Delivering the best service – Addressing family and domestic violence

Around one in three Australian women will experience some form of domestic or family violence, with the majority reporting the perpetrator was a current or previous partner.  Senator The Hon Marise Payne – as Minister for Human Services – spoke out in response to the rise in concern over the issue since the death of Rosie Batty’s son at the hands of his father, and other serious cases that went public.  The Minister announced that her Department had developed a Family and Domestic Violence Strategy, aimed at raising awareness of this issue and supporting its most vulnerable customers. Marise Payne addressed The Sydney Institute on Tuesday 21 July 2015 to further argue her proposals.

DELIVERING THE BEST SERVICE – ADDRESSING FAMILY AND DOMESTIC VIOLENCE

MARISE PAYNE

Gerard and Anne Henderson, Secretary of the Department of Human Services Kathryn Campbell, The Hon Stuart Ayres MP, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of this land on which we meet this evening, and pay my respects to their elders both past and present.

It is a pleasure to be here tonight at The Sydney Institute. It’s been some years since I last had the opportunity to speak here. In fact, we’ve had four prime ministers since the last time, three from the same party and two of those the same person – certainly a strange period in Australian politics.

It is a great pleasure to address The Sydney Institute again, this time as the Minister for Human Services. My department is the government’s service delivery agency, comprising Centrelink, Medicare, Child Support and Australian Hearing. We deliver more than $159 billion in payments each year, including the Age Pension, Newstart Allowance, Disability Support Pension and Medicare benefits. If you have a Medicare card, you are one of my customers.

We also lead the Commonwealth Public Service in the employment of Indigenous Australians, of people with a disability and of women. I am immensely proud of our workforce, their skills and diversity, their commitment to doing their job, and of the support they give to Australians, often at the most vulnerable times of their lives.

Government service delivery, welfare reform and our recently commenced welfare payments IT investment that will bring our antiquated payments IT systems into the twenty-first century, are major issues for the Abbott Government. I know some of you will have heard my colleague Scott Morrison, the Minister for Social Services, address some of those issues recently, here at the Institute.

Acknowledging the importance of those, tonight I particularly want to speak more broadly about one of our nation’s most pressing concerns, and in my view, a social emergency, family and domestic violence.

For some time now, family and domestic violence has certainly been considered a serious issue. But, in the last 18 months, it has progressed to a topic of national conversation, which is long overdue. Because frankly, the level of family and domestic violence in Australia in 2015 is alarmingly high and completely unacceptable.

Historically, we had avoided talking openly and frankly about the issue. It just wasn’t the “done” thing; it was regarded as “private”, and something to “sort out at home”. More than unfortunately, some methods of sorting it out at home only involved further violence and increasingly, deaths.

While a number of factors have driven this changed conversation, I want to acknowledge our 2015 Australian of the Year, Rosie Batty, and her remarkable contribution to the national discourse since her son Luke was tragically murdered by his father and her former husband.

In her recent address to the National Press Club, Rosie said that after Luke was murdered, the media congregated at her home. She said that when she walked outside she had every intention of politely telling the group of journalists to please leave her alone. She didn’t want to speak publicly, it was too soon and too raw.

As journalists do, they encouraged her to make a short comment. It was those comments, unprepared and unrehearsed, that revealed the ugly truth about family and domestic violence in Australia: it happens anywhere, to everyday people who live in everyday suburbs. It can happen to anyone.

Since that day, Rosie has shared her infinitely painful story and campaigned for change. In June this year, on what would have been Luke’s 13th birthday, she launched the Never Alone campaign to build support for victims of family and domestic violence. We’ve also seen greater recognition of the issue of family and domestic violence through primary prevention campaigns including White Ribbon Day and Our Watch, both Commonwealth supported.

These campaigns focus on driving nation-wide change in Australia’s culture, behaviours and attitudes that lead to violence against women and children.

The Male Champions of Change program, brought together by the Sex Discrimination Commissioner Elizabeth Broderick, is another valuable initiative which sees leading and influential men stepping up beside women to help build a gender equal Australia.

I look forward to an opportunity for my department to work with the Male Champions of Change as part of our work in this area. One of our most important steps is to recognise that family and domestic violence is not a women’s issue, it is everybody’s issue. The national conversation needs to continue and in my view to expand.

We have seen an increase in family and domestic violence reporting in the media, we have seen politicians voice their support for change. We’ve seen companies such as Telstra and the National Australia Bank create workplace domestic violence policies. But for those actually experiencing violence the change probably feels slow and the response from both government and community needs to go further. I think most of us can do more, including me.

