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Legislative Council - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, First Session (54-1)
2018-11-13 Daily Xml
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Domestic and Family Violence

The Hon. J.S. LEE (14:44): My question is to the Minister for Human Services about the government's commitment to address domestic and family violence. Can the minister please provide an update to the council on the government's consultation with the domestic and family violence sector and the housing and homelessness sectors on further developing crisis interventions or first response models?

The Hon. J.M.A. LENSINK (Minister for Human Services) (14:44): I thank the honourable member for her question and her ongoing interest in this area. The South Australian Housing Authority and the Office for Women are leading some important consultations in this particular space—what is termed the first response. Last Wednesday, 7 November, a range of service providers came together to commence discussions on this important model. There will be three rounds of consultation in total. One was also held on the 9th, and there is one which is going to be held in a couple of weeks. I think the one on 9 November had a specific focus on Aboriginal responses. They are all to be facilitated by an independent facilitator, Dana Shen, who is well known and well respected in the sector.

In terms of first response, housing can sometimes take a housing first response. What we know in terms of domestic and family violence is that safety is the paramount issue for people who may be fleeing or seeking assistance from the sector, so in that sense safety first has been certainly the focus of the domestic and family violence expert providers in this space.

The Office for Women, as we know, has been key in leading a range of round tables so far that the Assistant Minister for Domestic and Family Violence Prevention, Carolyn Power, and myself have attended to inform our policy discussions, particularly related to the crisis end of domestic and family violence, which includes the new funding for the 24/7 crisis line, crisis accommodation, interest-free loans, the personal protection app and responses to perpetrators.

We were also seeking to leverage how first responses or crisis interventions can be further orientated on keeping women and children safe in their homes and thereby achieving a genuine safety first response model. We have developed a paper which I think is very informative as to where the sector is heading. I have touched on this, I think, in this chamber in some recent discussions in that 30 years ago the shelter models were very much women-led, very much covert locations for shelters. We have moved very much to preferring the core and cluster accommodation type services.

In the contemporary discussions we also are looking at better engagement with perpetrators. The discussion paper touches on a range of areas in terms of defining crisis accommodation, discussing the core and cluster model, hotel and motel accommodation, infants and children in crisis accommodation, Safe at Home programs, perpetrator interventions, culturally safe and responsive services and also looking at a range of cohorts that haven't been considered as holistically in the past, such as people living with disabilities and LGBTIQ people.

So, on those discussions, we are looking forward to receiving feedback from the sector about what conclusions they have reached so that we can continue to modernise our responses in this system to provide the most effective models going forward.

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