Page 1127 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 28 March 2017
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Traditionally, there has been a focus on physical forms of violence. This expansion of the definition of family violence highlights the many forms of non-physical violence that can and sometimes do occur and emphasises that family violence is unacceptable in any form. These reforms represent a best practice approach to responding to domestic, family and sexual violence in our legal system.
The bill builds on the protections set out in the family and personal violence acts by adding additional protections for children and people with a disability. The bill also clarifies the circumstances in which an applicant’s evidence-in-chief recording can be played, reducing the number of times they need to tell their story.
The bill helps to ensure that the protections available for victims of domestic and family violence in the ACT are as accessible and as straightforward as possible. Importantly, the bill supports the significant amount of work being undertaken nationally to improve responses to family violence.
The national domestic violence order scheme is a very important national reform to improve responses to family violence across the country. The scheme will allow a family violence or domestic violence order issued in one jurisdiction to automatically be recognised and enforced across the country.
All jurisdictions are currently participating in a national working group to operationalise the scheme and ensure that all necessary administrative arrangements are in place to support it. At the moment, if victims hold a protection order in one jurisdiction and would like it recognised in another jurisdiction they are required to register the order themselves. The national scheme will remove this burden for victims by automatically recognising orders across jurisdictions. Significant work is being undertaken nationally to improve and create systems to support the scheme. Police across the country will be able to enforce orders from any jurisdiction in ensuring that protection does not stop at the border.
Jurisdictions are working towards a national commencement date for the scheme to provide clarity and certainty for victims and the community. This bill also works alongside the other important work being done in the family violence space, which includes cooperation between the ACT and Victorian governments; releasing the issues paper on information sharing to improve the response to family violence in the ACT, and undertaking community consultation; and increasing funding to important front-line services—the Domestic Violence Crisis Service and Canberra Rape Crisis Centre.
It also includes providing funding to ACT Policing to employ order liaison officers to assist victims with domestic violence order applications; providing funding to the Director of Public Prosecutions to strengthen criminal justice responses to alleged perpetrators of family violence; providing funding to Legal Aid ACT to improve access to legal services for victims of family violence; funding the development of the room4change program, which is an innovative residential behaviour change program for men who use or are at risk of using violence, which will be launched in coming
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