Let me start with some of my direct experience of the last 18 months. From the beginning of my role as Minister, I received escalation notices about incidents of violence in our service centres. This was certainly not something that was in the incoming government brief. However, as the face of the Australian government, staff in my service centres experience aggressive and violent behaviour at the hands of our customers, which of course happens in other public facing work environments.

My observation is, that this is mostly a result of customers bringing their own issues, and sometimes their personal conflicts, into the service centre with them, and also a result of using violence as a response to an interaction with us; behaviour which is completely unacceptable anywhere, anytime; in the home, on the street or in our service centres.

The department takes steps to make sure our staff are safe at work. Although we would prefer it was not necessary, we train our staff to deal with customer violence, and in some locations we do employ security staff, which managers tell me has had a discernible deterrent effect. We provide support to staff who have been in violent work situations and we work closely with local police as necessary.

The job of some of those staff will also be to support customers who are experiencing family and domestic violence, in itself a challenging and demanding job. Then to face violence or abuse in the workplace, whether in person or by phone, can only exacerbate the impact on our staff.

That is one difficult aspect of the job done by Human Services staff. It does become more complex though. Last year, I received yet another email escalation notice. I read it several times. I know exactly where I was when it arrived. I sat in a car, uncomprehending. It said one of our Human Services staff had been murdered, by her husband.

I truly don’t believe anybody in charge of a large organisation expects, during the course of their work day, to be advised of their staff dying as a result of family and domestic violence. I don’t. My Secretary doesn’t. You don’t expect it, but it happens. I dread it. I can’t describe here the full impact that tragic event had on me as a Minister, but I do know it was one of the significant drivers bringing me to make these remarks tonight.

But why was I so surprised? Family and domestic violence can and does affect anyone, anywhere. As is typical in many family and domestic violence situations, fellow workers are often unaware of the violent lives colleagues suffer outside work, and are of course also left devastated when they become aware.

Less than a month ago, an intoxicated customer stabbed his wife, not fatally, outside one of our service centres. I read that escalation notice with dread. It is impossible in such circumstances not to turn your mind to what we can do, what more can be done, and that is what brings me here tonight.

As a person in public life with a voice, as a woman passionate about supporting women in Australian society, as a Minister with a profile and position that gives me something of a role in the broad leadership of this nation, I am determined to do what I can to progress the national conversation on family and domestic violence. I want to do more. I want to give a voice to those Australians who do not have one.

I have been reminding myself of the size of the challenge Australia is facing. According to the 2012 ABS personal safety survey, over 132,000 Australian women have experienced violence at the hands of a current or former partner in the past 12 months. That is staggering. That’s enough women to fill Sydney’s Allianz Stadium almost 3 times over. That’s just the number of reported instances.

According to the Australian Human Rights Commission, every week in Australia a woman is murdered by her partner or ex-partner. Domestic violence accounts for one fifth of our total number of homicides. According to one online women’s group, there have already been 52 family and domestic violence related deaths in Australia this year. You know, I have even had to adjust that number up several times in the last few days as I have been working on these remarks, I think it was 47 at the end of last week. Let me say though, this figure is not an official account, but one tallied by an online group, which gives an indication of how ad-hoc some of the data reporting around this issue is.

I am talking about women here. While there are men who suffer abuse and violence within the family, and the recent tragic and senseless murder of Adelaide Crows coach Phil Walsh is a timely reminder of this; it is, statistically and literally, overwhelmingly women who are on the receiving end of family and domestic violence.

According to the ABS, almost one in six women have experienced violence from a partner compared to almost one in nineteen men. One in 20 women have experienced sexual violence compared to one in 250 men. These are invidious comparisons but I think it is important to restate them.

So let’s be clear: violence is a society wide issue, but it predominately affects women and children. Family and domestic violence isn’t limited to physical or verbal abuse. It comes in the form of bullying, harassing, stalking, isolation or financial abuse.

Now, in the technological age, we are seeing another worrying trend. Perpetrators are using technology to inflict abuse, to control, track and intimidate. If preventing homicides and protecting 132,000 women from experiencing violence each year isn’t reason enough to put an end to this sinister problem, then also consider the economic cost of family and domestic violence.

In economic terms, and I don’t think it gets any dryer than calculating the cost of abuse and violence, family and domestic violence is costing Australia billions of dollars each year. According to KPMG, the cost of family and domestic violence in Australia is $19.9 billion each year, and rising. To break that figure down: domestic violence is costing Australia $8,800 for every man, woman and child.

