Page 3375 - Week 09 - Thursday, 24 August 2017
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commitment to addressing that issue over the coming years. Of course, in the 2016-17 budget the ACT government announced a family safety package that included funding of $21.42 million, the first time that this kind of funding has been applied to such an important issue in our community.
Last year I had to write to the estimates committee to ask for the domestic and family violence levy and the issues around domestic and family violence to be included in the estimates committee’s hearing. We were given 30 minutes to discuss the considerable amount of work that is happening in the ACT to address domestic and family violence here.
In this year’s estimates committee hearings we were allowed 25 minutes to discuss this very important issue. So I put on the record now that I will be again writing to future estimates committees to urge that we have a very strong focus during estimates hearings on this issue so that we can inform the community, the committee and members of this Assembly about all of the work that is being done to address domestic and family violence in the ACT, because it is considerable and the funding that is going towards it is significant. The funding in 2016-17 is $21.42 million.
In the 2017-18 budget, this year’s budget that we are talking about now, that funding has been increased by $2.2 million over four years for the safer families initiatives, to bring the total of the package for the 2017-18 budget to $23.5 million over four years. For a small jurisdiction like the ACT, that is a significant amount of money.
You would be naive to say that that was going to solve these issues overnight. This is very complex. Everybody understands that. The work that has been done by the coordinator-general in working with the stakeholders and the community about the co-design of the family safety hub has been vital in identifying the people at risk and looking at how we create opportunities for early intervention as a government and as a community as well.
The co-design process is continuing. I have invited all members of the Assembly to attend a walk-through with the coordinator-general so that they can properly understand the work that has been done in the development of the family safety hub to improve responses by the community and the government on how we address domestic and family violence in our city.
The role of the hub before the co-design is completed pre-empts all the processes that are in place and values that have been gathered from the insights of people: victims who have experienced domestic and family violence but, importantly, also the people who are providing support services to those victims. The insights gathered through the co-design process have been shared widely with all the stakeholders involved through a series of insight walk-throughs, which I mentioned earlier. I hope members take the opportunity to attend one; we have provided the opportunity for that to occur on 26 July.
All the front-line services have provided some detailed feedback to inform the development of the hub and front-line services have highlighted that the current system is not offering the same sorts of supports that we should for the safety of
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