Recording: The Hon Tanya Plibersek MP in conversation with Jess Hill and Anne Summers AO

AMY PERSSON:  Welcome, everyone, and thank you for joining us today, whether in person or online.  
My name is Amy Persson, and I’m the Pro Vice-Chancellor Social Justice and Inclusion at UTS.    
Today, we’ll here to hear from three women working towards eliminating violence against women and children – the Honourable Tanya Plibersek, Minister for Social Services, Industry Professor Jess Hill, and Professor Anne Summers.  I'll introduce each of them properly in a moment.   
It's incredibly important, of course, to acknowledge that this university exists on Aboriginal land and we owe so much to the First Nations custodians who have developed and stewarded knowledge in this place for more than 60,000 years.  Here at UTS, we are on Gadigal land.  I'd like to pay respect to Elders past and present, recognising their continuing connection to land, waters and culture, and I extend that respect to any First Nations people joining us today. 
Given the topic of today's discussion, I want to also acknowledge that First Nations women and children are uniquely and disproportionately affected by violence and it's welcome to see the release of Australia's first standalone national plan to address this.  Our Ways  Strong Ways  Our Voices is built on the incredible advocacy and action of First Nations women and sits on equal footing with the 10year National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children, released in 2022. 
Tonight we have the opportunity to hear from a senior Minister in the Australian Government on their progress towards ending violence against women and children in a generation.  Specifically, we're here to discuss the outcomes from the 2024 expertled Rapid Review into Prevention Approaches convened by the Government amid a 30% spike in intimate partner homicide and a declaration from the Prime Minister that we were in the grips of a "national crisis".  Two of our speakers tonight, Jess and Anne, were participants in that Rapid Review.  18 months on, we will hear about what has been done since the release of that report and what legislative policy and systemlevel changes are realistic in 2026.   
Please remember that this is an opportunity for all of you as the audience to put forward questions or vote for others to be asked.  You can see a QR code to access Slido pop up on the screens here and we'll share a link for all of you joining us online. 
I'd like to now introduce our speakers who are on the stage behind me.  Tanya Plibersek  
TANYA PLIBERSEK MP:  I can do things like this behind you. 
AMY PERSSON:  Yes.  Tanya served as a Cabinet Minister in the Gillard and Rudd governments covering portfolios including Health, Housing, Human Services and the Status of Women.  Before entering parliament, Tanya worked in the Domestic Violence Unit at the New South Wales Ministry for the Status and Advancement of Women.  We are very proud that Tanya is a UTS alumni.  Welcome, Minister Plibersek (applause).   
I often say this next woman needs no introduction, but I'm going to do one anyway.  Anne Summers is a Professor of Domestic and Family Violence at the UTS Business School.  Her research has had widereaching impacts, including influencing the Federal Government to make changes to the single parenting payment.  Her work at UTS is supported by the Paul Ramsay Foundation.  Anne is a bestselling author, Walkley Awardwinning journalist with a long and highly accomplished career in the fields of politics, the media, business and the nongovernment sector in Australia, Europe and the United States.  Welcome, Anne (applause).   
Jess Hill is a Walkley Awardwinning investigative journalist, author and educator and one of Australia's most recognised and respected thinkers on gendered violence.  See What You Made Me Do was awarded the Stella Prize in 2020 and Jess received the New South Wales Premier's Woman of Excellence Award in 2024.  Last year, Jess joined UTS as Industry Professor to continue her work on family violence prevention.  Jess's work is supported by the Wilson foundation and I do want to acknowledge the importance of philanthropic support for work on violence against women and children.  It is really, really critical and we really appreciate the support from those foundations that have invested in the incredible women on the stage and UTS more broadly.   
I'll leave it there.  Thank you all again for joining us.  (Applause). 
ANNE SUMMERS AO:  Well, hello, everybody.  I'm going to kick off on behalf of Jess and myself.  Each of us want to make a few short introductory remarks before we turn the laser on the Minister and ask her questions.   
What I wanted to say first of all just about the Slido, please start putting your questions in as things occur to you while we're talking and if it seems right, we might address some of the questions along the way.  Otherwise, we'll wait until the end and allow a little bit of time for questions after we've finished speaking. 
I just wanted to say, and I'm sure that I speak on behalf of all of us  I just wanted to say how glad we are to have Tanya back, that it's been  to have her back in the portfolio of Violence against Women, it's actually called DSS, but women's safety I think is the sub portfolio, or whatever it is, but Tanya is now once again in charge of dealing with violence against women.  She's had a long history of doing so.  She was instrumental in designing the first National Plan back in 2012 and it was such a tragedy that the Government changed shortly after that plan was launched and so she did not get the opportunity to put it into practice in the way that I'm sure she had planned.  Instead, it was left to the likes of Scott Morrison and Christian Porter  
TANYA PLIBERSEK MP:  And Women's Minister Tony Abbott. 
ANNE SUMMERS AO:  Oh, Tony Abbott.  How could I forget?  So is it any wonder that we made no progress and in fact the numbers went up?  So we're very glad that Tanya is back in charge and we are looking forward to great things  no pressure. 
But I did want to say that one of the reasons that we wanted to have this meeting today, and I'm so honoured that, Tanya  do you mind if we're informal and call you Tanya? 
TANYA PLIBERSEK MP:  Oh, I'd prefer "Empress of the Universe". 
ANNE SUMMERS AO:  Oh, that's not going to happen, except maybe at the end.  One of the reasons that we're so pleased that Tanya agreed to come along tonight is that we do feel, I think, a bit of a sense of impatience and even frustration that we know the problems are getting worse and we just don't know enough about what the Government is doing.   
