who had hopes and dreams and a life to live, but it was taken from her, usually by the person who should have loved her the most.

I would also like to say—and Michaela Cronin referred to this at the White Ribbon Breakfast recently—that we all need to ensure that services are provided to anybody who is experiencing domestic violence. She quoted the name of a young person who I think was 15, a young male who had experienced violence. We need to ensure that there are services for everybody who experiences this scourge on our society, but we know the prevalence certainly has a huge impact on women. I think Malcolm Turnbull nailed it when he said that not all disrespect leads to violence but all violence starts with disrespect.

Thank you, Connie, for acknowledging the work that we did. We did do a great deal of work, and we did it in partnership with the sector, and I would like to pay tribute to the sector. There are things that we changed from our election commitments because they said, 'That's not going to work.' For instance, the locations of the emergency beds; that was completely rejigged based on the advice of the sector.

I tried at all times not to be a minister with pet projects but we know there are gaps. There were gaps then and gaps continue. As the Hon. Connie Bonaros stated, there are those voices in the sector, those voices particularly with lived experience, and when you hear those stories they are so clear about the fact that they did not know that what they were experiencing was domestic violence, or they could not get help when they needed it, or they could not get the right help when they needed it, and these are all critical factors.

I assume that, eventually, through the coronial process, we will find out more about the details of the four women who were murdered, but that is far too far down the track for my liking. I do not believe royal commissions need to drag on. In any case, they can do interim reports, they can do several reports, if they identify things early, as recommendations to government. They are independent to government.

Indeed, we as a party had sought, in the aftermath of this horrific statistic being a stain on our state, to have the Social Development Committee conduct an inquiry into this. We had included terms of reference examining the current crisis, identifying key contributing factors, looking at legal frameworks and support mechanisms, strategies including community education, and then recommendations for policy amendments and community initiatives at a South Australian level.

As has been said, South Australia does not need to rely on Victoria. In fact, we are unique in a really good way in the service sense in that our services work incredibly well together. You get people from interstate who say, 'Everyone gets along and bogs in and works really well together', and I think that is really true. I have always been impressed with the leadership that we have in the sector in this state. The fact that a lot of services have been co-located together means that, across the spectrum of service need, when victims need those services they are all in the one place.

We know that there are campaigns that have been running recently. The 'See the signs of coercive control' is an incredibly powerful and useful campaign but, again, we also know through the national surveys that are taking place that our young people have some really disturbing attitudes about what a healthy relationship looks like. A young woman can believe that if she has a controlling boyfriend it is because he cares—and you hear things like this all the time. They are so disturbing and they need to be addressed—that primary-level awareness.

As I said, sometimes women do not even know what they are experiencing is domestic violence. There was a rally just on Saturday, as part of the 16 days of activism, which was co-organised by Rotary and Zonta. I commend Rotary—I commend Zonta as well but, as has been said, women have been working in this space for a very long time so we will just keep turning up—for being in that space, which has predominantly or historically been a male organisation. It is so important to bring men on that journey so that they are having those bystander conversations and spreading the awareness as well.

As the district governor said, the initiative of the first of those rallies in Australia was through a regional—it might be in New South Wales. Two Rotary members, women, sat down one day and had a conversation about the experiences they were having in their relationships and trying to work out whether it was okay. We know that it was not okay and that what they were experiencing were versions of either coercive control or domestic and family violence.

We all have friends, people we know and, given the statistics, there are people among us all the time who are experiencing domestic violence. We also know that it is often the case that those who die by the most violent means have not experienced physical violence in the past but have experienced coercive control. I commend the government for bringing these laws forward. Work did start under the former Attorney, Vickie Chapman, as well. It is something that has bipartisan support as we try at a legislative level to grapple with laws which will address these issues.

It is so prevalent in the community that my fear is—and I think it has been borne out—that we are only scratching the surface in terms of getting to those people who need services. As Tammy said, we know at least one of those women had not had contact with services before. She disclosed to friends that she was trying to leave, and had she potentially been in contact with services a safety plan might have been able to be arranged for her so that she could leave.

We know that when women try to leave, that is usually the most dangerous time of all. There are gaps in our systems—we know that—and they are significant gaps. They are gaps in terms of whether services are adequately funded. They are gaps in terms of services which may be of assistance that we might not even have thought of yet. But the most important thing we need to do is elevate the voices of lived experience in this debate, give them the opportunity to explain their stories in a safe space, so that as a community we can move forward to end violence.

Debate adjourned on motion of Hon. I.K. Hunter.