The national crisis of violence against women is the culmination of many problems, and the government can solve some of them.

Alison Scott’s beloved sister Jessica was murdered by her husband five years ago.

On Tuesday, she will be one of several women who have lost female family members to violence to speak at a national crisis roundtable in Canberra that will address Australia’s shocking female murder rate.

It will stand out for being primarily a meeting of people who work in the area, rather than politicians and bureaucrats.

But it’s also one of many meetings taking place right now as pressure is put on politicians to finally do something serious to protect women at immediate risk and hopefully reduce the number of people who find themselves in that situation.

This week there has been a national cabinet meeting, a police ministers meeting and other meetings in several states, including a NSW Cabinet meeting on Friday.

The frustration of many in the community was palpable after Wednesday’s national cabinet meeting. The announcement that an existing pilot scheme to help the immediate needs of women fleeing violence with a $5,000 assistance package and some measures to address online misogyny was met with quite a few “is that it?” ” disbelief, even if it meant new spending of $925 million over five years.

Alison Scott’s message this week ahead of the talks in Canberra was simple: “We have been controlled for too long, not just by the perpetrators but by the systems.”

It’s a message heard from many people who have been calling for change for too long, and one that this week’s frustrations only seem to have reinforced.

The interventions – from the level of a call to the police to the way financial and legal support systems work – are a nightmare of paperwork and conditions that must be met by people who are often fleeing a violent and controlling partner and not in a privileged position to manage the paperwork.

This adds to the dilemmas faced by the police, who often find themselves powerless to act.

Broader issues need to be addressed

The fact that support systems can be used as weapons against women is widely recognized in advice given to governments.

Long-time advocates for action against domestic violence say one notable thing about next Tuesday’s Canberra meeting is its very clear focus on women who are murdered, missing or who die as a result of suicide, rather than the broader set and complex of issues that must be addressed in prevention, intervention and protection for women who may not be at immediate risk of being murdered but who live in daily fear and in a world from which they do not feel they can escape.

Advocates say change is urgently needed and many feel the spending announcement is not enough.(ABC News: Luke Stephenson)

And that’s before we even begin to consider the related issues that are all too often another part of this broader community failure: drug and alcohol abuse, gambling addiction, mental illness, as well as the workings of power. judicial.

Advocates say there are a number of policy changes that can (or at least should) be made immediately that could help reduce risks and open up options for women.

Agencies, including the federal government’s own Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee, have looked at the ways in which perpetrators can use the social security and child support systems to continue to exert coercive control over their partners, as well as limit women’s choices about leave due to the sheer financial impossibility of doing so.

As well as income support payments putting women well below the poverty line, there are rules around waiting periods and access to payments that mean you can’t even get support for an average of nine weeks , and You will still need to demonstrate that you have first exhausted your liquid assets.

These are things the government can fix.

And it can fix the social security system’s interaction with child support payments that penalize women’s access to income support, even if their partner is not paying them the amounts they claim.

The government has also received numerous recommendations to split the two systems.

Financing plagued by bureaucracy

When Anthony Albanese announced the $925 million Leaving Violence programme, many frustrated voices welcomed the initiative but wanted to know why the government couldn’t have simply increased funding for frontline legal and support services.

In the case of community legal centers, the answer lies, at least in part, in the bureaucracy of how they are funded.

Advocates say there are policy changes the government could make immediately that could help women fleeing domestic violence. (ABC News: Luke Bowden)

In 2020, the Morrison government changed the funding system so that it is now distributed across the states, rather than being purely the responsibility of the federal government.

There is now an agreement between the Commonwealth and the State to cover that. And it doesn’t end until next year.

While the Albanian government is not saying it, money will be available before then (possibly even before the federal budget) to increase funding.

The question is: what kind of money? The story of these centers is that funding for them was savagely reduced in 2015.

This was partially restored in 2020. But centers face a continuous, real-time decline in their funding because the indexation rate for their money was set in times of low inflation and wages.

So for starters, they need a more realistic indexing rate to be able to confidently keep staff. And then they need a big increase to help cope with the huge demand for their services.

Charging

There is so much to do

Then there is housing, both emergency and long-term.

The first report on the state of the housing system by the government’s own National Housing Supply and Affordability Council, released on Friday, projected that the housing shortage crisis will continue, and that is particularly the case for the social and affordable housing.

Social housing had declined as a proportion of the housing stock for three decades, falling from 5.6 percent in 1991 to 3.8 percent in 2021.

In New South Wales, the government has committed to looking at all options, including retrofitting empty motels and aged care facilities and building modular homes.

The state government is also awaiting advice on reforming bail laws.

Police ministers meeting in Canberra on Friday were discussing how to improve police responses to “serial and high-risk offenders”, including the use of “targeted deterrence”.

What that means is that police are taking a much less black and white view of their interventions which, according to a 2020 report from the Australian Institute of Criminology, has seen offenders who “are not assessed as high risk receive a standard response and a small group of high-risk offenders receive a high-intensity response.”

The focused deterrence approach would involve more gradual responses and applying different levels of law enforcement, while also introducing social services to the policing equation.

There is so much to do. And many of the issues show how domestic violence has somehow been allowed to become an endemic product of decades of neglect or misguided funding cuts, often driven by ideological agendas, such as those targeting single mothers. , or the push by governments to exit areas such as social housing.

How to ensure that momentum continues to adequately address just some of these issues is one of the biggest challenges now facing all of our politicians.

Laura Tingle is 7.30’s chief political correspondent.

St John Shopon

Us News Update

The national crisis of violence against women is the culmination of many problems, and the government can solve some of them.