E&OE transcript
PATRICIA KARVELAS: The Social Services Minister, Tanya Plibersek, tabled the report in Parliament today and I spoke to her a short time ago. Minister, welcome to the program.
TANYA PLIBERSEK, MINISTER FOR SOCIAL SERVICES: It's a pleasure to be with you.
KARVELAS: Looking at this report in summary, it indicates some progress has been made, yet it says the scale or pace required to change the trajectory for people affected by it and save lives is essentially not fast enough. Do you accept change isn't occurring fast enough?
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: I have an incredible sense of urgency for more change. We've seen too many women lose their lives, too many children lose their lives, and, I mean, obviously, women and children murdered in family and domestic violence situations are the extreme end of the problem. But we know that this is an issue that affects 1 in 4 women and 1 in 14 men in the course of their lifetime. And, of course, we need to do more and do it faster to have the impacts that we want. We also have to keep up with new challenges. I really do think there are a lot of people who underestimate the impact that social media, online pornography is having on our children and young people in particular. There is something wrong with the fact that now the most likely offender against a girl is a boy who's under 18. We've seen an explosion of sexual violence amongst teenagers and, you know, we've seen the tragic consequences of that in the real world. We need to do more, and that means addressing some of these new challenges as well as keeping up our efforts. You know, frontline services need to have that support to help people every day.
KARVELAS: Independent MP Zali Steggall says data is unavailable for around 68% of the measures in the National Plan's outcomes. She says that means you can't actually measure how you're tracking. That's in the report as well. That one of the recommendations is in relation to measurement. Is that going to be one of the changes you make to actually build a measurement structure around delivery?
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: So, a few things about that. The first is the very reason we have an annual report from the National Commissioner for Family, Domestic and Sexual Violence is so that we can track progress. That is a big part of the work of this report and the work of the Commissioner. We've also got a couple of really important other ways of measuring progress. The first is through the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, the data that they track. And my own department, the Department of Social Services, has an online tracking feature where you can look at well over 500 measures that are underway because of the existing National Plan to End Family, Domestic and Sexual Violence and to see the progress of those measures. I think there is more work that we need to do to really drill down into what's working and what's not working, and we've got our Australian National Research Organisation for Women's Safety, ANROWS, doing a lot of that work with the Australian Institute of Family Studies, with the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. There is a lot of measurement going on, evaluation of programs to see what's working and what needs to be reformulated so that it works better. I think Zali's missing the point a little bit. I mean, the very reason we have the National Commissioner doing this annual report is to make sure that we are keeping track of what's working and what's not working.
KARVELAS: Oh, there's no doubt that the reporting is important, but even the report itself wants more tracking so that we can actually see, you know, cause and effect, so we can monitor it. Right, so is that. Is that going to be a key part of the next agreement, ensuring that that is trackable?
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: So, a couple of things. The first is, yes, we'll always invest more in making sure what we're doing is working, whether that's through population surveys or evaluations of measures and so on. But we also, and we've also just agreed at the National Cabinet, the Prime Minister got the state Premiers and First Ministers to agree to the heads of the Prime Minister's department and the Premier's and Chief Minister's departments to do more benchmarking across states and territories. But I sort of feel like getting involved in a long conversation about data again is missing the point a little bit. We've had eight major reviews with 1,000 recommendations. I don't want to be driven by more reporting and more recommendations. I actually want to be driven by what's happening on the ground and making sure that the people who are working on the front line of this have the information and the resources they need to help people. We need to make sure that we're building the houses, we're doing that. We need to make sure that that leading violence payment is available when people need it. We need to invest better to protect children and to help children heal if they've been harmed. We need to work with adolescents who are starting to use violence in their interpersonal relationships. We're doing all of that work. It's the work that is important.
KARVELAS: The report points out that not enough investment is going into early, getting there before the violence starts, when there are some signs, and that a lot of the investment, as you know, goes to after the violence has happened. Do you want to see a redistribution of that money to go into the before work?
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: I don't want to see a redistribution. I want greater investment in early intervention. It's a different thing. I don't want to take money away from the front line who are, you know, facing a woman who turns up with kids in the middle of the night and needs a place to go to be safe. I don't want to take money away from that. But I do think we need to do more on early intervention and prevention, because unless we reduce rates in the first place, we're always going to be struggling to keep up with the enormous, enormous issue that this is in the public. We need to reduce the incidence of violence as well as deal better with people who need safety immediately.
KARVELAS: And that greater investment is clearly, you know, on the cards for the next National Plan. It's going to have to be pretty substantial, isn't it, given we are seeing increased rates of sexual violence, particularly, as you say, among younger people. If it's an explosion, you need an explosion in support, don't you?
