ASSISTANT MINISTER REBECCA WHITE: Thank you very much for joining us here on a brisk Hobart morning. I’m joined by Assistant Minister for Social Services, Ged Kearney, and also Shirleyann Varney, who's the CEO of Sexual Assault Support Services here in Tasmania.
We understand that unfortunately we see too many instances still of sexual and family domestic violence in Australia, and we're working really hard through the development of a Second Action Plan to address responses that hopefully will see a reduction leading to zero levels of violence in our community, that's our ultimate plan, but of course there's work to do in the interim.
I'm really proud to be part of a government that takes the care and welfare of people who are in desperate need, some cases fleeing violence, seriously, and is investing in services to support them, investing in the workforce that is at the front line, trying to help people who are in these circumstances.
I’m going to hand across now to the Assistant Minister, who's going to make some further remarks and take your questions. Thank you.
ASSISTANT MINISTER GED KEARNEY: Good morning, everybody. It's a great pleasure to be here with the Assistant Minister and with Shirleyann to make a really important announcement. We are, as Rebecca White said, Assistant Minister White said we are absolutely determined to reduce the scourge of family, domestic, and sexual violence right across this country, and the Albanese Labor government has invested more than any other government in doing this.
We know that sadly 1 in 4 women in Australia experience violence, and 1 in 5 experience sexual violence. This is something that we really need to put a great deal of effort into reducing in this country. The Labor government has invested $4 billion into this in a number of programs right across the country, but importantly, here in Tasmania, where unfortunately the incidence of sexual, family, and domestic violence is more than the rest of the country.
We've invested in over 28 or nearly 28 programs here, right here in Tasmania, including an amazing program that SASS is providing, is protecting or working to protect our students on campus at the University of Tasmania. So, I'd like to congratulate SASS for the work they do. It’s incredibly important. They provide amazing support right across the spectrum, from prevention, early intervention, crisis support, and healing and recovery. And Assistant Minister White and I have been lucky this morning to hear about a number of those programs. For example, we just heard about an amazing program where SASS are working with adolescent boys, so important in the prevention and early intervention space.
But today I would like to talk about how important the workers are in this space. Workers that work at places like SASS, you know, we could not do what we do without them. They are the absolute bread and butter of our defence against family, domestic and sexual violence. They are an incredibly skilled and dedicated workforce, and the Albanese Labor government is very pleased to say that we have invested previously $160 million to help the sector provide up to 500 workers right across Australia, and here in Tasmania, there are 33 frontline workers that have been added to the incredible workforce here in Tassie due to that funding. But today I'd like to announce that the federal government, the Labor Albanese government, will provide another $14 million to support those workers.
We recognize that they are highly skilled, they deserve to be properly remunerated for the work that they do, and we want to make sure that we keep them in the sector. So, this funding is going to be very important to do all of those things, so that Tasmanians know that they are getting the best possible support they can as victim- survivors of family, domestic, and sexual violence. And so, once again I want to thank every single one of those workers out there who every single day provide that care and support that is so desperately needed by so many people, so thanks very much.
SHIRLEYANN VARNEY, CEO, SEXUAL ASSAULT SUPPORT SERVICES: So, we welcome the announcement today by the Commonwealth Government and thank them for the investment into the specialized workforces in Tasmania. We have a very high prevalence of prevailing sexual violence issues in Tasmania, and this funding will enable us to support those people in need when they need support. It's very important that we can do that for Tasmanians, being able to feel safe following a sexual violence incident, and having someone again on the phone or able to come and work with them and provide immediate support and advice and help is absolutely critical. So, we also acknowledge and thank the federal government and the state government for the signal about the importance of primary prevention, so that we can prevent harm from sexual violence in the future for the safety of all Tasmanians.
JOURNALIST: Can you explain how the service works? So someone might call up, and can you explain what happens from there?
