Wednesday, 15 May 2024

Statements on tabled papers and petitions

Family violence reform implementation monitor

Legislative Review of Family Violence Information Sharing and Risk Management

Ryan BATCHELOR (Southern Metropolitan) (17:15): I rise to make a statement on the Legislative Review of Family Violence Information Sharing and Risk Management: Reviewing the Effectiveness of Parts 5A and 11 of the Family Violence Protection Act 2008 (Vic), which is a report from the family violence reform implementation monitor tabled in the Council on 17 August 2023. I thought it was appropriate to talk about this report today given that earlier in the week we had Rosie Batty in the Parliament talking about the launch of her book and memoir, Hope. This piece of legislation and this framework that was part of the government’s response to the Royal Commission into Family Violence has a very close connection to Ms Batty and to the tragic death of her son Luke a decade ago.

The coroner, in his inquest into the death of Luke Batty, in one of the key recommendations in that report – recommendation 4 – recommended that the law be changed to improve the sharing of information about perpetrators of family violence to better inform risk assessment, and that was a notion that was further discussed by the royal commission in their report. Some key recommendations were made by that royal commission and resulted in the legislative change that was enacted a few years later and that the topic of this report goes to.

The reason I am so keen to talk about it with you is because when I joined the public service in 2015 responding to the coroner’s report, particularly on the information sharing, and then subsequently developing a response to the family violence royal commission was one of the things that I worked on in the family violence reform unit in the Department of Premier and Cabinet. I had the great honour of working on these reforms, working with Rosie and other members of the victim-survivor advisory council to develop the legislative response that has now been implemented.

This is important also because we have had comments in the last 24 hours from the former Premier, who quite rightly and wisely said that other jurisdictions around the country could learn a lot from the reforms that Victoria enacted following our royal commission. I think this particular one is one that has demonstrated a lot of benefit and goes to the heart of how we make victim-survivors safer by effectively reducing the amount of rights, particularly the right to privacy, that perpetrators of family violence have. We are clearly preferring the rights of victim-survivors of family violence to be safe. The assessments about the risks they face from perpetrators are more important than the right to privacy that perpetrators of family violence often had used to shield information about their past that could be used to inform new partners or new service delivery agencies of the risks they pose given their violent history.

This is, I think, a key point from the royal commission:

Assessing the risk that a person will be subjected to family violence and then appropriately managing that risk, underpins all efforts to uphold safety for victims of family violence and to hold perpetrators of family violence to account.

The central principle of these legislative reforms is that you cannot hold perpetrators properly accountable unless you know the full picture, unless you know the full story, and that information about them should be shared between trusted entities who work in the family violence space, who perform family violence risk assessments, so that the full picture of these perpetrators and their previous actions is laid bare. Sadly, that was not the case with respect to orders that were made around the father of Luke Batty. As the coroner said, had that been different, the outcome of that event may well have been different as well.

This review done by the family violence reform implementation monitor says that these changes have been:

… effective in supporting a positive cultural shift away from maintaining perpetrator privacy toward sharing information to keep victim-survivors safe and to hold perpetrators accountable.

The sort of changes that Victoria implemented following the royal commission have made a difference to the way that family violence services operate. They have made victim-survivors safer. They have held perpetrators more accountable. These were and are nation-leading reforms, and we strongly suggest that others around the nation follow suit.