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Well, we certainly need more support, but we also need to do what we're already doing better. So, take the example of consent and respectful relationships education in schools. We know some schools do it better than other schools, so we need to learn from what's working and apply that more consistently across our systems. We know that there are examples of incredibly good practice where people who have begun to use violence confront their own behaviour and change their behaviour. We need to be able to scale that up and make that more broadly available. So, I think the question of investment is one of size, but it's also one of quality. We need to make sure both are there.
KARVELAS: Respectful relationships you mentioned last week, Matt Canavan spoke to me. He's the leader of the Nationals. He identified respectful relationships as being a problematic course because it asks male students to identify or look at their power. And he says that kind of starts from a prism of treating boys like they have too much power, like they are a problem. What do you say to that critique of a program like that?
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: So, I'm a Cabinet Minister, you know, I'm in a pretty powerful position. When I walk to my car at night in a dark car park, I still get my keys out in case someone attacks me. I've been assaulted walking home in Canberra at night. I think what some men don't understand is that they say not all men. And I agree it's not all men. I've got wonderful men in my life. But as a woman, you don't know which man it is. And when you're walking alone at night on the street, you don't know whether someone's safe to be around or not. I think it would be terrific if Matt Canavan spoke to some of the women in his life about what that feels like.
KARVELAS: I want to just go to this issue of this UK style ban on strangulation in pornography. You've raised it as something you want to look at. Is there more movement on that?
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Yeah, look, it is something that we want to look at. We want to see how it's operating. We've got an opportunity both through the digital duty of care work that we're doing. We've also of course, got to work with the states and territories on the actual practice of strangulation. So, it's one thing to deal with the pornography. What we've seen is now around 60% of young people say that they've experienced strangulation in their sexual encounters. So, the dealing with the pornography is part of it, dealing with the practice of it has to be a big part of what we do as well. I think a lot of young people who are engaging in this are doing it without understanding the dangers of it. They don't understand that you can kill someone immediately, you can give them brain damage. We're seeing people who've been strangled repeatedly showing up with early dementia. We know that you can experience clots or damage weeks after a strangulation incident. I think we need to do better at educating people about the dangers of it as well. It's not a harmless kink, this is a potentially deadly practise.
KARVELAS: Would it be covered then under the harms part of the social media laws that you wouldn't be able to depict strangulation online?
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Well, that's certainly something that we're looking at.
KARVELAS: So –
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Yeah, I'm not going to make announcements today, but it's a really serious concern for us. We know that too many kids are getting their sex education from pornography and it’s one of the reasons that we've introduced a world leading social media delay for under 16s. It's one of the reasons that we've introduced age verification for pornography. There's definitely more to do with the depiction of harmful sexual practises. I'd say there's also, I mean, you can search for, I don't know, it's children's television viewing hours, but you can search for step-sister, step-daughter, there's like a lot of very disturbing stuff that is very readily available. I think we need to push back on that.
KARVELAS: Just finally, on a very different issue and a very political issue, this $6 million grant to this golf course in the Prime Minister's electorate in Marrickville. I'm sure lots of golf courses would like that upgrade, right? I mean, it doesn't kind of pass the pub test, does it, that he gets to do it and then others can't apply to have their golf courses fixed.
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Yeah. And that's why we've got other large infrastructure programs that people can apply for. There's the thriving suburbs one, there's stronger regions or I can't remember what the proper name is-
KARVELAS: Doesn't mean this is fair though does it?
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: There’s $1.7 billion in those two programs alone, the regional program and the suburban program, they're competitive programs. Any member of parliament can support organisations in their electorate to apply for that $1.7 billion across two programs. I think it's, you know, we should have high expectations of how public money is spent, I agree with that. But where you've got a clear election commitment, you've got an established process, you've got other pools of funding available that are competitive grant rounds that other members of Parliament can help their local communities apply for. I think it's a-
KARVELAS: The two-party system is currently under strain, you know that. Look what's happening by elections across the country that we've seen. Doesn't it just make people go Labor Party does it, the Liberals did it, this is how they all are.
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: I don't know that there'll be a lot of people saying that the Prime Minister shouldn't have supported an upgrade to a women's refuge, a women's health centre and stopping raw sewerage flowing into the Cook's River. I don’t know-
KARVELAS: There was more to that grant than just the Cooks River.
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: - I don't know that they're going to be that upset about that.
KARVELAS: Tanya Plibersek, thanks for coming in.
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Thank you.