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Legislative Council - Fifty-Third Parliament, First Session (53-1)
2014-05-21 Daily Xml
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Domestic Violence

The Hon. T.A. FRANKS (14:55): I seek leave to make a brief explanation before asking the Minister for the Status of Women, representing the Premier, a question on the issue of a royal commission into domestic and family violence.

Leave granted.

The Hon. T.A. FRANKS: As members would be well aware, we have seen yet another tragedy in the Encounter Bay area of this state this past weekend, with a suicide and murder. It is part of a national trend, and a trend that the Labor Party in Victoria has risen to the challenge to address. The leader there, Mr Andrews, has called for a royal commission, which, he says, will examine family violence 'from the ground up', looking into the criminal system, the courts, health, services, housing, education, alcohol and drugs.' He says:

We expect victims to make a deeply personal and terrifying leap, to come forward and seek protection, but we're not doing our bit. We're not there to catch them when they make that leap. Instead, those seeking help fall into endless waiting lists.

As we know, this case in South Australia involved, again, one of those victims who fell onto an endless waiting list. Will the Premier consider a royal commission into domestic and family violence in South Australia?

The Hon. G.E. GAGO (Minister for Employment, Higher Education and Skills, Minister for Science and Information Economy, Minister for the Status of Women, Minister for Business Services and Consumers) (14:56): I thank the honourable member for her most important question, and will refer that question to the Premier in the other place and bring back a response. May I say, though, that this government takes domestic violence and violence against women and children extremely seriously. We have put in a series of initiatives and programs that are very valuable responses indeed, for instance, the Family Safety Framework initiative of the Women's Safety Strategy.

I have spoken about it in this place before so I will not go into a lot of detail, but we have been able to roll out that Family Safety Framework into all our regions now, including the APY lands, one of the most recent rollouts. It is a means of case managing, if you like, involving multi-agency responses to those women who have been assessed as being at high risk of violence, and we are very pleased to have been able to roll out that initiative.

I also remind members in this place that this government reformed sexual assault legislation as well as domestic violence legislation in the past year or two. We introduced intervention orders, and there were a number of reforms within those measures. One of the most important ones was the introduction of intervention orders that gave powers to police to enable them to implement, if you like, restraining orders on perpetrators straightaway. In many instances there is a complaint about a domestic dispute, police go out to a person's home and they assess whether the women and children are at high risk of domestic violence. These new orders give the police the powers to remove the perpetrator from the family home and secure the women and children in the family home rather than having to find them a safe house and dislocate them from all their support systems.

What did we see the Liberal opposition do when it was trying to form government? What did we see them do about domestic violence in the lead-up to the election? What was its platform? It was going to unwind these very important measures. Its platform was to reverse what this government had done with intervention orders and to remove the powers that the police have and give them back to the courts. Of course, the reason that we reformed this area, after extensive consultation with the key stakeholders right across the sector, was that the problem with the old system was that it took too long to get restraining orders through the court system and out on the ground so that perpetrators could actually be removed.

What did the Liberal opposition want to do? It wanted to remove the powers of the police to slam orders on there and then and be able to remove perpetrators from high-risk environments there and then. What did the Libs want to do? No, they wanted to send it back to the court and let it spend another week or so in the court while the perpetrator was out doing harm to their partner and children. It was a disgraceful thing to put in place—disgraceful—and they did not even get what they were proposing to do.

Of course, on top of that, is another of our other measures: SA Police (SAPOL) is the lead agency for the development of a comprehensive integrated early intervention gateway—we call it MAPS (the Multi Agency Protection Service)—and SAPOL is going to partner with the Department for Communities and Social Inclusion and other departments to streamline the referral and notification process of key agencies that will enable them to assess, analyse and respond to child protection and domestic violence issues in a more timely and coordinated way. That is yet another initiative that we have put in place.

At election time the Jay Weatherill government announced additional measures for data collection, particularly around repeat offenders of domestic violence, and a number of other important measures. This government has been extremely serious about this very important policy area. We have taken the risk to women and children in relation to family and domestic violence very seriously. We have put a number of measures in place and we continue to look to develop new initiatives to help protect women and children from domestic violence.

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