Thursday, 30 May 2024

Ministers statements: gendered violence

Vicki WARD (Eltham – Minister for Prevention of Family Violence, Minister for Employment) (14:11): This government is continuing to drive nation-leading policy and investment in family violence prevention. We are very clear: we will pull every lever available to us to end family violence and end violence against women and girls. This morning we announced our strengthening women’s safety package. This package covers over $100 million and continues to build on the strong foundations laid with the nation’s first Royal Commission into Family Violence.

I thank our amazing sector, our workforce and our victim-survivors, including the Victim Survivors’ Advisory Council, who have sat with me at many round tables, who have met with me and the Premier and who have shared their knowledge and their experience – people who maintain their energy and their passion to keep working to support change, as do we. We are responding to the centuries-old challenge of gendered violence and the ongoing need to strengthen women’s and children’s safety. Our new package responds to the need to increase therapeutic supports, to further enhance our groundbreaking central information point, to keep more women and children safe in their homes and to better understand people, particularly men, who choose to use violence. And we will be doing so much more. In 2016 Conor Pall, deputy chair of VSAC, was, in his words, an invisible survivor of family violence. Today he joined us as an advocate and told us that he feels as a victim-survivor that he is now seen, including by this government – that he is no longer invisible.

I will finish this how I started: by thanking all of our victim-survivors and by thanking our incredible sector workers, who are there every day to support victim-survivors, who are holding perpetrators accountable and who are delivering urgently needed therapeutic supports. And I thank the community for working with us. I particularly thank those men who are answering our call, like the member for Mordialloc, to join with us and end family violence and end violence against women and girls.