Federation Chamber | 25 May 2026
Mr WALLACE (Fisher) (17:46): This is a topic which is near and dear to my heart. I thank the member for Bonner for moving this motion. The zero-tolerance language around this motion is correct. The sentiment is right, but sentiment without accountability is not policy; it’s just another press release. I rise having chaired the bipartisan inquiry into family, domestic and sexual violence, which reported to this parliament in March 2021. Eighty-eight recommendations were made. They were bipartisan and they were unanimous on the core findings. We said as a nation we can do better. We said we must do better.
Five years later, this government asks us to commend them. Let me put some numbers on the table. The ABS released data in March this year showing that the number of family and domestic violence offenders rose eight per cent in 2024-25 to approximately 97,800—the largest-single increase since national data collection began. More than three-quarters of this number are male. This government’s own oversight body, the Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence Commission, found a 35 per cent increase in women killed by intimate partners in 2023-24—35 per cent in a single year under this national plan and under this government’s watch.
The Australian Institute of Criminology’s most recent homicide data records 46 intimate partner homicide victims, most of them women. In 2025, 28 women were killed by a current or former partner. This government declared gender based violence a ‘national emergency’. Those were their words. For the community facing the most severe exposure—First Nations women in remote Australia—the Prime Minister stood in Alice Springs and announced $842.6 million, with women’s safety explicitly cited. Documents produced in the Senate reveal that not one dollar of that $842.6 million has been paid. When pressed, the government said funding would be done retrospectively. Tell that to the women and children who’ve been waiting for help. This is the pattern: announcement, architecture, silence. In the meantime, another family is shattered.
DV is not simply physical or psychological harm; it is the slow erosion of one’s identity. It’s a woman or a man who stops trusting their own judgement because they have been told, day after day, that they are wrong, that they’re worthless and that they’re unwanted. It’s permanent vigilance—reading a room, reading a mood and calculating the safest response to an unpredictable threat. Children who grow up witnessing this are more likely to experience mental health difficulties. They struggle at school and enter violent relationships themselves. The cycle does not break itself. The deeper cost is harder to measure. It’s the child carrying a nervous system shaped by chaos into a classroom, into friendships and into their own relationships one day. The bruises may fade and the wounds may heal, but the research tells us that women who have lived inside violence carry it in their bodies and their minds for years, sometimes decades, after they leave. Rebuilding a shattered family is years of painstaking, expensive work, and we ask chronically underfunded services to carry that weight.
Finally, I want to send a shout-out to Ashton Wood of DV Safe Phone from my electorate, who has donated thousands of phones to victims of domestic violence, thousands of phones that get distributed around the country at no cost to people. He does a great job and he should be commended.
[ENDS]
Media Contact: Brendan West – 0402 556 646 – Brendan.west@aph.gov.au