I think there was a lot of disappointment recently when there were a number of murders just a few weeks ago and the Prime Minister made no comment at all, whereas in the past he has made comments when there have been large numbers of killings, and we just sort of felt that maybe the Government  I'm not saying this is true of Tanya, but we thought maybe the Government is perhaps not as interested in this area as we thought it was and it used to be and we need it to be.   
So we've asked Tanya if she can come along and talk to us about the Government, what it's doing.  We want the transparency.  We want to know what's happening.  Even if there are things that haven't yet happened, we'd like to get some idea of what might be in the pipeline, what we can expect and also what you expect from us.   
I mean, we are here to help.  Most of us work in the area, we certainly have strong attachments to the area, and we will do anything that is required of us to help, but you as Minister, as the main Minister  of course there's also Katie Gallagher, who's the Minister for Women, and there are several ministers assisting, so it's not for lack of woman power, but we just wonder what is happening, particularly since the Rapid Review report, and I'm going to now hand over to Jess, who has a few comments to make about that. 
JESS HILL:  Mmm.  Thanks so much, Anne, and thank you again, Tanya, for joining us.  It's so great to have you here. 
So before we begin, I just want to bring the Rapid Review back into focus because it has been 18 months.  We all remember what 2024 was like.  It's in our nervous systems.  We can feel it probably just about here.  There was a lot of public anger, there was a lot of media attention.  It felt like there was huge momentum.   
But for many of us there'd been alarm bells ringing for years.  I think that 15 years of coordinated effort across every level of government, two national plans, sustained investment in primary prevention, measurable gains even in gender equality and the levels of violence were still not going down. 
I think when you listen to frontline services saying repeatedly that the violence is getting more severe, more complex, that perpetrators and victims of sexual violence are getting younger, that's a cause for alarm.  It was there in black and white in the second National Plan that the first plan did not substantially reduce genderbased violence.   
So by 2024 that was just impossible to ignore and the Rapid Review was commissioned in that context, so not to restate what we already know, but to interrogate where we were falling short and what could be done about that.  So at its core, really the task of the review was to radically expand the remit of prevention  not just stop it before it starts, but identify targeted ways to interrupt ongoing cycles of harm, prevent violence from recurring, escalating, from being transmitted from one generation to the next. 
So the review really identified prevention opportunities that are not just in schools, not just in gender equality policies and in improving community attitudes, although all of those are essential.  It urged governments to activate every available mechanism to stop perpetrators, to work across departments, to activate the health system, to stem trajectories of violence and that these opportunities for prevention are everywhere.  They're in the way that we run emergency departments and GP clinics, they're in the Family Courts, they're in child protection systems and policing, in housing policy, how we regulate harmful industries like alcohol, gambling and technology, in suicide prevention, and in how we respond to perpetrators and stop them from weaponising every system at their disposal. 
We know that genderbased violence is endemic.  4 in 10 Australian kids are growing up with it.  Prevention can't just mean stopping violence before it starts.  It has to mean preventing it from happening again, from escalating, from being passed down from one generation to the next.   
That was really the first and most urgent priority for the review, was to provide safety and recovery for children and young people, both in preventing harm, but also in helping those harmed to recover, including with their protective parent because that is what they deserve, but it is also essential to interrupting those intergenerational cycles of abuse and violence.   
So the recommendations from the review, they went across 21 priority areas.  I promise I am not going to list them all now.  There are some QR codes on the screens if you want to read the report.  I think it's written quite well and it's a gripping read.  But really, we also set a set of principles and the first and foundational principle was that governments must prioritise the leadership and experiences of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.   
Violence in Australia, it cannot be separated from our colonial history and its ongoing impacts and prevention must embed cultural safety, placebased responses and selfdetermination and that plan, that firstever plan from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women Our Ways  Strong Ways  Our Voices, it's a really important step, but it requires political will to make it a reality. 
So today I guess we have the opportunity to ask the Minister what has been done in response to the Rapid Review?  Have the commitments that were made at the National Cabinet meeting back in September 24 been honoured?  And it's really a privilege to be joined by Tanya to discuss exactly that.  So over to you, Anne. 
ANNE SUMMERS AO:  So, as Jess has previewed, the first question is going to be to ask you about the federal actions that are already underway as a result of the Rapid Review and at the National Cabinet meeting which was held in October 2024 and just to sort of prompt some of the areas that we might look at, you know, we know there's been a government audit of child support, Centrelink and ATO systems and we're wondering what's happened there, what has been identified so far, what structural changes are being pursued and how will these interrupt the abusive patterns of perpetrators and help keep survivors safe, and are there any other major prevention initiatives stemming from the Rapid Review that the Commonwealth is currently pursuing?   
One of the things I'm interested in is the National Plan Annual Activities Addendum, which I must admit is a document I'm not that familiar with, but apparently was meant to be published at the end of 2025, so maybe you can tell us.   
TANYA PLIBERSEK MP:  Yes.  Okay, thank you.  Thank you both for those introductory remarks and I want to also start by acknowledging we're meeting on Gadigal land and pay my respect to Elders past and present and to any other First Nations people who might be with us tonight. 
I'm so pleased that you, Anne and Jess, have put tonight on because I think probably one of the areas where we've been weakest is keeping people up to date on the activities that we've undertaken both at a Commonwealth and State and territory level.   
