Wednesday, 26 August 2026

 Chris COUZENS (Geelong) (14:48): I believe I was up to thanking and congratulating the family violence workforce for everything that they do in our community every single day, and the importance of that. I also want to thank all those advocates and the people that have been actively working towards this change and acknowledge what it means for them and their families, particularly those families who have lost loved ones. That advocacy work has been so important to the work that the Attorney-General and others have done over a period of time.

I do want to also acknowledge the lived-experience Victim Survivors’ Advisory Council and the important work that they have done. I really want to acknowledge Katie Alexander in particular as someone who is on that lived-experience advisory committee and who also lives in the Geelong electorate and has made contact with not only me but also other members of the Labor Party, including the member for Lara, the member for Bellarine and the candidate for South Barwon, to talk about what we can do together to work towards making change. I will read part of her speech that she did yesterday right here in this Parliament talking about survivors of family violence:

Survivors of family violence often say “I wish I had seen the signs.” It was hard for me to see the signs because harmful behaviours were minimised and normalised in my family.

Men using manipulative behaviours were all around me. My father was abusive and bread-crumbed attention; my first boyfriend was domineering and demeaning; and my fiancé love-bombed and gas-lit me. After marriage and parenting tied us together my husband stole our son’s childhood.

This experience is something that probably all of us in this place have heard time and time again. There are many women in my electorate of Geelong who have told me their experiences and their stories of family violence and of coercive behaviour, and we know that Aboriginal women and children are over-represented in this space. Often in talking to those people they will go through what their experience has been and what needs to change, and this bill has been about listening and responding to those voices of victim-survivors.

Reflecting on what I have heard over the years and preparing for this contribution, I thought about all the things that women in particular and young girls had talked to me about in terms of what their experience was. Many of them described exactly the same things over a period of time, and sometimes it was quite slow. Those insidious changes would creep into their life, and they felt totally controlled by their male partner or sometimes their father. It started with things like controlling their phone and tracking where they were. It also included things like having to explain why they were meeting a family member or a friend, to the point where it got just all too hard to even try to get out the front door. They talked about then having tracking put on their phone to monitor where they were, control of finances and the bank accounts in the family household and how that was completely controlled by the male partner and then of course the physical and sexual violence that was also associated with that. I know that many of those women will be either watching this today or reading Hansard, looking at this bill that we are about to pass and knowing that we have listened to what they have had to say. For me it is really important that we continue to listen to what women and girls are telling us needs to change.

As I said, I hear from many Aboriginal women who have been removed from the family home because they have been misrepresented as the perpetrator. Multicultural women have had similar experiences, where the perpetrator may be a white man and convinces the police attending that they are not the perpetrator; their female partner is. For Aboriginal women in particular the consequences of that often lead to having their children removed. It leads to child protection being involved. We know that we need to start making real change, and this is what this legislation is all about. Criminalising coercive control as a standalone offence is something that I believe everybody in this chamber supports, but we need to also have that awareness out there for women so that they know that this is there to support them, to help them. Ensuring that Victoria Police have that knowledge – my understanding is that they will be trained up to implement this legislation – is so important to so many.

The bill, in criminalising coercive control as a standalone offence, will apply to adults, with a focus on coercive control within intimate partner relationships. The offence will commence on 1 March 2028. This will allow time to educate the community and for family violence response services, including police, to prepare. That preparation is really important. Unfortunately there are still some situations where police attendance does not always turn out the way it should, so this knowledge is really, really important. I value the police role in family violence. We have a fantastic unit in Geelong. I acknowledge and thank them for the work that they do, because I know how difficult it is. But I also want to make sure that they are trained up and skilled enough to be able to deliver this legislation on the ground. Many of us have heard from the coalface, from those women and girls who have been impacted by coercive control, what that means for them and their families, for their siblings and for their loved ones and the difficulty that they have because of that coercive control. Trying to get away from that situation, we know, is terribly difficult for many of those women.

This is really important legislation. I again want to thank the Attorney-General for her work and also previous ministers for family violence prevention, because if it were not for them listening and all of our colleagues on this side of the house listening to survivors of family violence, we would not be standing here today debating this bill. It is such an important one, and I commend the bill to the house.

 Nicole WERNER (Warrandyte) (14:57): I rise to speak on the Justice Legislation Amendment (Family Violence, Coercive Control, Good Character, Risk Assessment and Other Matters) Bill 2026. At the outset I will say that the coalition will be supporting this bill. Right now there is a meaningful public conversation going on about gender-based violence, and rightly so. There are some very public incidents that are going on that I will not weigh in on. But I will say that it became a renewed issue for me when I recently visited an all-girls school in my capacity as Shadow Minister for Youth, a school called Strathcona in the electorate of Hawthorn. During a Q and A session with a year 11 class one of the students poignantly asked me: ‘Nicole, what are you and the government doing to combat misogyny in my generation?’ That question that day honestly floored me. It was direct, it was sincere and it was astute, and it took me a moment to gather my thoughts and give her a response, because it was such a weighty question.

Misogyny is not a new concept. What is new in more recent generations is that it is no longer socially acceptable. Culture has changed. Times have changed. Society has progressed. This is due in part to legislation that also changes as society and culture changes. Once upon a time women were not allowed to vote. Once upon a time women were not allowed to hold public office. It was three years ago to this very day that I became the first woman to ever represent the seat of Warrandyte. Times continue to change. That is why it is incumbent on us as legislators to listen to our communities and keep pace with what our communities’ expectations are and pass laws that reflect the needs of our times. That is our responsibility to the Victorians that we have been elected to represent. That is why it was a year ago that the Liberals introduced a bill to criminalise coercive control in Victoria, which, shamefully, Labor voted down. This is why we support this bill today despite its delay.

