Page 614 - Week 03 - Tuesday, 30 March 2021
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The review made 18 recommendations which highlighted several ways that the government can create meaningful change and ensure that the Family Violence Act operates in the way that it should. It recommends that further work needs to be done in consultation with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, as well as culturally and linguistically diverse groups, to ensure that we can protect them from cultural abuse.
It recommends that the legislation needs to refer to specific types of abuse, especially technological abuse like monitoring someone’s online accounts or tracking someone’s location. It recommends that after hours orders need to be better facilitated so that there are no more delays in protecting Canberrans from domestic and family violence.
All of these recommendations, and the 15 others included in the review, have sat with the ACT government for 12 months. That is 12 months that this ACT government has failed victims and victim survivors of family and domestic violence. That is 12 months that this ACT government has failed our community.
Let us not forget that this review follows a bipartisan committee report tabled in 2019 that made 60 recommendations to government on this very issue. A number of these recommendations were similar to those in the review—better communication between courts and agencies, more support and tailored services for children, and that government identify service gaps that need to be addressed.
It is unacceptable that this government, which claims to be the most progressive government in this country, has allowed this review into domestic and family violence to sit on a minister’s desk for 12 months, gathering dust. How many Canberrans have fallen through the cracks in these 12 months? How many Canberrans have been betrayed by the system that was designed to protect them?
All the while, this government were concerned about how this review would make them look. If they thought that the review made them look bad, the fact that they hid it for 12 months makes them look even worse. The now Attorney-General admitted to the media last week that the review had been “around for some time” but failed to take any responsibility for its delays; instead blaming COVID-19, the caretaker period or the “other bits and pieces”.
It should not have taken an FOI request for the review to be published. The Attorney-General cannot blame anyone else. The buck stops with him. After 20 years of this Labor-Greens government, Canberrans deserve so much better. This government cannot continue to stand idly by while more cases of domestic violence get reported to the police, and they cannot wait until another innocent Canberran is harmed. They must act now.
My motion today calls on this government to formally respond to the review, including outlining a concrete legislative agenda to make Canberra a safer place. The Canberra Liberals are calling on those opposite to take the concerns raised in this review seriously and respond to the concerns of the legal profession, of the frontline workers, of the experts, of our victim survivors, and of our community.
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