I know, Jess, you said you don't want to go through all the recommendations and how we have begun to address the recommendations of the Rapid Review, but fortunately I can point people to a document that they can find on the DSS website that goes through the progress that's being made on the Rapid Review recommendations and there is progress in a whole range of areas.  The two that you've just mentioned there I'll speak a little bit about and then we can go into some of the other areas as well. 
Just before I forget, the addendum, which is the keeping people up to date addendum, there's 122 Commonwealth activities in family, domestic and sexual violence right now and you can look on the DSS website, the Department of Social Services website, and see the progress against those 122 Commonwealth recommendations, but also the state and territory recommendations.  One of the changes we've made very recently is to make it possible to search by topic that you might be interested in.  So if you're particularly interested in responses around First Nations communities, you can search, or children, you can search. 
Jess, I know that you've just mentioned the particular importance of responses for children.  One of the reasons that it's  well, there's many reasons it's so important.  Children are victims of domestic violence, whether they are experiencing it themselves or whether they're seeing a parent experiencing it, and only a tiny fraction of the investment we make today is on services specifically for children.  Often children are with mum when she's escaping domestic violence and if they go to a refuge, there will be services for the child at the refuge, but they're not often enough specifically directed to the needs of children.   
So one of the first things we did was invest $80 million in services specifically for counselling and healing and recovery for children.  A number of those services I've already visited and in most instances around the country, there are services that are being provided by organisations that were previously providing services for women escaping domestic violence and they were really responding to the needs of children in a way that was unfunded and additional to what they were doing for the protective parent.  So having that funding available for counsellors to be employed and have children as their clients specifically and in addition to what they've been doing for the protective parent I think is a really important step. 
One of the things that I wanted to mention tonight is the consultations on the second action plan on the National Plan will begin very shortly and obviously I don't want to preempt the outcome of a national consultation, but to my mind, the areas that are shaping up for greatest focus in the second action plan, we need to continue to focus on victims and survivors, but we do need to focus on children.  It has been a really underdone part of our response up until now.   
The other real area of focus that's been underdone is changing behaviour, men's behaviour change programs, responses to perpetrators, and that is really the full spectrum.  The most recent surveys say about three quarters of men want to see less violence in our community towards women.  About half of them don't have a clue how they would participate in delivering that. 
So actually right now my assistant Minister Jed Kearney is working with our men's health envoy and they're doing a like loop around to a lot of the  not the men's behaviour change programs necessarily, but actually other areas like Men's Sheds, where you've got people who are at the very soft end of wanting to see behaviour change and participate in changing what our community is doing, so there's that kind of end of the spectrum of people who are using violence, to really quite intensive things that we're doing with the Police Ministers and the AttorneysGeneral in highrisk perpetrators, like actually driving down to an intelligenceled policing response that says who of these people are most likely to go on to continue to offend and how do we deal with them.   
So we've got about just over $80 million for innovative responses to perpetrators as well and whether that is  you know, whether it's electric ankle bracelets for people who you're worried are going to approach someone when they're out on bail, to really intense intelligencedriven policing that looks at the intersection between kind of radicalisation, misogyny  like online radicalisation and misogyny, like we're seeing this confluence of really harmful attitudes developing, how do we get into the intelligenceled policing to that group of people.   
It's a convoluted answer to say that there's a lot going on at the moment. 
ANNE SUMMERS AO:  Can we ask you to specifically address the systems abuse?   
TANYA PLIBERSEK MP:  Oh, yes, sorry, systems abuse as well.  Well, we've already passed one bill that begins to address the systems abuse.  We know that perpetrators have used the social security system to get victims of domestic violence to incur debts and the last Social Security Bill we passed made it possible to waive those debts for decision makers in the social security system to take into account, even if someone has lied, that if they've been coerced into lying or pressured into lying, they don't end up with the social security debt. 
The next step we're looking at in the social security system is whether it's possible to make the perpetrators liable for those debts.  At the moment we're just essentially ignoring them in that circumstance, but if someone is being coerced into doing it, what is the consequence for the person who's doing the coercion?   
The next cab off the rank is also in the child support system.  We know that the child support system is an area where  well, there's a lot of intersections of disadvantage for women here.  In the first place, there's about $1.9 billion of child support debt that is not paid.  That is $1.9 billion of money that should be with children for their benefit that has not been paid.   
So we need to make sure that people are paying and we're looking at, you know, lifting the ability of using things like the interaction between the Australian Tax Office, the onetouch payroll system, making it easier to garnishee wages, for example, so that you have employer withholding of child support debts, toughening up the not being able to leave the country if you've got a child support debt  there's a whole range of things that we can do in that area.   
But there's a bunch of really simple things too, like if you're a parent who's got majority care of the kid and you ask for a change of assessment because, oh, your partner has bought a Ferrari, maybe he's hiding some money, you need to give all of your details again to have that reassessment done.  So if you have fled a violent relationship and you want to keep your address secret, you know, you've got to go through this whole rigmarole to keep that sort of detail confidential.  There's no reason on God's earth that he needs to know your address in a situation like that, so actually just making those practical changes.   
We've got the secretaries of all of the departments working together on a safety by design  like a project of embedding safety by design into our Commonwealth systems and so we've seen banks, for example, are taking this seriously so perpetrators of violence can't continue to send messages like transfer 1 cent, "I'm going to kill you", you know, whatever.  Banks have taken up that challenge.  We are using some of those same safety by design principles to challenge and change our own systems of government. 
ANNE SUMMERS AO:  Is there any way that we as the public or we as even involved members of groups that are trying to change all these things can get access to what the Government is doing?  How do we find out what you're doing? 
