Page 1362 - Week 05 - Thursday, 26 April 1990
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of households, such as grandparents or the parents of adult children, can also be victims of harassment and abuse, and protection obviously needs to be extended to people in differing forms of relationships. Everybody concerned agrees that the New South Wales approach should be adopted where protection is extended to all family or household based relationships.
The other important amendment that everybody is waiting for is one which will allow people under the age of 18 years to seek protection from domestic violence in their own right. At present, the Act prevents a person under 18 years from applying for a protection order without the assistance of others.
These two major amendments and a number of other technical changes have been needed for a long time. Everybody concerned agrees with them. At the start of October last year the Labor Government agreed to the drafting of these amendments. A preliminary draft had been prepared by the time we left government. Once again, the inaction and the uncaring attitude of the current Government and, in particular, of this Attorney-General has been exposed.
Mr Collaery: How outrageous! You'll get your answers.
MS FOLLETT: Mr Collaery has had four and a half months to introduce the Bill but he has done nothing.
Mr Collaery: You had seven months.
MS FOLLETT: I notice that he is getting a bit heated. If he has done anything, I would be delighted to hear about it. I do not wish to end, however, on a sour note; so let me be optimistic and say that, after a decade of campaigning in the US and Canada, research shows that community attitudes may be changing.
But we should take seriously the argument that domestic violence and the attitudes which surround it are based on deep-rooted assumptions about gender roles. They depend upon systematic, economic, political and legal inequalities between men and women. Campaigning against domestic violence alone is, therefore, not enough. We must tackle the attitudes and inequalities of our whole society before domestic violence can be removed.
MR COLLAERY (Attorney-General) (4.43): Much of what the Leader of the Opposition said is common ground in this community, one hopes, or at least in this Assembly, one hopes. Certainly the Alliance Government agrees with the sentiments that the Leader of the Opposition expressed up to the time she departed to the $142,000 and the rest. The Government is deeply concerned with the problem of domestic violence in our community and recognises the need to assist domestic violence survivors. (Quorum formed)
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