The Coalition’s $90 million announcement includes:

• Implementing a to ensure police and relevant agencies can share information about violent offenders.
• Making it a criminal act to use mobile phones and computer networks to cause an intimate partner or family member to fear for their safety.
• Royal commission into sexual abuse in Indigenous communities.

“The scourge of family violence reaches into every corner of this country and into every cohort of Australian society. And every time we re-commit to new funding like we did today, we make the statement that enough is enough,” she said.

Labor’s response to domestic and family violence

Labor says they will take steps to:

• Preventing perpetrators from using the tax and corporate systems to create debts as a form of coercive control.
• They will make perpetrators accountable for these debts and look at making them liable for social security debts.
• Look at how to stop perpetrators from receiving their victim’s superannuation after death.
• Invest $8.6 million in innovative perpetrator responses and intensive behaviour change programs, including electronic monitoring and ankle bracelets on high-risk perpetrators and early interventions for young people.

“It is all too frequent that we see a chilling new headline, reporting on the death of another woman, so often at the hands of a current or former partner,” she said.

Funding is a ‘drop in the ocean’

She said it was great to witness the acknowledgement of the need for increased investment in housing and some of the frontline services, pointing to the Coalition’s commitment to expand emergency accommodation and payments for people fleeing domestic violence.

While acknowledging Labor’s commitments to violence prevention, Ripper said the party’s $8.6 million announcement was “woefully inadequate”.

‘We need to tackle family violence at the source’

“And we need to keep developing programs and interventions to work with different men at different stages of their journey of change.”

“They actually need a front door into services that might actually give them information about financial abuse and where they can go for support,” she said.

Politicians were ‘disappointingly quiet’

“We have seen more women murdered at the hands of men in the last week, and yet the silence has been deafening,” he said.

“I’m sure that women would vote for a party that came forward with a really strong platform about what they’re going to be doing to make sure that men and boys who perpetrate violence against women are held to account, not just by our society, but held to account by the law.”