Wednesday, 19 June 2024

 Wendy LOVELL (Northern Victoria) (17:54): (967) My adjournment matter is for the Premier, and it concerns the prevention of family violence in Victoria. The action that I seek is that the Premier extend the recently announced saturation model family violence prevention program that will run in Ballarat to include areas in northern Victoria where the incidence of serious family violence is higher than in Ballarat.

The tragic loss of women’s lives this year is a painful reminder of the urgent need for Victoria to do more to address family violence. On 31 May this year Premier Jacinta Allan announced that Ballarat would be home to a four-year saturation model program for preventing family violence that will draw on world-leading social research to strengthen referral pathways, boost support services, combat toxic attitudes and run initiatives to test new prevention approaches. This approach is being rolled out in Ballarat due to three recent high-profile and tragic deaths of women, and I hope that the pilot program can deliver insights that are ready to be applied across Victoria and Australia in combating the causes of family violence and providing help and support when the worst happens.

However, there are areas of Victoria missing out on this program where the rate of serious violence is much higher, and they deserve the same interventions and support as Ballarat. Tragic deaths that make the newspaper headlines bring us together in mourning and galvanise our will to take action against this epidemic, but behind the headlines is the invisible tragedy of families who suffer beatings and intense violence, which never makes the news.

If you look at the data on family violence that involves serious assaults, Crime Statistics Agency data for 2023 shows that the 26 local government areas with the highest rates of serious assaults are all rural and regional areas. Greater Shepparton sadly tops the list, with a rate of 379 serious assaults per hundred thousand people, followed by Swan Hill with a rate of 293. Half of the 26 LGAs with the highest rates of serious assault are in northern Victoria, and those 13 all recorded a higher rate of serious assault offences than Ballarat. Greater Shepparton’s rate of 379 is more than three times that of Ballarat, which has a rate of 111 family violence serious assaults per hundred thousand people.

Extending the family violence prevention program to additional areas that have the highest serious assault rates would enable world-leading prevention initiatives to target those areas with the worst levels of violence and the greatest need for help. Regional cities and towns face a particular challenge in preventing family violence. They tend to have tight-knit communities and are more geographically isolated, while there are fewer support services to help victims of violence. There are also fewer police officers to respond to crisis situations, and some stations do not have 24-hour police attendance. Victims of family violence in these areas cannot wait four years for the pilot program to run in Ballarat. They need to be included in the program now.