TANYA PLIBERSEK MP:  Yes, I think there's a couple of things that are really useful for people who are interested in this.  Now, these documents are a bit impenetrable, right, but the activities addendum that you can look at now and see where we are on projects, there will be things on that list that even if you work in the sector, you're probably not familiar with or, you know, you haven't heard are happening.  It's worth just scanning the list to get an idea. 
ANNE SUMMERS AO:  Where do we find these? 
TANYA PLIBERSEK MP:  Oh, it's on the DSS website.  What I might do  I think, Serena, the best thing to do is if we give the direct details where you can find the documents to the organisers tonight and if you do a followup email tonight to participants, we can direct you most easily to where to find those documents.   
But there's that and then there's the response to the Rapid Review.  There is a short version and a long version.  There's like a twopage version, threepage, something like that, where you can get a very quick overview of the progress against each of the 21 recommendations and then there's a 31page version, which has much more  Viv has got a copy.  She's holding it up, there you go.  There's a 31page that  leave it to Serena, we'll show it to people after.  There's a 31page document that goes into a lot more detail about the funding for the individual recommendations and where we are in rolling them out.   
So the children's counselling services, for example, I think we've funded 32 children's counselling services now.  It's good to know that and we've been shockingly bad at telling people, in part because there's so much activity going on that it is really  like, you know, we live in this media environment that is hopeless at complexity and this is some of the most complex work that you can imagine.  It's complex, it's longterm and, you know, we want to do it responsibly and respectfully.  So I don't want to be looking for headlines in, you know, simplistic ways, but being accountable for the work I think is a really important part of the story. 
ANNE SUMMERS AO:  Well, we know that the media is not interested in policy generally, let alone women's policy, so maybe they're doing us a favour by ignoring it, but we still need to find ways of finding out.   
TANYA PLIBERSEK MP:  I agree, Anne, and I really do think that the more we can work together to get some of the stories out.  You said what can people do to help and, I mean, I know because I actually recognise very many people in this audience  I know that you're doing the hard work every day in frontline services and in advocating for policy change as well.  Hello all of you.  I can see you all in the audience.  I know you're doing the work.   
But actually, I think  well, there's a couple of things I'd say.  I think one of the real dangers of progress, any sort of social policy progress, is the feeling that things are hopeless and this is a huge challenge, right?  Violence against women has been with us for thousands of years and we're not going to fix it overnight, but we need to celebrate the successes.  So look around in your sector and be prepared to say "look at this amazing organisation and the wonderful work they're doing" and celebrate that success because hopelessness is poison to change and progress and we need to do it sort of for our own sakes, but it's also a really good way of engaging the community.  If the community feel like it's hopeless, that's  again, like you lose momentum in those circumstances.  So look for the good examples of progress.  I'm not saying give us a pat on the back.  I'm saying give yourselves a pat on the back and be prepared to talk to one another about the things that you're proud of. 
Like all of us have a responsibility here.  I am prepared to take responsibility for what we do as a Commonwealth Government.  I'm absolutely prepared to do that.  Obviously, states and territories have a responsibility, but all of us in the other organisations that we're part of, the university  I mean, in January we released the  in January we started the Student Ombudsman kind of where university students can go and get a resolution if their complaint of sexual harassment or sexual assault on campus has not been appropriately dealt with.  Like that's something I remember calling for when I was women's officer here at the University of Technology that there was better accountability for sexual harassment and sexual assault on campus.  Like we've done that.  Be proud of that.  If you're someone here at UTS and you're part of that, be proud of that.  Make sure your students know about it.   
You're all in sporting clubs, church groups.  We're doing specific work right now with faith leaders as well.  Like we need to be talking to people in all different communities.  I'm happy to talk about the First Nations plan in a moment if you want me to, but this is not a onesizefitsall approach, right?  We've got to be talking to people of all different faiths, different ethnic backgrounds, socioeconomically, inner city, remote and regional communities, how do we make sure that our response is there for everyone. 
JESS HILL:  Now, I don't want to  
ANNE SUMMERS AO:  Before I hand over to you, Jess  I know, there's so much to get through and time is not our friend, but I just wanted to quickly mention one other recommendation, number 21 which you have enacted which is the DVrelated suicides investigation and it was announced before Christmas and there's been some criticism of it because the time for submissions wasn't very long. 
TANYA PLIBERSEK MP:  When Anne says some criticism, she means by her. 
ANNE SUMMERS AO:  Well, speaking for others, but yes. 
TANYA PLIBERSEK MP:  Some may say. 
ANNE SUMMERS AO:  But yes, I did put it in print, and since then Louise MillerFrost, the Chair of the House of Reps Standing Committee on Social Policy and Public Affairs, which is conducting this inquiry, has extended the period for comments.   
So I just wanted everyone to know that that is a recommendation that has been accepted, is in progress.  There's a fairly vigorous chat going on LinkedIn at the moment about whether or not the submissions are being made public.  That's something that we're going to have to take up with Louise.  But I just wanted to say thank you.  That's another one we can tick off. 
TANYA PLIBERSEK MP:  Thanks, Anne, and thanks for mentioning it because anybody who works in this sector will know of people who have died by suicide and you would think that that person would still be alive today if they hadn't had this experience of sexual violence or family or domestic violence.   
I don't run the parliamentary committees.  They are independent for a reason.  They shouldn't be influenced by Ministers, but I know that people contacted Louise MillerFrost as the committee chair and she was very pleased to extend the time for submissions.   
