Ms ROXON (6:01 PM) —I want to address the allocation of a modest sum of money for what is a major social problem and follow how this money has been underspent, diverted, delayed, mismanaged and wasted. The sorry tale I want to tell is of federal expenditure that has been allocated to the prevention of violence against women, and it is a story that has many parts. The first part is to set some context for why I am raising this matter in the debate on Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2003-2004, Appropriation Bill (No. 4) 2003-2004 and Appropriation (Parliamentary Departments) Bill (No. 2) 2003-2004.

I think it is worth touching briefly on a couple of incidents that have happened recently, and more generally, in the community. In Victoria just this last week we have seen that keeping a woman as a sex slave and torture victim in his own garage, with his wife and son living inside the house and his neighbours witnessing abuse from only metres away, was no real problem for a Warrnambool businessman who has just been convicted. Witnesses are now saying in the courts that they wish they had done something to help this victim sooner. In New South Wales there has been massive coverage about the alleged gang rape of a young woman by professional rugby players in the resort town of Coffs Harbour. This is being papered over very quickly by the club's media people, but some players, from this club and others, are now commenting that this sort of behaviour is not uncommon in rugby circles.

Nationally, about 63,000 women reported assaults to the police in 2002. We know that this figure is probably only about 10 per cent of women who have actually been assaulted, as that is the proportion of women that will go to police. Yet many in this House still do not believe that violence against women is a major social problem. Women and children are being subjected daily to violence and sexual assault by male members of their families in Indigenous communities across the country, and we are seeing drug addiction and suicide as the only escape for many of these young victims. A three-year-old child with syphilis is, I think, horrifying to everyone in this House, but it is not an uncommon story. Last year more than 32,000 women with young children in tow were assisted by women's refuges around the country, and many thousands more women on their own were also assisted. Many have suffered years of abuse and only leave when they finally see that the next violent episode may actually kill or severely maim either them or their children.

What do each of these awful stories or issues have in common? They all have in common the casual, almost dismissive manner in which the horror of sexual assault and violence against women is accepted within our community. Nearly 40 per cent of homicides in Australia are the result of domestic violence. Too often this is the tragic end of a relationship that has gone through all the preceding steps of emotional, physical and sexual abuse that are passed off as private matters by those who witness them or suspect them. On top of those women who show up in our homicide statistics, there are of course thousands and thousands of others who are not murdered but injured and abused each year by men who are often their friends, partners, husbands, lovers or fathers. This is the brutal truth.

So what funding has the government allocated in the budget to this issue? I use the context to emphasise that this is such a serious problem. Even though the extent of this problem is not widely acknowledged in the community and the statistics are just as neglected as the issue, it was welcome that the federal government recognised that it has a role to play in preventing further violence against women. As far back as 1997 the Prime Minister announced a new program of Partnerships Against Domestic Violence, with funding of $25 million over four years. Many groups in the community were led to believe that this was a signal that something substantial was going to be done to help prevent violence against women. In 1999 it was announced that the PADV stage 2 would attract an additional $25 million and that the program would be extended to June 2004. This looked like an additional commitment at the time but, with the benefit of hindsight, I am unsure whether this was just a way of stretching the period for payments over a longer time.

In 2001, a further welcome announcement was made that $16 million was to be spent on a national initiative to combat sexual assault. This was to be run over a four-year period. It was only $16 million to tackle this epidemic of violence and assault against women, and the most disappointing part of it is that we are now three years into that four-year period and we have yet to see anything for that money. Although it was a modest amount, it was enough of a commitment that, if spent properly, it could have a significant impact in this area. But, in order to have impact, the government must not only allocate this money but also develop the campaigns and spend real money on these prevention projects and campaigns.

Unfortunately, after a promising start, we can track a very sad tale when we look at the Howard government's neglect on this issue. We find that these small allocations of money have been left unspent; they have been diverted to other programs and then the money has been wasted, when it has been spent in this area. The budget papers for 2003-04 read as a Monty Python script when it comes to analysing the commitment the government has made to women's programs and women's issues. Words appear, such as `parameter adjustments', `unspent funds' and `rephasing of resources', which all basically come down to a smokescreen to divert attention from the fact that the limited amount of money allocated to women's programs has been consistently underspent and poorly accounted for by the Prime Minister's own department. However, there is one clear statement and that is on page 45 of the Prime Minister and Cabinet budget papers. It states:

What is going to happen after that? The additional estimates statement still notes that the money which has been allocated to these campaigns is there to be spent but, on this side of the House, we are starting to get suspicious that we will ever see anything for that allocation. Given the struggle to get money allocated to this sort of issue, when it is so hidden in the community, we are concerned that allocation is not enough. We also have to make sure that this money is going to be spent on the project.