The hurt and suffering of victims makes up about half of the total cost, while the cost to business in lost productivity is about $1.6 billion. So not only is there a strong moral imperative to prevent violence against women, but there is a strong economic reason too. At the Commonwealth level, the Prime Minister and Minister Michaelia Cash, Minister assisting the Prime Minister for Women, have established a COAG Advisory Panel on reducing violence against women and their children, chaired by former Victorian Police Commissioner Ken Lay, with Rosie Batty and Heather Nancarrow as deputy chairs.

The panel members have expert knowledge across domestic and family violence, sexual assault, online safety, violence within Indigenous and culturally and linguistically diverse communities, and people with disabilities. The panel is advising COAG on practical ways to address violence against women and their children.

ANROWS has been given a leading role in increasing our knowledge about family and domestic violence and sexual assault to help us drive informed and strategic policy change to address the levels of violence against women and their children. ANROWS and Our Watch have jointly commissioned a study into the media portrayal and representation of violence against women and their children. The media is such a dominant force in shaping and contributing to the discussion about family violence.

The study will provide baseline data on the media portrayal of violence against women, which will give us a starting point to measure any changes in attitude resulting from the work being done to address this issue. These initiatives, with others led by Minister Morrison and Minister Cash, are part of the broad Commonwealth response and campaigns addressing a reduction in family and domestic violence.

My department comes into contact with victims and survivors of family and domestic violence each and every day, not to mention perpetrators. We have a unique opportunity, and in my view an obligation, to take a lead in addressing family and domestic violence, both in terms of our customers, but also for our staff.

Research has identified a number of domestic violence risk factors and particularly vulnerable groups. Some of those groups include: women – particularly young women, women from CALD and Indigenous backgrounds, pregnant women and women with disabilities Risk factors include: alcohol and drug use; past experience of violence; depression; separations; people with a disability; financial stress.

If you compare those risk factors and vulnerable groups to the reasons customers contact my department, you will see there are certainly cross overs. Some of our customers can present with one or several of these risk factors. However, it is a fallacy to believe that family and domestic violence only affects people who have fallen on hard times. These issues are correlated, but they are not necessarily the cause of family and domestic violence.

Centrelink alone has more than seven million customers, while Child Support helps 1.4 million separated parents transfer money to support more than 1.2 million children. Each weekday the department handles more than 220,000 calls while an average of 100,000 people visit one of our 400 service centres around Australia.

Our customers contact us at times when they may be vulnerable and going through personal turmoil. They may have lost their job, are ill or injured, have had a relationship breakdown, or they have lost a loved one, and/or they are experiencing family and domestic violence. Customers experiencing family and domestic violence may be eligible for a range of payments and services and our staff work with customers to identify the best support available for them.

My department also has a network of social workers who offer counselling and support. As well as helping victims to obtain appropriate payments, our social workers play an important role linking victims with state and community support services. In the last financial year, 48,468 contacts were made with departmental social workers about family and domestic violence, over 1,000 more than the previous year. This is not a small issue.

In conjunction with the National Plan to Reduce Violence against Women and their Children, my department has developed a Family and Domestic Violence Strategy. As part of this strategy, Human Services is implementing its Family and Domestic Violence Risk Identification and Referral model, initially in the Child Support program. This process requires child support staff to ask customers if they are concerned about their safety or their family’s safety during certain telephone conversations.

If the customer identifies a concern, the staff member will offer appropriate support, potentially engaging the customer with one of our departmental social workers, or by providing contact numbers for relevant community organisations, or a direct transfer to 1800RESPECT, Australia’s National Sexual Assault, Domestic Violence Counselling Service. Separation can often commence or increase family and domestic violence.

Customer feedback from the early trials suggest that people appreciate being asked if they have concerns for their safety. The model ensures staff have a systematic and consistent referral process to connect customers with the support services they need, when they need it. While child support staff are experienced in working with customers who have complex matters, they are given comprehensive training in responding to people who are identified as experiencing family and domestic violence concerns.

The department is expanding the model to other areas of the business and adapting it for face-to-face and online service delivery channels. Human Services is often described as the face of government to the Australian people. Nowhere is this more the case than in remote and regional Indigenous communities. We know that family and domestic violence occurs far too often in these communities, and is a very complex issue for those victims and our staff to deal with.

I am acutely aware that implementing the Risk Identification and Referral model in these communities will not be a simple task. I also know that it is one further initiative among many that the government is implementing to improve the lives of Indigenous Australians. I believe the model will help to ensure victims of violence receive the support they need and I look forward to working with the Minister for Indigenous Affairs to make this happen.