Honestly, the truth is with material as sensitive as this, even if you're a week late in putting your submission in  don't tell Louise I said this  of course it will still be accepted.  Like this is not a situation where it's computer says no, you know?  I've poured my heart out, I've given you these statistics, I've told you my story and the committee says computer says no.  It won't be like that. 
The reason, Anne  I haven't spoken to Louise about not publishing some of the submissions and I  so I can't answer for why.  It is possible if you don't want your submission to be published you can ask for it to be given to the committee, but not published.  You can ask to present in person in camera so you don't have to be public in the information you give the committee. 
My guess if I was guessing is that some submissions if they include names of people might be considered defamatory.  I'm not sure whether that is the reason that some may not  
ANNE SUMMERS AO:  The person complaining the most is Jules Adams, who is one of the people who's done more than anyone to get this inquiry going, and she's outraged because she says the story has occupied three pages of the Australian, it's been on 60 Minutes, it's had more publicity than you can poke a stick at and yet the committee won't publish it, so she's super pissed off. 
TANYA PLIBERSEK MP:  No doubt the committee will respond to that.  No, I mean, again, like there is a reason that parliamentary committees are independent.  They should be.  They shouldn't have Ministers telling them what to do. 
ANNE SUMMERS AO:  Yes.  Sorry, Jess. 
JESS HILL:  No, that's okay.   
ANNE SUMMERS AO:  Your turn. 
JESS HILL:  So, I mean, I guess what I'd like to do is just close the loop on what we're talking about with perpetrators weaponising systems and the Government's efforts to audit those federal systems.  I mean, I really want to go directly to child safety, we've addressed children just briefly, because there are two parts to systems abuse.  We have the systems themselves which we can reform and that's part of what you're looking at, but there are also the actors within those systems and my current research here at the moment is focused on family law and specifically looking at what the impact is of the amendments that have been put through the last couple of years.   
Now, the Family Court's own data shows they now largely operate as family violence courts.  83% of allegations or of cases feature family violence allegations.  They're also basically private law child protection courts, only this is all happening in an adversarial context.   
We're getting practitioners in our interviews just describing levels of legal aggression that are not designed to resolve disputes.  They're designed to exhaust and destabilise and destroy the will and capacity of victim survivors to fight for safe outcomes for their children. 
One practitioner this week described the perpetrator trifecta, and I've heard this from a number of people, on the same day you file in the Family Court, then you file for an intervention order, then you make a report to child protection.   
Now, this is happening, what I've heard from a number of people, on advice from legal representatives.  It's causing the most incredible psychological trauma for victim survivors and unsafe care arrangements for children.   
I mean, I know you know from bitter experience just how traumatic the legal system can be, but victim survivor mums, they often have no choice but to go through the family law system.  So how do we stop that kind of systems abuse, particularly when the professionals inside these systems are incentivised to act as perpetrators?   
TANYA PLIBERSEK MP:  So the Family Court in recent years has  I mean, we've made changes to family law that restore the best interests of the child as the primary determinant of family law decisions.  It always, I think, takes a little while for systems to change to keep up with government intention in this way.   
We've also got  like the interaction between family law and what's happening in statebased child protection systems has  like quite often in the past parents have had kind of quite different messages, like a parent has been determined by the child protection system at a state jurisdiction not to be a safe person to be around and the Family Court is ordering contact. 
So actually, just getting these systems to talk better to each other is one of the most important steps we can take.  We've put $56 million into making sure that the child protection system and the Family Court and police, like AVO safety records, actually can talk to each other so people aren't bounced around like a pinball between these systems.   
That work is going to take a little while to really show its benefit, but getting the systems to be working together focusing on the best interests and keeping a child safe is the reason for that $56 million investment. 
JESS HILL:  Can government act, though, to create accountability for actors within those systems who are at the moment just at the behest of perpetrators who can pay enough to get them to do what they want?  Like is there anything government can do to create accountability for lawyers, for others who work across this system?  I mean, you don't have to come up with all the solutions now.  That might be a rhetorical question for now. 
TANYA PLIBERSEK MP:  I mean, it's a broader question than the Family Court, isn't it, because we've had the Australian Law Reform Commission investigation into responses to sexual violence and we know that the experience of victims of sexual violence through criminal courts is excoriating and we've got  we're doing  you know, one of the research projects we're doing is why the dropout rates are so high.  I mean, go to court with someone, I don't even know if you need a research project, just sit through a trial and I can answer you the question.  It's because defence barristers are horrible to victims of violence.   
So I guess, Jess, yes, we can change our systems, but isn't this also a sort of question for the legal and I think it's relevant that they call themselves a fraternity  isn't it a question for them about whether  like yes, your responsibility to your client if you are a defence lawyer is to get them a fair hearing, right?  Is it your responsibility to get someone who's guilty of a crime off by using every trick in the book?  I don't know.  I reckon that really sucks if you think that's your job.   
Yet in so many parts of our legal system, whether it is the way decisions are made about the care of children through the Family Court or whether it's sexual assault or whether it's, you know, an assault  like domestic or family violence assault that's dealt with at a criminal level in a statebased jurisdiction, we're not really looking for  our system does not look for fairness.  It looks for  lawyers think that they are doing their job if they get their client off.  I mean, maybe they need to ask themselves whether that really is their job. 
JESS HILL:  I would love to see if we can find some way to make them accountable to that question.  I think  I know that we're running short on time, we'll probably go a little over 6.30 just because we started a little bit late, but what I might come to now is the recommendation in the Review around regulating harmful industries, which was a key recommendation and internationally it's actually recognised as one of the most underutilised violence prevention strategies.  So when I say harmful industries, I'm talking about those that are the biggest risk factors for genderbased violence, like alcohol, like gambling, like pornography, and like tech.   