SHIRLEYANN VARNEY, CEO, SEXUAL ASSAULT SUPPORT SERVICES: So someone can call, make a phone call to SASS, and they will be immediately responded to by a counsellor. So, the counsellor will work with them at that immediate moment in time, provide them with some more referrals to other supporting agencies, or coordinate and organize perhaps forensic medical examination, if that's required. We also have a team that work as part of a multidisciplinary team at Arch, which allows victim-survivors to walk in and seek support when they find the courage to do so. So, we also, the funding, the 500 Workers funding enables us to provide some outreach support to meet people closer to where they live, or even communities where they live, and this is really important. The Tasmanian population is very dispersed with a lot of regional and rural families, and so being able to provide that additional agile support is critical.
JOURNALIST: We hear a lot of the time about, you know, women being turned away from support services. Has that something been something that you've had to do, or, you know, they've had to wait? Maybe they haven't been able to get family cared anymore straight away.
SHIRLEYANN VARNEY, CEO, SEXUAL ASSAULT SUPPORT SERVICES: So, a couple of years ago, we designed a stepped care model to ensure that to the front door, there is no wait list, so anybody who needs immediate support will receive immediate support. We then offer a variety of different supports in that intake program, and there might be brief interventions, there might be group work, often therapeutic group work. There are still wait lists for our long-term trauma processing sessions, but the brief interventions and the group work sustain those clients where they wait for that longer term intense support, and also help them to get ready for that journey. In fact, some of our clients don't even go on to the deep trauma processing work, their needs are met within the groups and the brief interventions sessions.
JOURNALIST: Do you currently have the workforce needed to carry out the work that the program does?
SHIRLEYANN VARNEY, CEO, SEXUAL ASSAULT SUPPORT SERVICES: We would always be able to scale up our model of care. We design it so that we can. The demand is huge. The prevalence in Tasmania is one of the highest in Australia, so absolutely we would always like more, but we have to work with what we’ve got, and the 500 Workers is a great support in providing us with some additional frontline workers, which we otherwise wouldn't have.
JOURNALIST: As the Assistant Minister said, there's record investment in other services like the Respectful Men program and similar programs. How vital is early intervention in these scenarios?
SHIRLEYANN VARNEY, CEO, SEXUAL ASSAULT SUPPORT SERVICES: So early intervention absolutely critical, preventing harm from ever occurring is, of course, absolutely the goal we really want to achieve. And what we understand is that we need to make our prevention initiatives inclusive and supportive to everyone in our community, and so being able to work with boys and men, all genders of our community, to support them to be a part of building the components in our society, the way we work to prevent harm from occurring in the first place, so they're part of the prevention initiative, and that's absolutely critical. And the number of our programs in prevention particularly look at doing mentoring with young boys and men, particularly in our sort of high schools age, and our program, the PAS program, our statewide program, works on multiple young boys in the prevention and early intervention space. We're very proud to be able to work in that space.
GED KEARNEY: It's a very good question, because we have actually, in fact, today in Hobart, I will be meeting with a number of people from the sector, family, domestic and sexual violence sector to feed into the Second Action Plan for the national strategy to eliminate family domestic and sexual violence in Australia by 2030. So, prevention is really where we are focusing right now. We have invested over $4 billion into family domestic and sexual violence, which is important, and a great deal of that is going to crisis care. Absolutely important, and we're not taking anything away from that, but the area I think we think we really need to build on is prevention and early intervention, and that is where we are focusing.
There's a number of initiatives that I wanted to make an announcement today. Shirleyann, and I thought I would talk about the Innovative Perpetrator Response we are announcing today, $1.7 million dollars will bring to a total of $3.2 million on a program that we are working very closely with the Tasmanian Government on, and this is work that we are doing in prisons with men who are perpetrators, who we know are soon to be released back into the community after their sentence has finished. And we're doing very intensive one-on-one counselling with those men, because we know that 50% of perpetrators will actually perpetrate again, and this program will follow the men after release back into the community and continue that one-on-one counselling and mentoring for a year. We will also work with the victim-survivors to make sure that they stay safe during this program and do a lot of work in counselling with them as well. So, that's just one prime example of prevention. There are a number, a myriad of prevention programs that the Federal Government is investing in and evaluating right now.
