Wednesday, 1 May 2024

 Ryan BATCHELOR (Southern Metropolitan) (16:25): I rise today to make a statement on the report – which was tabled in February, I think, of this year – on the implementation of the family violence multi-agency risk assessment and management framework 2022–23. The report in question is an annual report that is provided following the implementation of the updated multi-agency risk assessment and management framework under the Family Violence Protection Act 2008 – which was amended following the Royal Commission into Family Violence, which obviously tabled its report in 2015 – and though the government’s acceptance of all of the recommendations of the family violence royal commission’s report and both the subsequent development of the multi-agency risk assessment and management framework and the legislating of that framework into the Family Violence Protection Act.

A new way of assessing risk in family violence situations has been developed here in Victoria. As many of these things do, these are the kinds of initiatives and kinds of reforms and kinds of changes made to our service system that do not always make the headlines. They do not always feature at the top of the list of things which grab people’s attention. What I hope to do in the course of the next couple of minutes is talk about why they are exceptionally important in improving both the family violence response to victim-survivors of family violence here in Victoria but also – and this is particularly pertinent in the context of the current debates about gendered violence – why they are exceptionally important in making sure that perpetrators of violence are both in view and held accountable for their actions.

The multi-agency risk assessment and management framework – MARAM, as it is known by those who use it – is a new tool that practitioners, responders to family violence, now use to help them when a victim-survivor of violence presents to a service system or needs support to assess and understand the risk that individual faces. It is a much more sophisticated response that we have here in Victoria since the royal commission, since the investment that the government made, since the changes that we have made to the service system to better understand and appreciate the various and varied elements of risk that victim-survivors of family violence face.

Last year, in 2022–23, according to the report that was tabled, there were 33,792 MARAM risk assessments undertaken, which is a use of the new MARAM tool, which was a 41 per cent increase on the year before, and that was an increase on the year before that, and that was an increase on the year before that. What we are seeing – having spent some time before I came into the Parliament both working on family violence reforms and also being on the board of No to Violence, the men’s referral service – is the new risk assessment tools are exceptionally valuable for service responders to understand and better assess the risks that victim-survivors of family violence take. One hundred thousand sector professionals received training in MARAM and the associated information-sharing protocols last year, a 55 per cent increase on the year before; over 12,000 Victoria Police staff completed training; 41,000 MARAM risk assessments and 7500 MARAM safety plans were undertaken on the Specialist Homelessness Information Platform by specialist family violence services; and over 20,000 central information point reports were delivered about perpetrators of family violence to better inform those risk assessments.

These are incredibly important reforms, nation-leading reforms, we are making here in Victoria, which are keeping victim-survivors of family violence safe and perpetrators accountable for their actions.