Now, at National Cabinet one of the most significant and hardwon commitments was that states and territories would review their alcohol regulation frameworks with genderbased violence prevention as an explicit objective.  More than a year on, progress is pretty disappointing, to put it mildly and not use swear words.  South Australia and the ACT have drafted legislation, but no state or territory has yet tabled any reforms in parliament.   
So a couple of things I just wanted to ask is have other jurisdictions actually formally reported?  Is there a clear expectation or timeline for them to follow through?  And how important is alcohol regulation as a prevention strategy in the Federal Government's view because at the moment it's mentioned I think once very sparingly in the National Plan. 
TANYA PLIBERSEK MP:  So I think it's really important.  We've given FARE, the policy people around alcohol research, $1 million to do the work that comes up with the framework that we want states and territories to understand and adopt.   
You're quite right, South Australia is working on it.  ACT are probably a bit ahead, I would say, of South Australia.  We actually have jurisdictions that are going backwards.  In the Northern Territory, the newish NT Government has got rid of the floor price on alcohol, so they've made alcohol cheaper, and they're releasing new alcohol licences effectively in a whole lot of communities that have been dry in recent years, so cheaper and more available. 
So it's not a universally good story.  We'll have the  I've got on Friday another meeting with women's ministers and women's safety ministers and community services ministers because we're trying to bring the work we do around family violence together with the work we do around child protection.  We'll get an update then on the progress that we're making on alcohol.   
Gambling is another one, obviously, Jess, that I know you're very interested in and I'm very interested in.  We've made some progress, but I'd say probably still some work to do in the area of gambling. 
The other one is pornography and other forms of online and techfacilitated abuse.  We're doing a lot of work on techfacilitated abuse.  The communications minister has got some work going on right now to work out how we deal with deep fakes made and distributed without people's consent and how we deal with the sort of stealthy tracking devices.  You know you can put a program on someone's phone.  I mean, there's obviously the little I tag that's bad enough, but you can hide a program on someone's phone and track them, they don't know.  You can read their messages, you can read their emails, you can read their diary and they're almost undetectable.  So that would build on the work that we've done on doxxing, the unauthorised release of people's private details, and the sharing of intimate images without permission.  Like there's a bunch of work there. 
I think in the long run I hope our delaying kids getting online a little bit until they're 16 years old might help a little bit with the massive explosion in children watching pornography, including quite violent pornography.  You know, the average first age of watching porn I think is 13 now.  You know, more than half, I think like 58% of people, boys, have watched pornography by the age of 13, something like that. 
It's not good for them, right?  If your first sex education involves nonconsensual choking, that's not good for you and we need to be  as well as sort of dealing with the completely unfettered access to violent and degrading imagery of women online, we need to be talking to young people explicitly about what healthy relationships look like, right?  At the moment most teenagers are getting their sex education from pornography. 
JESS HILL:  And those age restrictions come in next month, don't they, around pornography, which is a massive step, I think. 
TANYA PLIBERSEK MP:  It is.  Yes, it is and we hope it all actually makes young people slow down in their consumption of this stuff.  But parents, schools, sporting groups, all of us have to be having these conversations about what healthy and consensual sex looks like. 
JESS HILL:  Mmm.  Can I just ask one follow  and we are running out of time, but we're going to make sure we've got time at the end for questions.  Nobody is leaving until some questions are read out, that is for sure.   
But I do want to ask  when you've got commitments made by state and territories at National Cabinet, what kind of accountability mechanism is there to ensure the fidelity of those commitments because those commitments were made around alcohol regulation by every leader of every state and territory and there are a few states and territories  they haven't even started looking at it.  They're not even bothered.  So what good are the promises made at national cabinet if nobody is holding them to account? 
TANYA PLIBERSEK MP:  Well, look, this is the problem of a federated system, isn't it?  We don't run the states and territories.  They can make a commitment and break it and it's up to the electors in that state and territory to say, "You've let us down, you've let us down" and hold their governments to account. 
We can pressure, we can cajole, we can offer to cofund things.  We do all of that.  We're doing all of that. 
JESS HILL:  Are you cajoling them about alcohol?   
TANYA PLIBERSEK MP:  Oh, yeah.  I mean, we had a discussion about it at the last women's ministers meeting, for example.  We absolutely are, but we can't make them do it.   
When I expressed my dismay to the Northern Territory Government about making alcohol cheaper and more readily available, they had a go at me in the media saying that I was being, you know, paternalistic and there was plenty of responsible drinkers in the Northern Territory that didn't need my Sydney ways interfering with them, which like that's fine, they've decided to take a political response to it, but the idea that if you make alcohol cheaper and more readily available it's not going to have an impact on family and domestic violence, well, you know, we all know. 
JESS HILL:  And just a quick 15 seconds on the gambling recommendations of the Murphy Review and Rapid Review, will we see gambling advertisement phased out in this term of government. 
TANYA PLIBERSEK MP:  So that's not a question that I can answer here tonight, but I can say we have really made some substantial progress.  Things like not being able to gamble on your credit card, having to verify your identity, getting monthly updates on how much you've lost, all of those are important steps forward and I would say, let me put it this way, there is a very strong appetite amongst my colleagues to do more.   
ANNE SUMMERS AO:  Well, we have a lot of questions and we can't possibly go through all of them, but I'd like to at least ask some of the most popular.  The most popular question by far is what does it take to see the same commitment to fully fund the safety of women and children as the funding for nuclear submarines, which is so contested in terms of relevance, cost and delivery? 