You might know Dan Rapicoli, who is the Special Envoy for Men's Health, he and I are traveling around the country, talking to all different types of stakeholders to see how we can actually promote healthy masculinity, and with a view to preventing violence amongst men and boys. So, there's a lot happening in that space, and I'm very proud to say that I'll be doing a Second Action Plan consultation today in Tasmania.
JOURNALIST: Can you explain why a Royal Commission into violence against women isn't something that the government would look at? The PM shut that idea down pretty quickly here in Hobart just a few months ago.
GED KEARNEY: Yeah, I completely understand that people will be calling for a royal commission. There's a lot of frustration and a lot of anger at the level of violence against women and children, but the fact of the matter is that the Commissioner, the Family Division Sexual Violence Commissioner, has found that there have been at least eight royal commissions with over 1000 recommendations. We know what the problem is. We have the recommendations about what to do. We have wonderful people working in the sector, like at SASS, who are saying to us, just get on with the job. The time has passed from asking questions, the time has passed for inquiries. It is now the time to just get on and do the job, and that is really what we want to do.
JOURNALIST: So why are, I guess, women still dying at the hands of violence? If you're getting on with the job?
GED KEARNEY: Well, we have invested more than any other government, as I said, around $4 billion and most of that has been spent in crisis care. We are now focusing on the very complex issues that drive violence. It's not a silver bullet. There's not one thing that fits all, that will fix it all. It's a very complex issue and a complicated problem, and that's why we are working with organizations like SASS and like other family and domestic violence and sexual assault services to really knuckle under and work on the prevention side of things. While one woman dies, we haven't done our job, and we know that, and it is a great tragedy that women are dying at the hands of intimate partners, and that is something that we are determined to work on.
JOURNALIST: What kind of feedback have you been receiving throughout this consultation for the Action Plan?
GED KEARNEY: It's been absolutely amazing. What we are asking people to come to the consultation with is tell us what is working. Where is great work being done? You know, we just heard about a fabulous prevention program here at SASS, and several other programs that they're working on. Tell us what's working. Tell us where the gaps are. Tell us what we, as a government, can actually do to really make sure that we are working to prevent family domestic and sexual violence, and people have been amazing. They are coming to the table with the programs, with the gaps, and really telling us, as government, where we should be focusing over the next five years.
JOURNALIST: It's slightly off topic, but related, how the Albanese government is pursuing national firearms reforms. How important is strong action on reducing the number of firearms in the community on improving (indistinct).
GED KEARNEY: Yes, we do know that I think it's about 10%, I might need to check that number, of deaths against in family domestic and sexual violence are using a firearm, and it is a very important part of the conversation that we're having with the states and territories. Firearm laws, of course, you know the purview of the states and territories, but we are working at every level across government to have that conversation, and it definitely is part of the conversation nationally surrounding firearm laws.
JOURNALIST: There's been pushback from state government over the sale of Rushy Lagoon. Is the federal government seeking wise decision to allow the sale?
REBECCA WHITE: I think a bit of perspective is important here. That property was privately owned by a New Zealand farmer, and they've had it on the market for nearly 10 years and haven't been able to find a buyer. They've gone so far a couple of years ago to carve out the dairy farm component to see if they could sell that separately and were unsuccessful. What's transpired is that a UK firm has decided to purchase that property, and the decision did go through the Foreign Investment Review Board, and of course that's now publicly known, and an announcement's been made about that.
The federal government's role here is quite limited when it comes to what happens on the North East, that farmer who is trying to sell that farm can't do so for quite some time. My understanding is the purchaser will be putting some of the property into trees, but not all of it. Some of it will be retained for agricultural purposes, and I think that's really important to note. I think the other important thing to understand here is on behalf of the community, they do deserve some information from the new purchaser about the timelines for when they do plan to start to begin operations there. I do understand the community has some questions about ongoing job opportunities. I understand currently there are about 19 people employed at that site, but that doesn't take into account, of course, the other services that support the operation of those farm activities, so no doubt, there are some questions in the community at the moment. My hope is that the company can be transparent with the community about what the next steps are, where the job opportunities might be coming from, and when, so that people who are living in the North East have some certainty about what the future holds.