Family, Domestic and Sexual Violence

Mr HAWKE (Mitchell) (19:04): I rise tonight to raise my ongoing concern about the treatment of family, domestic and sexual violence against women and children in Australia by governments, and the lack of what I would regard as legislative reform responses that are adequate and urgent enough to meet the challenges we all know, in this Chamber and in this House, that we face.

I do want to recognise the government for its 6 September release, following National Cabinet, in relation to the $4.4 billion in further commitments to the National Access to Justice Partnership and the shared goals under the National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children. I do recognise the value that additional money for services can have and the important role that it will play in all of the different facets that the National Cabinet signs on, including the five-year national partnership agreement and enhancing and expanding child centred trauma centres and the development of national evidence based centres and men's behaviour change programs. These are all worthy initiatives and all very good initiatives. What is also needed, in my opinion—and in the opinion of very many—is reform of all of the different facets of Commonwealth and state legislation that enable much of the family, domestic and sexual violence against women, including in the area of financial services. Financial abuse is one of the most prevalent kinds of domestic and family abuse. It gets too little attention in much of the headline funding for necessary things that need to be done.

I want to speak briefly on Catherine Fitzpatrick, the founder and director of Flequity Ventures, and the important work that she has been doing in relation to financial abuse and a regulatory reform framework, something that is the domain of government to do—not just funding or service provision, which are very important and will certainly make a difference, but also actual reform of the laws and the financial system that will prevent many of the people who want to perpetrate these things and stop it from even occurring in the first place and give women recourse to safety and allow them to go somewhere and deal with it rather than face roadblocks when they come to their banks and other financial institutions and the treatment that happens in family and domestic violence.

Taking up some of the recommendations that she has made, I will also endorse the government in the role of Commonwealth legislative change in relation to financial services and financial sectors. The first thing would be treating financial abuse as a financial crime. It sounds simple but financial abuse of women is not treated as a financial crime. That is a fundamental legal reform that parliament should do first. If you treat it as a crime under the Crimes Act, you completely invert the treatment of behaviour by all of our agencies, whether it be police, investigative agencies or all of our ombudsmen in other sectors. That is a fundamental historic flaw in the construction of our laws and legislation. At the moment, as we know, the tactics and impact of financial abuse is consistent with other financial crimes. The government has done a lot of work recently on awareness of scams, frauds and theft, but domestic and family financial abuse isn't treated in the same way. This seems simple, but this is 2024 and we still haven't treated financial abuse as financial crime in a domestic and family violence context. Establishing things like a financial abuse accord, similar to the cross-sector public-private partnerships for scams and responses to protect customers from financial abuse and mechanisms for applying similar criminal penalties as we do to scams and other things would be simple measures that would actually prevent physical violence from occurring because we know the steps and the stages of abuse centre around things like financial abuse for many years before physical abuse might happen. Sometimes they will happen in a complementary way or together. Sometimes we see, as in a more serious example recently with Molly Ticehurst, a pattern of behaviour where a partner's pet or cherished animal is killed in advance as a warning that is ignored by agencies as well. One of those warning signs is financial abuse. Financial abuse can happen for many years and it still isn't treated as a crime even to this day. So that's something very simple that the government can take up and reform.

Another recommendation that the Flequity report has come up with which again makes absolute sense is to apply financial 'safety by design' principles to products and services. That's financial products and services we are talking about here and safety by design. We still know today that when women try to engage, if they are the joint holder of an account, once one partner has locked them out of the account, the financial services provider can't do anything about it. We don't have safety by design built in. So we don't have a way of enabling and empowering our financial services institutions in dealing with those things. Safety by design—and there are plenty of bodies of work being done on this—can be done by reimagining all of our financial services products to understand reality and what goes on with financial abuse in these situations.

Again, these are not things that government necessarily has to fund or do but work that can be done through legal and fiscal reforms that will actually make a practical difference. I commend this work very much to the government in lifting the bar on customer service. We have heard recently from many banks about how they do monitor, for example, messages in transfers between parties. They actually can monitor abusive keywords. The only problem is that, as they identify abusive words and texts that are sent between partners as they transfer money, they can only send them a warning message saying, 'Hey, you shouldn't be abusing that other person in this way, and we note your behaviour.' But, when we've asked, for example, 'How many customers have you kicked out of the bank?' the numbers are one or two. But we know that we can detect through technology abuse occurring, and banks are unable to do anything about that. Again, it is financial abuse, in many cases a precursor or a continuation of ongoing family and domestic violence.

We're talking here about a comprehensive financial safety review of the regulatory framework around fiscal services, and that includes the regulatory framework to specifically include domestic financial abuse and recognise the risks of misuse of the financial system. I think this has some areas with relevant laws, as we might include for our members to note, including the National Consumer Credit Protection Act and the Privacy Act. I am an advocate for privacy and always have been, but the Privacy Act ought not to act as the barrier it does in family and domestic violence.

You treat it as a crime upfront, you reform the financial services system and then you look at all these acts, including the Privacy Act, to take out the nonsense that we should consider perpetrators' privacy—for example, like the banks, where they can detect abuse happening in writing through their technology but then privacy laws prevent them from dealing with these things in a way that might be sufficient. Given that we know that these people are particularly violent and abusive—we're talking about a small percentage, but still the Privacy Act prevents things. We haven't seen sensible amendments to the Privacy Act in this regard for a very long time.

There are the ASIC Act, obviously; the Insurance Contracts Act; legislation of statutory instruments for superannuation; and state and territory regulations, but for our jurisdiction there are plenty of acts that we can be looking into, including the ASIC Act. We know how abusers will abuse company directorships, especially within relationships, to abuse women in particular. It's a common occurrence for all members here when they've come across this, and yet we still don't have from any government a set of comprehensive reforms of the ASIC Act and of company directorships in a way that would take into account the realities of modern financial abuse.

I commend the government and have no criticism of the government's funding announcement or of National Cabinet for doing its work, but funding is one part of the important arrangements that we need to make to do our best against the ongoing scourge of family and domestic violence. One of the critical components that we must consider in this parliament and in the future will be financial abuse reforms. It will do a lot for a lot of women and a lot of children who are faced with regular financial abuse. Financial abuse is as horrific as any other form of abuse in a domestic and family violence setting. We have laws that can be amended. We have a complete retreatment of these crimes in 2024. These ideas are sound. There is plenty of solid advice already, and I think the reforms, the will, the drive and the bipartisanship all exist for us to pursue this at this time. I raise that tonight with the best of intentions to say to the government, in the open spirit of cooperation, that here I think there would be a real willingness to make urgent reforms to the treatment of financial abuse of women and children in a way that would make progress in this very difficult area.