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Legislative Council - Fifty-Second Parliament, Second Session (52-2)
2013-02-06 Daily Xml
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VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN

The Hon. S.G. WADE (14:32): I seek leave to make a brief explanation before asking the Minister for the Status of Women a question relating to violence against women.

Leave granted.

The Hon. S.G. WADE: In target 18 of South Australia's Strategic Plan, the government commits to a 'significant and sustained reduction in violence against women through to 2022'. The South Australian Strategic Plan Audit Committee's most recent audit of the State Strategic Plan noted that the target does not articulate what would constitute a significant and sustained reduction in violence against women. My questions to the minister are:

1. What does the government consider the phrase 'significant and sustained reduction' to mean in the context of violence against women?

2. When will the new baseline be established so that the people of South Australia can hold the government to account for tackling violence against women?

3. Can the minister inform the council what reduction in violence against women has been achieved thus far?

The Hon. G.E. GAGO (Minister for Agriculture, Food and Fisheries, Minister for Forests, Minister for Regional Development, Minister for the Status of Women, Minister for State/Local Government Relations) (14:33): I thank the honourable member for his important questions. Indeed, I was very pleased to see that a new target was added to our SASP targets for South Australia, which includes focusing on violence against women, which is an issue I have a great deal of interest in, and it is a campaign I have been involved in for many decades.

The aim is to produce a significant and sustained reduction in violence against women through to 2022. The measure for this target will be the number of females who experience violence. Source data, I am advised, for this target will be the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the personal safety survey and the national community attitudes survey.

It is anticipated that the personal safety survey will be released in the second half of 2013. We have baseline data now, but that will be the first round of data by which we will be able to make some comparisons. The inclusion of this target obviously responds to recommendations of the Community Engagement Board and feedback from the community engagement process, including consultations undertaken by the Premier's Council for Women; that was obviously during 2010. This target, for me, certainly highlights this government's commitment to reducing violence against women and complements our Right to Safety strategy, which involves our women's safety strategy.

We have seen a wide range of projects that I have talked at length about in this place before: the Family Safety Framework, information that we have in terms of Don't Cross the Line, community campaigns that we have funded, the intervention orders that have been put in place, and the work that we continue to do around that to make sure that that is working really well and improving protections for women. The target aligns with the National Plan to Reduce Violence against Women and Their Children, so those plans are consistent.

As I said, the specific data will not be available until mid-2013, but I have reported in this place some preliminary work. They are not formal figures as yet, but preliminary work around intervention orders shows that the rate of utilisation of intervention orders has increased significantly compared to the restraint type of orders that were previously in place and that there are some very promising trends for the rate of breaches for that. As I noted, they are very early figures. They are not indicative, but they give us a bit of an idea of the trends that might occur and that is that more women are seeking the protection of these and in fact they are hopefully, proportion wise, resulting in fewer breaches by perpetrators.

I think there are some good signs and we will look forward to plotting this data and looking at our performance as time goes on. I just want to finish by saying that what is important is that this government, unlike the former Liberal government, was prepared to actually set targets down and was prepared to use these impartial measures to measure our performance. We will be able to see quite clearly whether we do improve or not.

Those figures will be there and we have invited that lens to be placed on us, for us and our projects and activities to be scrutinised using that lens. That is something that I am very proud of, and it is something that the Jay Weatherill government has continued with. It places our strategic objectives under public scrutiny, it makes us transparent, and it makes us more accountable. I am very proud that this government was brave enough to do that, unlike the former Liberal government.

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