The Prime Minister did refer to the prevention of domestic violence against women as one of his priorities after his election to government in 1996, but he now presides over a country that has increased levels of sexual assault and a domestic violence prevention strategy that has not delivered a single national anti-violence campaign in more than eight years. The government has spent several years talking about developing a national campaign against sexual assault but, in the meantime, it has allowed this money to be spent elsewhere. A shift in priorities saw $10 million of the money go, instead, to producing fridge magnets for the 2002 antiterrorism campaign. When the government was sprung for having diverted the funds in this way, it promised to spend the extra money in the following financial year—the financial year we are now in—on an exciting community awareness campaign, described as exciting by the Office of the Status of Women. This campaign was ready to be run at the end of last year, television and newspaper ads had been produced, media space was booked and experts from the US had assessed the program and were being flown here to speak at the launch.

At last those of us who had been following these issues could see that some of the money that had been allocated to this issue was being spent. Obviously money had been spent on the extensive research that had been conducted and it was found that the ads and the campaign devised were very well received in the target group of young people. Obviously the research cost some money and the ads that had been developed cost some money—we had ads for print and TV, and broader materials for schools and community education campaigns. We know that at least $2.7 million has already been spent in the production of these materials.

In December 2003, just a week before the launch was due, there was another spanner put in the works. A committee, consisting of three government male MPs and Mr Howard's private secretary, shelved this campaign. The real reason for the shock decision is not known. At best it reveals to me serious mismanagement of funds, atrocious planning by the government and, if this campaign material is never used and the campaign does not see the light of day, wasteful expenditure. At worst the decision is sexist, ignorant to the research and completely dismissive of the importance of this issue. Are we ever going to see proper resources allocated to this issue and spent on a decent project that comes to fruition? Surely this is not too much for us to ask.

What is the next stage? What is the Prime Minister now saying? Where will this campaign go? It is interesting that the Prime Minister, a couple of years ago, said he believed that we are living in a post-feminist age where women have got just about everything they need in terms of equality. Leaving aside issues that we have argued vehemently with the government about, like paid maternity leave, child care and pay equity, just to name a few, Labor clearly disagrees, on a large number of social and economic indicators, that women have achieved the equality that they deserve, but that is not my focus for today. When the Prime Minister thinks that we have everything we need in terms of equality, there is nothing very equal about the fear and reality of sexual assault and violence that so many women in our community are experiencing. The sad reality is that the majority of that violence is within relationships, perpetrated by somebody well known—often intimately—to the women.

I think these sorts of realities really focus on why the campaign that was going to be called `No respect, no relationship' was so important. In fact, the brief that the government designed to give to the advertising agencies to produce this campaign specifically says that it is targeted at relationship violence—to tackle this issue in a way that previous campaigns have not been able to do. I would like to read a comment from the brief that was given to the tenderers. It states:

I am at a loss to understand how the Prime Minister can stand up in this House and say that the reason the campaign has been cancelled, delayed or postponed—we are not sure which—is that he thinks people should be referred to the police. That is the only answer he can see in this area. I will come to that in greater detail later.

The minister responsible for the status of women, Minister Kay Patterson, seems to have taken the cue from her predecessor, Minister Vanstone, and decided that, in the face of obviously almost no support from her male colleagues at the cabinet table, she will just keep quiet and not rock the boat. The sorts of things that are keeping women quiet in the community appear to be keeping women quiet in the cabinet room as well.

Minister Patterson has walked into this job inheriting more than one muck up. The debacle of the way we would celebrate women's suffrage is just another, where the Howard government could not even put up a sculpture to commemorate 100 years of women's suffrage in this country. It seems to me they had only 100 years notice that it was coming up but apparently that was not quite enough time to get things organised. Now the minister has been lumped with the shreds of the community awareness campaign that four blokes from the coalition, including the Prime Minister's own private secretary, have overturned. This is although the materials developed for the campaign and the public money already spent on it had received international acclaim as a progressive and effective campaign to stop relationship violence, particularly among young people. It is interesting that Donna Carson, a woman the Prime Minister recognised on Australia Day this year as a local hero for the work she had done in the prevention of domestic violence, has called for this campaign to be run because it would be so effective in preventing people from suffering the sorts of injuries and abuse that she herself has gone through.

