AnalysisThe Albanese government is in the box seat as Australians rally against gendered violence
I want to make an admission.
I genuinely and passionately believed that some of the deeper sexist behaviours that were leading to gendered violence for my generation and the generations above me were on the way out. I thought young men were changing, that generational shifts were going to sort so many of our entrenched problems out.
Just as I had seen a radical reduction in homophobia in my lifetime, I believed young men were being raised differently — better — to be kinder and gentler and encouraged to talk about their feelings and that it would start appearing in the statistics, that there would be a seismic change in the treatment of women as a consequence.
And it wasn't just me. A lot of women in my generation would talk like this. We started believing a false dichotomy that older men were the dinosaurs and younger men were the great hope — that safety would arrive because gender relations would fundamentally be rewritten. We waited, but little shifted. In fact, things arguably got worse. Women kept dying.
I was wrong. It's time we start accepting that there will need to be an emergency response to the epidemic of male violence. We are knowingly putting our girls and women at risk if we don't consider immediate and radical changes to our prevention and response systems. We can't keep tinkering, review after review, state by state, individual crisis after crisis. We can't wait for attitudinal change to do the bulk of the work with miracle results.
Gendered violence is entrenched, so embodied in our culture it will take an effort bigger than motherhood statements about zero tolerance and lofty goals to end it. It will need dramatically more resourcing and top prioritisation, not just another agenda item on a long list of national issues.
Our federation is often the complexity here — but we've had a national emergency before. It was called COVID and it involved daily press conferences, constant national cabinet meetings and prime ministerial coordination. It wasn't perfect but it was intensive and deliberate. It involved expert advice and big investments.
It may seem an odd comparison but gendered violence can't be tackled in silos anymore. We can't have sporadic work, a flurry of activity after an explosion of anger and then, quietly, business as usual returning.
'Whatever it takes'
This weekend women took to the streets in their thousands in more than a dozen rallies calling for an end to gender-based violence. Organised by advocacy group What Were You Wearing, the first rallies were held in Ballarat and Newcastle and moved to Sydney and Adelaide, and on Sunday, in Melbourne, Bendigo, Geelong, Coffs Harbour, Wagga Wagga, Orange, Perth, the Sunshine Coast, Gold Coast, Brisbane and Canberra.
The prime minister went to Sunday's demonstration in Canberra. It was a powerful statement from Anthony Albanese that his government wouldn't walk away when women were demanding action. It was vastly different to the response we saw when Brittany Higgins, the former Liberal staffer whose rape allegations sparked a national discussion about the workplace culture at Parliament House, spoke at the women's March 4 Justice rally in Canberra in the aftermath of her revelations.
The prime minister of the day, Scott Morrison, did not join those women on the lawns at that time and the movement that was galvanised by those horrifying revelations grew across the country. What we are seeing now is a continuation of that movement.
This prime minister has sent a signal this weekend that he will not look away — but the obligation on him doesn't end there. Joining the protest was an important message from government that the rallies calling for change would not be in conflict with the government but instead in unison. He has agreed to hold a national cabinet meeting to address this in the wake of it being raised by the Victorian and NSW premiers.
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton told me for this column that he wants to work with the prime minister in a bipartisan way to turn this around.
"I will work with the PM and do whatever it takes to improve the situation. The violence is a national disgrace and we need to fund the services — l, government and non-government — which are working and making a positive impact," he told me for this column.
LoadingEveryone must work together
One in four women has suffered intimate partner violence since the age of 15, while three in five Indigenous women have experienced physical or sexual violence perpetrated by a male intimate partner.
Late last year, for the first time, governments set targets for ending violence, including a 25 per cent annual reduction in female victims of intimate partner homicide.
The Albanese government has made a funding commitment of $2.3 billion over the 2022-23 and 2023-24 budgets to address women's safety and support delivery of the action plans. This weekend Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus said he did not support a royal commission but not because the issue did not matter — but because it delayed action that needed to be taken now.
But experts say the investment promised is not enough to deal with the scale of the crisis of domestic, family and sexual violence in Australia. Now teal MPs are pushing for funding to accelerate too.
Teal independent MP for Goldstein, Zoe Daniel, says the prime minister must declare violence against women a national emergency.
"We need to treat gendered violence with the same level of urgency we show to terrorism, because it is a form of terrorism, and certainly at a rate of a woman every four days, it's killing more Australians," she tells me.
"We are desensitised to this. Whether we label it terrorism or not, the fact is that women and children are being terrorised across our nation. We cannot let this be yet another moment of hand-wringing that leads nowhere."
Daniel says we need to see it as (1) a set of immediate actions — things like how AVOs and bail are failing women, things like how gaps in data are leading to red flags being missed, then (2) next steps — how to address violent online porn, toxic misogynistic influencers online, other drivers like gambling and financial pressure, and all the while (3) we have a long-run education, prevention, cultural-change approach to elevate respect for women and girls and to provoke men and boys to be more than bystanders.
Crucially, she says federal and state governments also have to get together and stop throwing the can between them.
"For example, the federal government has given the states funding for 500 family violence workers — where are they? The national plan is a good set of aims but it's underfunded."
And she argues that family violence organisations live hand to mouth, constantly worrying about whether their funding will be renewed.
Wentworth MP Allegra Spender told me that as the public grieving recedes, the legacy of the Bondi Junction tragedy must be action on violence against women, and mental health.
"We know that violence against women happens in all communities and is linked to gender power imbalances. It starts with attitudes and social norms and thrives with a lack of consequences and a justice system that doesn't deliver justice or adequately protect women.
She agrees with Daniel that the existing national plan and targets to reduce violence need the funding to deliver that, and we need to hold ourselves accountable at each step on the way.
"Key areas for immediate investment should be education, housing and grassroots services for women experiencing violence, and justice reform," she says. "I have local services that are struggling for funding with the significant need. In my area up to 50 per cent of police time is spent on DV."
And she says social media has a role in this too.
"I believe the government should look at models where youth can opt out of the algorithm serving them content that they don't already follow or are searching for."
One of the toxic influences on some young men has been Andrew Tate, who has attracted millions of online followers drawn to his hyper-masculine and over-the-top lifestyle. For some young men and boys, Tate's view of the world is one to emulate. A new study of women teachers has recently found Tate's ideology is spreading in Australian classrooms in the form of sexism and sexual harassment. The messages some boys are getting in our disrupted world are dangerous, and we still haven't worked out how to combat it.
So this has the potential to be genuinely bipartisan like nothing we've seen before. The Albanese government is in the box seat — the words being spoken are broadly consistent across the political divide. There's an obligation on us all to ensure rallies like these aren't needed in the future.
Patricia Karvelas is the presenter of Q+A, which returns tonight at 9:35pm on ABC TV, RN Breakfast and co-host of the Party Room podcast.