Page 748 - Week 03 - Tuesday, 21 March 2017
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The ACT women’s plan 2016-26 will be implemented through a series of action plans. I was pleased to launch the first action plan at the ACT Women’s Day awards on 7 March. The first action plan, addressing health and wellbeing, provides practical ways that we can work with and engage community members, the community sector and the private sector to actively work towards creating true equality for women and girls.
The plan contains two key priority areas: equity and wellbeing, and physical and mental health. The first priority area, health and wellbeing, acknowledges that gender equality benefits everyone in our community. The plan includes actions to drive cultural change and incorporates women’s perspectives and the principles of gender equality in education, recreation, employment, our city planning and government policies. For example, the ACT public service will look at the impact of new programs and policies on gender and educate staff about the impact of unconscious bias on the status and wellbeing of women and girls.
The second priority, physical and mental health, seeks to make sure that women and girls have access to the right services at the right time. Health is such an important area for women and girls in our community. Some of the focus areas include perinatal services, active lifestyles and mental health, as well as improving information and services for women and girls from diverse backgrounds.
Sadly, Madam Speaker, whilst we can look at improving a range of preventative health measures, the rate of violence against women does not seem to be reducing. The Domestic Violence Crisis Service has reported a 23 per cent increase in demand over the last 12 months, with nearly 51,000 crisis intervention contacts being made with the service in 2015-16. That is almost 1,000 a week.
Similarly, the Canberra Rape Crisis Centre report an increase in demand for their services, with 18,488 calls to their crisis line in 2015-16, representing a 156 per cent increase since 2010-11. Yet, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, 72 per cent of Australian women who experience physical or sexual violence do not report the matter to the police. This means it is difficult to establish the cause of the increase, whether it represents an actual increase of incidents or whether it is indicative of women having a better understanding of their rights and an understanding that the support is there.
Whatever the reason, we need to take these statistics very seriously, and the ACT has become a national leader in declaring violence against women a whole-of-community challenge. In the 2016 budget we announced the $21.42 million safer families package and levy to secure much-needed funding for new services and legal responses to domestic and family violence.
There were a number of key pieces of work which helped build the evidence base in 2016. These included the report of the board of inquiry into the system-level responses of family violence in the ACT by Laurie Glanfield AM; the ACT domestic violence service system gap analysis from our own Community Services Directorate; and the findings and recommendations from the Domestic Violence Prevention
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