A national domestic violence order scheme could be up and running within 12 months, after the heads of states and territories made an in-principle commitment to the scheme at Friday’s Council of Australian Governments (Coag) meeting.
The national scheme would ensure that domestic violence orders in one jurisdiction would be recognised in every state and territory.
A legal framework shared between states and territories would be completed before the end of the year, and the prime minister, Tony Abbott, said he would be very disappointed if the scheme was not up and running within 12 months.
“In a complex federation, I don’t want anyone to underestimate the logistical difficulties of making [these] kinds of changes,” Abbott told reporters on Friday, adding that getting systems in place across the country was time-consuming.
“There’s quite a degree of logistics in all of this, but we’ll get on with it as quickly as we can.”
Organisations that provide services for survivors of domestic and sexual violence have warned that national schemes would be rendered ineffective if the commonwealth does not provide long-term funding certainty for programs.
“Laudable goals such as a national intervention order scheme risk being undermined by a continuing crisis in legal assistance funding that has not been fixed by the partial withdrawal by federal attorney general George Brandis of threatened cuts that were to take effect in July,” said the executive officer of the federation of community legal centres Victoria, Liana Buchanan.
“If women can’t get free legal help when applying for an intervention order, how effective in protecting their safety will those orders be?”
“We called on Coag to deliver robust, long-term and adequate resourcing for the national plan, and they didn’t,” chief executive of Domestic Violence New South Wales, Moo Baulch, said. “Violence against women is preventable. But we need adequate funding to be able to end it.”
Brandis reversed planned cuts to the legal aid sector last month, citing the impact such a decision would have on survivors of domestic violence.
The Greens echoed the call from service providers for funding certainty.
“Sadly, today’s announcement is undermined by the Abbott government’s funding cuts to housing and legal services for women trying to escape domestic violence,” the Greens leader, Christine Milne, said.
“The COAG communique says that frontline services should continue to meet the needs of vulnerable women and children, when it is obvious to everyone those needs are not being met and the funding is clearly inadequate.”
Earlier on Friday the social services minister, Scott Morrison, announced a $15m funding injection for community-based support services that specialise in combating family violence and drug and alcohol addiction.
First ministers also agreed to jointly contribute to a $30m national public awareness campaign to reduce violence against women.
Abbott said such a campaign was needed in order to highlight “just how wrong, just how evil” family violence is.
The chief minister of the Australian Capital Territory, Andrew Barr, welcomed the public awareness campaign, but said diverse cultures and relationships “should not be overlooked”. He wanted the campaign to focus on the realities of sufferers in Aboriginal and Torres Strait islander communities, culturally and linguistically diverse women, as well as couples in same sex relationships.
The Queensland premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, said that the campaign was needed to change attitudes, but that frontline services for survivors of family violence were also necessary.
“This is a community issue,” she said. “As leaders we can set the parameters, but it needs a community response.”
Palaszczuk flagged future discussions on the formation of a court dealing only with domestic violence, which she said would be more sensitive to survivors and provide a holistic approach to the eradication of the problem.
But chief executive of Rape and Domestic Violence Services Australia, Karen Willis, said that the $30m spent on the campaign “wasn’t very good expenditure”, and that the money could have better targeted at programs like counselling which change perpetrator’s behaviour, or services which support survivors.
The first ministers agreed to consider a national framework to ensure that perpetrators of family violence were held to the same standard in all jurisdictions, and that national standards for intervention be put in place.
The commonwealth and the states will also look at how to tackle the growing issue of harassment and oppression online.
They will report on the progress of a national information sharing system so that authorities in different locations can access information relating to perpetrators. NSW, Tasmania and Queensland will trial the system before reporting back to Coag at the end of the year.
Several first ministers praised the council for its dedication to the eradication of violence against women and children.
“We as leaders in this nation know and understand that more of the same policy will mean more of the same tragedy and we’re not prepared to settle for that,” the Victorian premier, Daniel Andrews, said.
“We have an unprecedented opportunity here to make a real difference in this area,” the NSW premier, Mike Baird, said. “It doesn’t stop at state boundaries. It’s clearly a problem across this country and bringing us together [means that] there’s initiatives across various states and territories where we’re making a difference.”
The Coag meeting also discussed how best to tackle the effects of the drug ice, after the prime minister’s announcement last month of the formation of a national strategy on reducing the effect of the drug.
A number of states and territories already have strategies in place, and the Northern Territory chief minister, Adam Giles, announced on Friday the formation of a new strike force made up of territory and commonwealth authorities.
The strike force will look particularly at the challenges of eradicating ice addiction in remote communities.
The federal Labor leader, Bill Shorten, welcomed the coordinated way in which the commonwealth and states were tackling the drug problem.
“Many of the police and experts I speak to say this is a national crisis, and they’re right,” he said. “This crisis requires a national approach and I’m pleased Coag has recognised that today.”