I said to the group of year 11 girls I spoke to that these are the types of things we are doing, moving bills like this and changing laws like this to criminalise coercive control. ‘What is coercive control?’ people may ask. By definition it is a repeated pattern of abuse by a current or former partner, meant to control someone, where the abuser should have known it would probably cause harm. It can involve intimidation, humiliation, surveillance, financial control, isolation and manipulation designed to control another person and strip away their independence and confidence. It is the gaslighting, it is the financial control, it is the emotional abuse, blackmail, manipulation and unseen control that takes place nearly 100 per cent of the time before physical abuse takes place. Sadly, over 90 per cent of the time it is gender based, with a man coercively controlling a woman. We know it does happen to men too, so that is why we are bringing in these laws to protect whoever is the victim, irrespective of gender. However, sadly, we know that statistically one in four women have experienced physical or sexual violence from an intimate partner from the age of 15 – one in four. If we let that sink in, that is a quarter of us. We either are someone or we know someone that has been a victim of gender-based violence, and that is devastating.

Coercive control in practice is that girlfriend of yours whose husband does not let her use or have access to her own bank account. It is your friend at work who you know needs to dump her toxic partner, but what you do not know is that he says to her every day, ‘If you leave me, I’ll kill you.’ It is the boyfriend you used to have that would call you worthless, ugly, hopeless every single day until you gave up and started to believe it too, stealing your self-worth so he could control you. Coercive control precedes almost every intimate partner homicide in this country. Emotional and psychological abuse was present in 96.7 per cent of cases reviewed nationally over eight years. This is why this bill is so important.

Going back to the room of year 11 girls, I said to that room that day, ‘In order for culture to change, it has to take place on every level.’ We cannot solely legislate our way out of it. Society and culture has to change as well, and it takes all of us for that to happen. For me, that is why I supported the social media ban for under-16s – not because we should wrap kids in cottonwool but because a child’s role model should not be chosen for them by an algorithm optimising for outrage. It is why I supported the federal government locking children out of pornography sites. Violent and degrading pornography is rewriting the sexual scripts of a generation. Children are learning what a relationship looks like from the material that treats coercion as normal and cruelty as intimacy, and they are carrying that into real relationships with real people.

Another form of change comes through education, because we have to champion boys becoming good men. People doing work like Daniel Principe are leading the way to help change that narrative for boys in schools. We have the chance to help boys become the men they deep down actually want to be: courageous, decent, kind, respectful – the kind of men that care about the people around them. We have the chance to help them reject the crap that is being sold to them on social media, the crap that says that dominance is strength or that women exist only for their pleasure and that feeling nothing and not caring is what makes a man. I am raising a son, and I am personally so conscious that we must show boys a better vision of what it takes to be a man. We must be ruthless in calling out the negative influences and behaviours that too easily take root. In the words of this advocate, Daniel Principe, we have to champion boys and challenge culture.

We also know we must go further in preventing domestic violence. That is why the Liberals have committed to implementing a domestic violence disclosure scheme, also known as Clare’s law. Clare’s law was named after Clare Wood, a woman who was tragically murdered by a partner with a violent criminal history which she did not know about. Clare’s law would allow partners who are in an intimate relationship with someone and who have concerns about that person’s behaviour to check in with police to see if there are any domestic violence offences or intervention orders. It might be before they are about to move in together or before they take the next step and get married. Whatever it may be, where police can see that someone is at risk, it lets them proactively disclose information to warn them. If Clare Wood had had this law, if she had been able to find this information and if it had been able to be disclosed to her by police, things might have been very different for her. It is a law that could have saved her life. Sadly, there are many more people in similar situations. Clare did not have this. She was murdered. That is why we sought to move this law in her name two years ago now.

Domestic violence disclosure schemes have already proven to be effective in New Zealand, Canada, the UK and even South Australia. For over two years the Liberals have pushed for it here in Victoria. Under our policy anyone who uses the scheme will be offered two free trauma-informed counselling sessions to help them work out what to do next. We will not leave them alone. Standing with victims cannot only mean helping them after the harm is done or if the harm is imminent. It has to also mean giving them the chance to walk away before it starts. That is why we fought for Clare’s law to be brought here in Victoria. Sadly, again, the Labor government voted it down.

It is up to all of us. I return to the room full of year 11 girls. When I spoke to them in answer to that question – ‘What are you doing to combat misogyny for my generation?’ – with all of the legislative change and all of the culture change and the education that must take place, I said to them, ‘But at the end of the day, we are all responsible. Boys and men are responsible for their own behaviour: to do better, to respect women, to be real men and call out unacceptable behaviour when they see it. And for women it is on us to call it out too.’ I told those girls, and I will say it again, that when you see bullying or unacceptable behaviour do not stand by and do nothing. Call it out. Do not tolerate it. Do not accept it. Demand a better standard from those around you, whether it be your brother, your boyfriend or your friend, whoever it may be. Do not let that standard slip. In the words of AFLW great Daisy Pearce, be a good human. Integrity matters. Humanity matters. Doing the right thing even when you think no-one is watching matters. So my message to every young woman who is wondering right now what is happening in our society is, ‘We are with you. Things are changing. Laws are changing, culture is changing and we are on your side.’

 Luba GRIGOROVITCH (Kororoit – Minister for Youth, Minister for Carers and Volunteers) (15:07): I move:

That the debate be now adjourned.

Motion agreed to and debate adjourned.

Ordered that debate be adjourned until later this day.