The Victorian premier, Daniel Andrews, says it is time for the federal government to stop talking and start taking serious action on family violence, an issue he will raise at Wednesday’s Council of Australian Governments (Coag) meeting in Adelaide.
The newly re-elected premier is at loggerheads with the federal government on multiple fronts before the meeting, including on education and infrastructure funding.
Andrews said the scheduled agenda item on family violence, which notes the outcome of a recent national summit on the issue and refers to the upcoming fourth action plan to reduce violence against women and their children, was welcome, but much more was needed.
“This is the fourth action plan that we’re being asked to endorse and I’ve got no quarrel with the summit,” he said of the October commonwealth state and territory meeting led by the women’s minister, Kelly O’Dwyer. “But, at some point, we have to stop having action plans and we have to have some action.
“I don’t think the investment priorities that we’ve seen, the amount of resources devoted to this challenge is anywhere near adequate when you consider a woman a week is losing their life at the hands of their current or former partner.”
Victoria is the acknowledged leader in this area, having held a royal commission into family violence and committed more than $2bn in the government’s first term, which it says is more than every state and the commonwealth combined.
Andrews said he would raise two specific things the commonwealth needed to do, both of which were recommendations of the royal commission.
The first was paid family violence leave in the national employment standards, to allow victims to deal with issues such as court dates or moving home. Last week, the federal parliament passed laws to give workers up to five days a year unpaid family violence leave as a minimum standard. Labor and unions want 10 days of paid leave and Victorian public-sector employees are entitled to 20 days.
When the law passed, O’Dwyer said “there is always more than we can do” and promised the change would not be the last to come from the government to support domestic violence victims.
Andrews will also push the federal government to provide a specific Medicare item number for victims of family violence when they visit their GP, so that doctors could be appropriately paid to give women the care and counselling they needed. In 2016, the federal government rejected the idea, saying existing Medicare items were sufficient.
“There is a lot of talk, and I don’t want to be critical for its own sake,” Andrews said. “There is an opportunity here for the commonwealth government to prove its many critics in the family violence sector wrong by adopting these two important changes. Neither of them are radical and neither will cost a lot of money.
“This is a crisis, this is urgent.”
The federal, state and territory governments have been working to finalise the fourth action plan, which begins next year and runs until 2022.
It aims to coordinate approaches to preventing and responding to family violence.
