Logie Jan: Estimates Debate — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeLogie Jan: Estimates Debate — In Committee[Sitting date: 11 August 2015. Volume:707;Page:5599. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JAN LOGIE (Green): I am pleased to take a call in the estimates debate on the justice sector this evening particularly in response to the recent initiatives from this Government in response to the crisis we have in this country around domestic and sexual violence. It is nice to stand up and offer unequivocal support for the actions of this Government. It is a very rare event for me to be able to do so and I do. I commend the Minister of Justice for making domestic violence her priority and I acknowledge that she said in the media that she could have gone for easy wins and that this probably will not provide the easy wins. But it is addressing an absolute crisis in this country and I commend her. It is not going to be simple. We are not going to get quick results but it is worth doing.She has rightly noted that there are 100000 family violence call outs to the police every year. That is one call out every 5 minutes and this work accounts for 41 percent of the police’s work. Yet we know that only around 10 to 20 percent of the incidents of domestic violence are actually even reported to the police. We know that although the number of cases reported to the police is going up at the moment the number of cases being resolved has dropped by 10 percent since 2008. There is something going wrong if the number of reported cases is going up and the number of cases being resolved by police is going down. So we need desperately to have a very comprehensive look at this problem. This is one in three women in this country who over their lifetime are likely to be victims of domestic violence.We also have an epidemic rate of sexual violence where one in three or four girls is likely to be a victim of sexual violence in this country and one in six to 10 boys is likely to be a victim of sexual violence in this country. We have a conviction rate for sexual violence of around 1 percent and of less than 2 percent for domestic violence. So this Government is doing the right thing in making this a priority. I would just like to offer it some advice and some encouragement to have the public participate in the consultation.I do think the Government is going to have to review its Better Public Services target to bring down the crime rate. The target is to reduce the crime rate by 20 percent by 2017 and what I am hearing from the community and on the ground is that that reduction and police resolution of family violence cases is a result of that Better Public Services target to reduce crime. We need to have all of the incentives lined up going the right way and when we know that only 10 to 20 percent of cases are coming to the police’s attention we need to be encouraging them to resolve things. That in the short term is going to result in an increase in recorded crime. That is just going to be part of the process and we have to go through it if we are going to get on top of this problem as a country.I also want to point out that the Prime Minister has noted that it is possible that the Government may need to spend a little bit more money in this area. Well from speaking to so many organisations on the ground hearing about the situation around legal aid and knowing the pressures on police there is no doubt that we are going to have to spend more money. The majority of funding in this area is going to the corrections system our prisons. We have a 1 to 2 percent conviction rate so we know that that money is not actually doing anything to resolve the issues in the long term when it is touching only a tiny little part of the problem. And prevention—the amount of money that is being spent in this area is 1.5 percent of the Government’s spending. A similarly small—not quite that small but inadequately small—amount is going towards counselling and support services and wraparound services for offenders and people who use violence as well as towards victims. If we want to be able to break these patterns and get people to change their behaviour and help women and children to get to safety we actually have to resource those efforts in a complete wraparound way.The third point I just want to touch on is that I do hope that the Minister is not dropping sexual violence as her priority though the discussion document is focused on domestic violence because the Law Commission has a comprehensive body of work to look at.