Wednesday, 15 May 2024

Victorian Systemic Review of Family Violence Deaths

Georgie PURCELL (Northern Victoria) (18:53): (899) My adjournment matter this evening is for the Attorney-General, and the action I seek is to increase funding to the Coroners Court to enable the Victorian Systemic Review of Family Violence Deaths to conduct extensive and timely inquests into family violence deaths. The Victorian Systemic Review of Family Violence Deaths, a unit within the Coroners Court of Victoria, has advised victim families that due to resource limitations and an overbearing workload they are still investigating cases of Victorian women who were killed in 2022. A domestic violence murder warrants urgent interrogation, not a two-year waitlist. We cannot afford to wait years to hear the crucial recommendations and findings of the Coroners Court to address family violence. Each day that goes past we lose valuable time to invest in opportunities for intervention to improve our state’s services for family violence victims and to reform police responses. We lose a chance to listen to victims before they are lost to the hands of violent men, and every four days another woman is murdered in this country. Families are forced to endure further trauma and unbearable suffering following what is the most traumatic event of their lives, waiting years for any closure on the circumstances of their loved one’s death, only to essentially be told, ‘We don’t have enough money to find out how she died, to find out how the state failed to protect her, and we don’t have time to investigate how this can be prevented in the future.’

One of the Coroners Court’s main roles is to reduce preventable deaths by publishing their findings and recommendations for the state. Even the most basic of recommendations given in 2012 by the Coroners Court, such as providing training standards and supervision to applicant support workers, to develop a wideranging education and information campaign for parents and caregivers of all school-aged children on the prevention of child sexual abuse, or for Victoria Police to conduct specific inquiries into the perpetrator’s access to or possession of weapons when a complaint of family violence and sexual assault is made, were refused by the Liberal government and successive Labor governments. As a result, in the past five years alone there have been almost 500,000 recorded incidents of family violence in Victoria alone.

This government claims it stands alongside us to combat violence against women, yet it is still simultaneously upholding the system that enables it to proliferate. Following the Bondi Junction attack, the New South Wales government allocated an additional $18 million in funding to their Coroners Court, and I ask the Attorney-General to similarly respond to urgently address the violence against women epidemic in this state by increasing funding to the Coroners Court to ensure extensive and timely inquests into family violence deaths.