Sorry. 
TANYA PLIBERSEK MP:  I'm not going to comment on AUKUS tonight, but I think it is  I think it is quite right to say we need to do more as governments, like no question.  We need to keep doing more and there is no way  I don't think in my lifetime I will ever  I mean, I hope I'm wrong, but if I get to the stage where I say, "Oh, we've done enough, feet up, we can relax now", I'll be a very grateful person.   
I think there will always be a demand for us to push and do the next thing and the next thing, the next reform, the next investment, and I think most of us are going to keep having to be part of that push for the long term, but please also think about what you have achieved already.  Like the last National Cabinet meeting that talked about family and domestic violence, there's a $4.9 billion commitment, massive expansion in  the leaving violence payment, that's a $925 million commitment.   
When I was working in domestic violence, if we had been able to say to a woman, "You've got $5,000 to leave this violent situation", it doesn't matter what your visa status is, we'll help you with cash, a ticket out of there, a bond for your new place, clothes for you and your kids if you had to leave them at home when you fled, that is a big change that people in this sector have fought for and won and you should be proud of it. 
The doubling of funding for family violence prevention legal services, the Indigenousfocused legal services that work in family and domestic violence, they were at risk of closing, if you remember, a few years ago during a conservative government.  We have doubled their funding to about $700 million.  It matters because those people fought for that change and won it and they should be proud of it and any of you in the room who were part of that should be proud of it. 
So I'm not saying job done, feet up, nothing to see here.  I'm saying keep fighting for the next thing, but for goodness sake, acknowledge the progress that you have fought for and won because we go back to what I said at the beginning, unless you can celebrate the wins along the way, we lose momentum in campaigning. 
JESS HILL:  Can I ask a question  it's a bit of a wonky question  in that  
TANYA PLIBERSEK MP:  What really, from you, Jess? 
JESS HILL:  I know, imagine.  Imagine.  Good thing we're all wonks in this room.  You know, we've seen the global evidence on prevention evolve, we've seen the Government's approach to prevention evolve.  That hasn't changed the wording of the national plan and we're about to have the second action plan spawn out of the national plan and I'm just wondering is the national plan set in stone until 2032 or does it get updated? 
TANYA PLIBERSEK MP:  No.  No, no, and I mean, look, I don't want to spend the time wordsmithing the national plan, but what I do want is for both the second action plan and Our Ways  Strong Ways  Our Voices to be living documents.  I think you're quite right about the evidence on prevention.   
I think attitude change and in particular I know what you're referring to, Jess, is the idea that we need to achieve gender equality and when we achieve gender equality, you know, genderbased violence will fall away like snow melting in the sun.  I can't wait until that happens.  Like if we're waiting to achieve genderbased equality before we reduce gendered violence, then we're all going to be waiting a long time. 
So we need to keep making progress in both streams of work.  So the attitude change  I think there are good signs that attitudes are improving slowly.  That in itself is not enough. 
So I think  I don't want this to sound like a sort of superficial comparison, but if you look at real behaviour change in the health system, seatbelts and getting smoking rates down, right, it takes decades of sustained change, sustained effort, but it also takes legal changes.  It actually takes prosecuting people who do the wrong thing.  There has to be a criminal justice response that works.  There has to be behaviour change education for kids on top of that.  There has to be, you know, work on attitudes.  Like it's not one thing that if we get attitudes right, you know, it will be job done.  I'm not waiting for that. 
JESS HILL:  Mmm.  Also, the head of Djirra, Antoinette Braybrook, you know, she's pointed out that if you don't measure something, you can't manage it.  I mean, it's an old saying, but it's particularly applicable to data for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and girls and the violence that they're subjected to.  Some of that data has not been updated from 2019 or even earlier.  With the launch of the first Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander National Plan, what's going to happen with data and how do we make sure that it's got the data sovereignty principles attached?   
TANYA PLIBERSEK MP:  Yes, we've got $16 million  I'm looking at Serena; yes, she's nodding  to do that work and we need to do it in partnership with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.  I think the reason that the first effort to start to collect some of these statistics was abandoned was because it wasn't done in a way that had data sovereignty principles attached to it.  It needs to be led by the work done by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander researchers and communities respecting them. 
JESS HILL:  So that is underway, though, that's going to be updated?   
TANYA PLIBERSEK MP:  Well, the design  not the data collection, but the design of the data is. 
JESS HILL:  Okay. 
ANNE SUMMERS AO:  Trying to sort of distil the essence of the questions is quite difficult because there's a lot of them, but there are some common themes. 
JESS HILL:  Just microphone, Anne. 
ANNE SUMMERS AO:  Oh, sorry.  There are some common themes to the questions and a lot of them go to the issue of political courage, priorities, and so on.  For example, 10 people are asking: "The progress report on implementing recommendations of the Rapid Review says that the FDSV is one of Cabinet's six major priorities.  Can the Minister please tell us what the relative funding allocated to this priority is compared to the other five?" 
TANYA PLIBERSEK MP:  I can't even remember what the other five are, I'm sorry, so I can't answer that question.  But it comes back to  I'm not  I'm never going to walk into a forum like this and say, "Feet up, job done", but the sort of funding that is available today, if it had been available when I worked for the New South Wales Ministry for the Status and Advancement of Women in the Domestic Violence Unit, I would have thought all our Christmases had come at once.  So there is more available, there is more going on.   