Both I and my personal staff, with senior members of the department, attended a Risk Identification and Referral training session last week, delivered by a senior Human Services social worker. I think it is important for me to know and understand how the department is approaching this.

I have mentioned the size of the task. Recent statistics from state and territory police suggest that police across Australia deal with an estimated 657 domestic violence matters on average every day of the year. That’s one incident every two minutes. In basically every community – wealthy, poor, urban, rural. Your town, my suburb. So, frankly, family and domestic violence isn’t a socio-economic issue, it’s everybody’s issue. The simple fact is that there are people who on some level feel it is justifiable to terrorise their partner, their family in the confines of their own home.

When I spoke earlier about the size of my department, I didn’t mention the size of our workforce. Behind Defence, my department is the largest employer in the public service. We have more than 34,000 staff, of whom almost 25,000, or more than 70 per cent are women. That makes me one of the largest employers of women in the country.

To give you an idea of our staff profile and size, Human Services employs roughly the same number of people as the Commonwealth Bank overall, but about 5,000 more women. According to the publicly available information from the Workplace Gender Equality Agency, if my department was a private company it would be the third largest employer of women in Australia. (If you are wondering, it is only the big supermarket chains, Coles and Woolworths, who employ more women than Human Services, which is about 55,000 and 96,000 women respectively).

Of my staff, 5,000 work in Canberra, the rest are spread around the country, many in country towns. Accepting that family and domestic violence is happening here in Sydney, and in regional centres and country towns, then unfortunately it’s most likely to be the experience of some of my staff as well.

I want the Department of Human Services to lead the way in the public sector in its support for both our customers and our staff who are victims of family and domestic violence. I have given much thought to what Human Services can do in leadership terms to provide support to our staff and what that leadership can mean in terms of the Australian public service. How can we become the best practice workplace in the APS?

What I would like to see in Human Services is a, preferably the, best practice work environment in the public service – that anyone on our staff finding themselves in this position, or knowing someone with whom they work is, is well informed about the supports available, feels comfortable raising their problem with appropriate staff without thought of stigma or negativity, knows that we care and can provide support, that we have for example provided easily accessible information and access to tools like 1800RESPECT for them; and they are only my ideas, there is much more being done.

I could not be more grateful to the Secretary and her executive team who are fully engaged on this challenge with me. I have been so impressed by their preparedness to work with me, advise me and guide the department in developing our work practices to achieve this. As I said, we have done the training. We also all sat down as a team with Sex Discrimination Commissioner, the exceptional Elizabeth Broderick, last month to discuss her perspective and to learn from her experience in this area.

The reality for us is, how can my staff ask customers who may be the victims of family and domestic violence whether they are at risk and in need of support, if any of those staff who may need it, are not being appropriately encouraged to seek support themselves? In my view we have an obligation to have our own house in order to allow us to most effectively engage with our customers.

This is why I am driving this work. The Department of Human Services will become a model employer to support victims, survivors and others impacted by domestic violence. To do this, the department must be a place where it is OK to talk about domestic violence; where managers and staff know what to do when someone is experiencing family and domestic violence. Where staff can identify issues and support each other, and their customers.

I have spent the past few months speaking to several highly experienced leaders in the family and domestic violence space including Karen Willis, the Executive Officer of Rape and Domestic Violence Services Australia, Paul Linossier from Our Watch, Moo Baulch CEO of Domestic Violence NSW, Elizabeth Broderick, and also the National Manager of Social Work Services in the department. I have listened to their perspectives on what it means to be a model employer for addressing family and domestic violence.

I have been working closely with my Secretary, Kathryn Campbell about what we can do to support our staff and our customers who may be experiencing family and domestic violence. In our department, I am pleased to say we are not starting this journey from scratch. We begin from a solid base of positive work that has been done in addressing family and domestic violence for our customers over many years.

We know that to advance and progress this work, to take up the heightened focus on the issue of family and domestic violence and meet the need created by the current national discussion, we must change, and that means cultural change.

Cultural change must start at the top. Barry Sandison, Deputy Secretary of my department will be leading the cultural shift. Barry will take on a leadership role for staff experiencing family and domestic violence, engaging in discussions with managers across the department, changing our language where we need to and supporting staff to support each other.

