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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 08 Hansard (Wednesday, 4 August 2004) . . Page.. 3435 ..

a ratio of 2 to 1 over men; yet males have higher suicide rates, particularly young males. Many families are kept together by parents and sometimes by the children attending counselling, seeking out support. Yet research shows that the vast majority of males are reluctant to seek out a counsellor or even attend once one has been found.

I think greater effort is needed to break down those cycles of stigma, and we need to actually ensure that these places are friendly, accessible and useful to families and to men in particular so that they are actually feeling that they can achieve something, that they can support themselves, that they can support their families. That would be a greater step towards actually achieving Mrs Burke’s aim than setting up an oversight agency, a bureaucracy that is designed to review decisions, as opposed to actually helping families when they need it most.

MS TUCKER (3.37): The Greens will not be supporting this bill either, although I think Mrs Burke is well intentioned in what she is doing here. I also have some serious concerns about this particular mechanism for dealing with this problem. We arguably all agree, basically, that families need to be supported. But this particular way of addressing it is problematic, for a number of reasons. I guess one of the really basic points that you would have to make is that we are in dangerous territory if we start to say that the integrity of families in or of itself is more important than protecting family members from what goes on inside families.

It is interesting that this legislation reminds me of the federal Liberal government’s recent changes to family law and the concerns that are coming out that basically the rights of the parents are put ahead of the rights of the children. In that instance, we are seeing this language around the rights of the parents, that both parents have access to children. Obviously anyone who has any experience of family breakdown, in particular any experience of working with the interest of the child being the primary motivation for any of our social responses, has to be very concerned when you see this notion of rights of families put above those of the children.

It is not just about children. I will stay with children for a minute. The point, as we know—it has just come out from the audit—is that again the majority of abuse occurs within families. Elder abuse is usually from family members. A paper by Marianne James of the Australian Institute of Criminology shows that a significant proportion of violence against women occurs within close personal relationships and within the family. Of all homicides occurring in Australia in 2002, 56 per cent took place in residential locations, with 49 per cent in a private dwelling. In 2003, 20 per cent of male homicide victims were killed by a family member, and over 20 per cent of female victims were killed by a family member.

Child abuse, as I said, usually occurs within families. That is not to say of course—and I would not like to be misrepresented—that families are evil institutions. Of course they are not. They are very important. But they cannot be made the most important concern within the society. It is important to note that bad things do happen within families and that in the past much of this crime went unreported or was not considered a crime, in the interests of keeping it all within the family. That is still a campaign we have to be talking about, that domestic violence is a crime. We know well that within our culture it is still thought in many situations that it needs to be kept within the family.

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