Things like the leaving violence payment are uncapped payments, you know.  That is a huge change.  Just over $1.2 billion into emergency and transitional housing for women and children escaping violence  again, a huge investment.   
You need to  part of my job is advocating for more.  Part of my job is making sure that every cent we have allocated, like in that $4.9 billion commitment made at that National Cabinet, is actually hitting the ground in a way that changes outcomes for people.   
So more is good, but the way we deploy using evidence and making sure the money actually gets through to the people who need the help in their lives, that's the other really important part of the job. 
JESS HILL:  I think we've got time for maybe two more questions and one that's really popular here and I think it's really pertinent, and it's not to ask you to tell on your colleagues, but it is the question about is there enough political courage to legislate reforms that might be unpopular, but necessary?   
I guess what comes to mind is sometimes when people advocate for say things like gambling bans or alcohol regulation, they're told literally from the people that they're speaking to in government, "Well, as long as you can get maybe the AFL on board" or "as long as you can get the AHA on board, then yeah, we can probably pursue that, but until we have those people who would threaten us with lobbying campaigns on board, we can't legislate."  I just wonder, you've got so much political capital in this government, how much of it are you willing to burn?   
TANYA PLIBERSEK MP:  I'm willing to burn a lot of it.  No, that  I don't think it's quite as simple as that and I know that there's a  there's always a kind of instinct  there's a very healthy Australian instinct to think oh, all politicians are cynical arseholes and I think by and large that's a good thing in our democracy to have that degree of scepticism, but it's not always the explanation for why things aren't happening in the way that you might want them to.   
So I don't think it's  it's not a lack of will on family, domestic and sexual violence.  It's that these are complex issues and we need to deal with them in a way that is methodical and evidence based and actually makes a change and I do think there's a willingness to do that. 
JESS HILL:  Do you have one last question, Anne?  I've got one last and I think, you know, it's kind of fitting that it's last because often it's so far last that it falls off the edge and that is that sexual violence is widespread and reports are increasing.  You know, we saw in the child maltreatment study that intimate partner sexual violence had doubled within a single generation for the youngest cohort surveyed, but the S is often left out of DFSV or treated as an addon or a footnote and I'm so sorry if it comes across that way tonight.  What more can be done to prioritise addressing sexual violence prevention and recovery and stop it from falling off the radar? 
TANYA PLIBERSEK MP:  It's such a great question and it's certainly not a secondstring issue for me at all.  We've put $21 million into the responses to the Australian Law Reform Commission inquiry into where our sexual violence systems are failing.  I think that's an important first step.  Part of that sort of investment is I think a twoyear project to look at why people withdraw, why complainants withdraw from the process.  As I said at the beginning, you only need to visit a courtroom to work out why that happens.  Looking at things like policing responses as well, you know, when police go on to prosecute, and so on, is an important part of that. 
So we need to get the systems right.  Our court processes are horrific.  For anybody who's ever been through them, you know that.   
But again, like this is truly the area that I'm most concerned about with the statistics.  Like if you take a decadeslong view of child deaths, child deaths as a share of the population are very slowly trending down.  That's a really good thing.  You know, we're a bigger population, so there are more child deaths.  We can't possibly be satisfied with that, of course not.   
If you look at the longterm intimate homicide statistics, they obviously jump around a lot year to year, but the longterm trend as a share of population is a slow decrease.  Again, not for a moment saying that we should be satisfied for that.  Like one woman dead is one too many, you know, never going to be satisfied.  But those two you can see  you can see some, you know, positive things there that give me hope for the future.   
The fact that sexual violence is going up exponentially and most particularly with victims and perpetrators under the age of 18 alarms me so much because we don't know whether this is a blip in this generation and as the perpetrators get older their behaviour will change, or whether this is a permanent feature of gender relations in Australia from now on because this generation has been brought up to think that if you're not choking your girlfriend to black out, you're somehow having boring sex. 
So the question about sexual violence, it is systems change, but it's got to be attitude change.  We are investing with boys and young men.  We've got a specific adolescent boys program that's working right around Australia working with boys who've grown up in families where there's violence to try to, you know, divert them from the  and they're starting  sorry, and the other feature is they're starting to use violence in their relationships themselves, in their families and intimate relationships themselves  working with them to make sure that they don't go on to offend in this way.   
We've funded Men's Line.  We're funding the Man Box to do more work.  We've massively increased the investment in a program that's going out talking to boys trying to work with them to challenge their ideas about violence, increase their empathy, all of that.  I think that will be delivered to 10,200 boys, that program, over the next year.  Like it's a big deal. 
You know, that again is one of those areas where government can do a lot, we can fund a lot, there's a lot of good work going on, but all of us have a responsibility to do what we can in any organisation we're part of to create environments where violence is not reinforced or tolerated. 
ANNE SUMMERS AO:  Well, thank you so much, Tanya, for being willing to answer so many and varied questions.  I mean, I think we could probably sit here for another hour and still not feel that we've covered all the things that we want to know and I'm sorry we couldn't get through more questions, but I think that we have learnt an incredible amount tonight and we very much appreciate the information that you're going to give us for how we can follow the work that the Government is doing.  That's something that we haven't had before, so that's a wonderful takeaway from this evening.   
On behalf of you all, let's thank Tanya very much for her time (applause).  Thank you. 
TANYA PLIBERSEK MP:  Thank you all very much and thank you to Anne and Jess for doing such an amazing hosting job and to Amy for her introduction earlier.  (Applause). 
JESS HILL:  Thank you, everyone.  Enjoy your evening.