Thursday, 19 June 2025

Respect Victoria

Tim RICHARDSON (Mordialloc) (17:21): (1208) My adjournment this evening is to the Minister for Prevention of Family Violence, and the action I seek is for the minister to detail how Respect Victoria’s campaign What Kind of Man Do You Want to Be? will engage with young men and boys in our local community. This is a fundamental campaign launched by Respect Victoria in the prevention of family violence around the role that I have as the Parliamentary Secretary for Men’s Behaviour Change, because we know ending gendered violence starts with men and boys in our community. We know how critical it is for the role modelling of young boys and men in our community and the support that they need to be the best versions of themselves. This research and evidence, which has been a good 12 months in the making, has been substantial. I had the opportunity to launch this recently with Respect Victoria, and I want to call out to their incredible team, who do an amazing amount of work. We know the rapid review has happened with Micaela Cronin and the federal government. One amazing hallmark in Victoria is that in this space, in the prevention of family violence, we are leading a lot of the markers. But one of the key reform areas after the family safety package was announced last year was the need to engage more with men and boys. Ending gendered violence starts with men and boys; it starts with us. Some of the hardest parts of those reforms are the cultural change and the journey that we will be on. This means challenging those rigid stereotypes of what it means in the role modelling of men and boys in our community and the mental health and wellbeing pressures that they confront.

We know that male suicide is 75 per cent of the toll. There were over 770 Victorians that we lost last year. We know how difficult it is for men and boys to reach out for that help and support. I said this in the time that I was parliamentary secretary for mental health: if men and boys showed the same love and compassion for themselves as they do for their neighbour or their friend when they call out and say ‘Can I have a hand?’, maybe we would go some way towards reducing that toll. We need to break down the stigma around mental health and wellbeing. We need to do so much more. We need to break down those stigmas and stereotypes and get lads talking to each other and get them seeking help when they need it most. While that disproportionate impact that we see in mental health has such a chilling toll, we know that 95 per cent of violence is perpetrated by men and boys. When there is a disproportionate toll like that, we need to front up and ask how our lads are being raised. How do we break down those norms? The 12 people who have shared their experiences in this campaign of how they have been raised are truly inspiring. It is going to be deployed across the state, and I am really keen to know how it will engage Kingston and Greater Dandenong residents, how it will drive that change and how as a Parliament, as a state and indeed as a nation we can promote positive masculinities, we can make men and boys be the best versions of themselves and we can the lower mental health harm and toll in our community and lower the instances of gendered violence over time. I am really keen to hear from the Minister for Prevention of Family Violence about how the Respect Victoria campaign will be deployed in my community.