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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 6 Hansard (17 June) . . Page.. 1691 ..

MR WOOD (continuing):

In welcoming the Bill, for the fourth time in this short speech I express the disappointment I and many others have that the position of domestic violence coordinator has not been incorporated in the way that it was expected to be, in the way that it was needed. I am sure others will talk about the Duluth model, on which so much depends. They need to incorporate that model. I prepared some amendments - I am not convinced that they are appropriate or would stand up to strong scrutiny - to try to rectify this situation; but I understand that the intention is to adjourn debate on the Bill before we get to the clauses. That is the preferred approach for me. Let us have further debate - perhaps we can do it rapidly - and get into this Bill the provisions that will see that the recommendations from the Community Law Reform Committee, which have been long worked for, are put into place in full effect.

MS TUCKER (5.40): While the Greens support this Bill in principle, and we are very pleased to see the Government bring forward legislation to establish a Domestic Violence Prevention Council, it is of great concern that they are not establishing a domestic violence project coordinator. This issue was raised earlier because it was a recommendation in the Estimates Committee report that the Government establish an appropriately resourced domestic violence project coordinator. I think the model the Government has put forward is seriously flawed, and I am hoping that, on adjourning this debate today after the in-principle stage, the Government will go away and come up with a model that puts the ACT back on the front foot in terms of domestic violence. As I said earlier, we have a very exciting opportunity to take the lead in Australia in terms of implementing an integrated multisystems approach to preventing domestic violence.

Unfortunately, we still live in a culture where violence against women, if it occurs in relationships, is seen as somehow different from other forms of violence. The costs of domestic violence to our community are enormous. You cannot even begin to quantify the social costs. They alone are the basis for the strongest possible government action. But the financial costs should at least have the economic rationalists jumping to act. Domestic violence is estimated to cost the ACT between $5m and $29m each year, and the direct costs to government range from $2m to $10m. Those figures are very broad, and that is because one of the other issues here is that we do not really have good data in the ACT.

We cannot expect to reduce domestic violence without spending any money, but the Government seems to think we can. The ACT used to be at the forefront of innovations in the domestic violence area. Now we are lagging behind, particularly in relation to developing a coordinated multisystems response to domestic violence. We have an opportunity to change that now by fully implementing the recommendations of the Community Law Reform Committee reports on domestic violence.

The recommendations centred around implementing a fully coordinated system along the lines of the Duluth model. The Community Law Reform Committee have not just picked a model and thrown it into their report. As Mr Wood said, there have been many years of work and a lot of serious work with the community to come up with these recommendations. The committee has recognised that the Duluth model, which has been very successfully adapted by many cities around the world, must be modified to suit local conditions. The model they came up with is called the domestic violence intervention project. As the name implies, this is all about prevention.

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