That brings me to the final part of this story: what can actually happen now? How do we make sure that the money that has been allocated for this campaign, which in fact has now been spent partially, in developing this campaign, has some benefit in the community? The bottom line is that this campaign must be run. Public money has been spent and the campaign has been effectively researched; it is long overdue. It has been shown, through testing, that it is going to be a successful campaign, and we call on the government to run this campaign. We have already called on the government to change its mind and go ahead with this campaign, but if it is not prepared to do that it must release the materials that have already been produced and paid for. They were paid for with public money and they are well-developed materials. If the government is not prepared to pay the extra money to run the campaign, there may be others in the community who are. There may be television stations that would run the materials as community announcements; there may be state governments, domestic violence groups and others who would piece together some way to fund this campaign. It is not cheap to produce the materials that have been produced, and I know that many other people in this House and outside it would not like to see wasted all that work which finally has been done.

There is plenty of evidence that this sort of campaign is needed, with recent surveys showing in particular that many young men still believe that using violence against their girlfriends or pressuring girls into having sex is acceptable behaviour; clearly, it is not. The old beliefs that some young women are just asking for it, or that it is not always wrong to hit someone because sometimes they provoke it, are scarily still present and are still strongly held by some young men. The campaign effectively identified this as an issue that they could tackle. It used young men talking to other young men, which was a very effective way of getting the message through that this is not acceptable behaviour. It seems a waste to let all that work now be used for nothing.

In fact, the Prime Minister himself seems to hold some of those old-fashioned views and beliefs that the campaign was specifically designed to address. I am not saying the Prime Minister would agree with the statements I used before, but, in justifying the government's decision to shelve this campaign, the Prime Minister said he would prefer that the campaign just told young women to go to the police, their priest or someone else to talk about the issue, rather than referring young people to information on a web site or highlighting unacceptable behaviour through print and media ads. But this fundamentally ignores the fact that nearly 60 per cent of sexual assaults happen within a relationship context and that only 10 per cent of victims are ever likely to report it to the police.

Rather than relying on his own outdated ideas of what constitutes violence in a relationship or how it should be handled, the Prime Minister would be well advised to sit down and study the comprehensive brief that outlined the government's reasons for wanting to develop a mass community awareness campaign in the first place. He should take the time to understand the reasons why a simplistic answer such as, `It's a criminal act; report it,' in many cases of relationship violence and assaults does not work and, in any case, only deals with part of the problem. The government's own advice said this, yet the Prime Minister and his gang of four have ignored it.

When we talk about domestic violence, I think it is important for us to send a clear message about what is wrong and, certainly, what is criminal, and to give people the support they need to get assistance and to report criminal behaviour to the police. But what we in this House are surely trying to achieve is to prevent these instances from happening to start with. As I quoted to the House before, this campaign was directed at prevention—not at dealing with how people should cope in a situation where they have been assaulted or have been a victim of domestic violence, but at encouraging young people to develop strong and healthy relationships of mutual respect, where violence is not going to occur to start with, and perhaps to pick up some of the warning signs early on and to make sure that they get out if they see that their relationship is going in the wrong direction.

I think it is really critical that this campaign be run. It is an issue of national significance. The government has moved the money around, underspent it, not really been quick off the mark, spent it on something else and now says that it is going to spend it on this initiative. It finally spent some money on the initiative and then pulled it at the last minute. That is a great waste, and I think the Prime Minister should reconsider his position.

Evaluations from the first year of the Partnerships Against Domestic Violence projects, which were all pilot projects, show that, if we are serious about preventing violence and not just reacting to it, we have to work in the ways that this campaign was directed towards: we need to work with young people to break an intergenerational cycle; we need to work with communities to educate against violence; and we also need to work with victims and perpetrators. Going back to the old approach of telling women that if they do not go to the police it is not really violence is taking us back light-years to a culture that has ignored the insidious nature of the power imbalance and fear that characterises many relationships.

So I call on the Prime Minister to understand, as I know he does, that violence against women is wrong. It is about the abuse of power, and it is often about relationships and respect. We need the Prime Minister's leadership to help stop this cycle of violence. We need him to be brave enough to change his mind. We need him to show some leadership and override the decision that has been made by his small committee and let this campaign run. It might be difficult and ugly for many of us to confront the reality of violence against women in the community, but it sure is a lot uglier for those involved in abusive and violent relationships. I call on the Prime Minister to change his mind.