We have established an experienced family and domestic violence contact officer network; improved resources for managers; and made enhanced information on our intranet and website more accessible. We will be placing targeted communications about support across the department to ensure all staff are aware of it. Staff (and customers) will soon begin to see the roll out of our “Enough” campaign.

David Learmonth, also a Deputy Secretary is leading the work on our processes and responses for customers. As well as the Risk Identification and Referral model, a new family and domestic violence icon will appear on our homepage linking directly to a range of information to support people impacted by family and domestic violence.

Family and domestic violence information has been added to our service finder function and we have developed specific messaging for social media. This communications program and more, internally and externally, will commence from tomorrow.

I am proud to announce these developments tonight. I know it is a major step and following it will be more work. The staff of the Department of Human Services can be confident that it is the right step, it is an important step and it will hopefully encourage other agencies to take a similar path.

Because family and domestic violence so often happens behind closed doors collecting data on incidents is difficult. There is still much we don’t know about victims and also importantly, about identifying which strategies are most effective at addressing the issue. Please bear with me for a moment while I draw some comparisons to the way we address and report on what has long been regarded as another critical national issue, our road toll.

I call our appalling road toll of the 1970s a national “crisis of behaviour”, either bad or stupid, similar to our wilful destruction of our skin in the Australian summers before the anti-skin cancer campaigns and our high levels of smoking, before the Quit campaigns. Australia has made impressive headway reducing our road toll from almost 3,800 deaths in 1970 to 1,193 in 2013. On a per-head of population basis our road toll is about one-fifth of that in 1970, a considerable achievement. Indeed, I can tell you that the first death on the nation’s roads this year occurred ten minutes after midnight, when a 35-year-old male motorcycle rider collided with another vehicle in a 100kph zone in Victoria. I found all that information out from one ABS spread sheet after a quick Google search.

I can’t do the same to confidently identify the first victim of family and domestic violence in 2015. We don’t have an official, equivalent data capture. In comparing domestic violence and road trauma, I know they are vastly different problems of both scale and complexity, but I have come to the view that we need to look at what has worked before to change bad behaviours and use good experience where we can.

I believe the way this country has steadily chipped away at the road toll, a problem for which many in the past thought there was no answer, may provide the basis of a plan for reducing family and domestic violence. Like domestic violence, the road toll is a multi-faceted issue with no single underlying factor – and no borders. As such, we’ve taken a multi-faceted and a highly nuanced approach to reducing the road toll.

Mandatory seatbelts, random breath testing, speed cameras, airbags, driver education, vehicle restrictions and improved road design have all made significant impacts in reducing the road toll. These are evidence based changes and they have worked. Coupled with sustained media campaigns they have fundamentally changed our driving culture for the better.

We haven’t avoided picking on particular demographics either. We deliberately targeted young men in the “pinky-wagging” television commercials, because we know there is an issue with young men driving recklessly. We needed to find a way to speak to this demographic. I bet we can all list at least one road toll campaign phrase, “fatigue kills”, “slow down”, the bloody idiot campaign, plan B, and the very special, “drink, drive, and score a date with a blonde”, the “blonde” being a judge on the bench wearing a blonde judge’s wig.

Without being overly simplistic, but using these campaigns as an example, we can drill down into the demographic profiles, socio-economic position and other indicators used in these successful campaigns and perhaps identify and use similar tools as a coordinated option for addressing and reducing family and domestic violence. Each of these incremental changes, big and small, have saved lives and prevented many more drivers from being maimed.

Professor Rod McClure, director of the Monash Injury Research Institute, has said that critical to the success of the long-term strategic approach to make our roads safer was the continual engagement of the public in the debate, ensuring the community was a stakeholder in the cause. He also highlighted the importance of community leaders standing up and calling for an end to the carnage. And this is what I am doing tonight.

We shouldn’t shy away from looking at this approach to reducing domestic violence. Just because domestic violence is a big, complicated problem it doesn’t mean we should overlook the small steps each of us can take to prevent it.

We must stop thinking that family and domestic violence is someone else’s problem that happens to other people. It happens to your colleagues and your neighbours, your staff and your friends.

But we can’t let the size and complexity of the problem overwhelm us and we need to take action, however we can, to start to make a difference.

Making Human Services a better place to work for survivors of family and domestic violence is not going to stop the violence. However, we should not be afraid to take more small steps now to achieve big outcomes in the long term.

We may not be perfect every time or immediately, but we will make it easier for other Commonwealth departments and other big organisations to follow suit.

If I can make it easier for just one of my staff members or one of my customers to speak up about their situation, and remove themselves from danger, then we’ve made a difference.

ENDS