The Hon Tanya Plibersek MP
Minister for Social Services
ADDRESS TO 5TH WORLD CONFERENCE OF WOMEN'S SHELTERS
SYDNEY
TUESDAY, 16 SEPTEMBER 2025
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Acknowledgements omitted
Thank you to the Global Network of Women’s Shelters and WESNET, for hosting this event and bringing us all together.
It’s an honour to be here with you, in the presence of so many people who have dedicated their lives to the safety and wellbeing of women around the world. Between you, you must have saved thousands of lives. So can I just start by thanking you for the extremely important and extremely difficult work that you do every day.
In Australia, our history of women’s shelters began walking distance from here, at Elsie Women’s Refuge in Glebe.
Elsie was the first women’s refuge established in Australia, and we celebrated its 50th anniversary just last year.
Its creation was not easy. And, like many advances in feminism and women’s rights, it took a group of brave women to break the rules and just do it themselves.
In March 1974, that small group of Sydney feminists, including my friend Anne Summers, broke into two vacant houses in an inner-city street and claimed squatter’s rights, as you could back in the day.
They cleaned and fitted out the premises themselves, opened its doors, and hoped women would come – and they did.
In its first six weeks, 48 women and 35 children found refuge there. Male politicians said that women’s refuges would destroy families – as though it was the escape from violence that was the problem, rather than the violence itself.
The women who founded the refuge were constantly concerned about the police coming and kicking them out. Ironic, given they couldn’t afford private security they needed to keep the women they sheltered safe, and so had to occasionally fight off angry and violent men themselves.
But through their bravery they started a movement. By the end of the following year, 1975, there were 13 women’s refuges around Australia.
In her memoir, Ducks on the Pond, Anne Sumers said of the opening of Elsie:
"It is not always obvious at the time that history is being made ... It was one of those rare moments when the right idea leads to an important social change."
And the change was immense.
Sadly it took the women running Elsie a while to get the attention and funding they deserved from the federal government.
Christina Gibbeson, one of the first employees at Elsie, told the Women’s Weekly last year of a particularly creative method of lobbying, she said:
“I remember carjacking the Federal Minister for Health…It was the opening of the Leichhardt Women’s Health Centre and as the minister was leaving, I jumped in the car with him and said, ‘Come and see Elsie’. You’d probably go to jail for doing that today!”
I’m happy to say that ministers no longer need to be carjacked in order for us to understand the important work women’s shelters do – maybe having a government that is 56% female helps.
But sadly, the need for women’s shelters is as great as ever.
Every day and night across Australia, and around the world, women and their children come to you in their most desperate and darkest moment, often scared for their lives.
Because you see women at their point of crisis, you are first witness to the ways in which they are being harmed.
And since Elsie opened in 1974, sadly, the types of violence being inflicted on women and children have evolved in nasty and insidious ways.
It’s our job, as a government, to help you keep up and keep ahead of perpetrators who are finding new ways all the time to terrorise women. And it is our job to listen to your voices from the front line, to make sure our laws and policies are keeping pace with these dark evolutions.
That’s what I want to talk to you a bit about today, as well as the importance of our collective efforts to keep doing all we possibly can to end this violence.
More than 15 years ago, I was the women’s minister in the Rudd government. I was really privileged to work in the portfolio and I feel so fortunate to once again be responsible for women and children’s safety again.
Before going into the federal parliament I worked in the Domestic Violence Unit of the NSW Ministry for the Status and Advancement of Women as it was called back in the day, and before that I was Women’s Officer at the University of Technology.
I felt determined then to make a difference for the many, many women that I had met who had endured being disbelieved, turned away or ignored. I wanted to take the privilege and responsibility I had as a Minister to create another seismic shift – just as the women who established Elsie women did.
And I believed part of how to do that was to make clear the role the Australian Government must play in addressing violence against women and children for the long term.
Leading the development of the first National Plan in 2010 was a historic moment, recognising that reducing and preventing family, domestic and sexual violence is a shared responsibility.
It took a collective effort from the sector, academics, survivors, activists and public servants to envision and articulate what was needed.
But it was just the beginning of bringing family, domestic and sexual violence policy into the centre of government.
Back then, I don’t think I could have predicted how successful the women’s movement would be in continuing to drive both government and the broader community to understand and prioritise the issue in the following decade.
I also could not have imagined the ever-evolving nature of violence, such as the scale of technology-facilitated abuse, that would face women and children today. In fact, the first National Plan mentions the word “technology” only once.
The first National Plan was important, and it was globally significant at the time. But it was really just a beginning.
It would shock many people, but will come as no surprise to you – that the first thing that often happens now when someone arrives at a women’s shelter is a thorough check of their phone, car, smartwatch and personal belongings to identify and destroy tracking devices and software.
The women who created Elsie did not need to have a tech expert on their staff. But today, every women’s shelter needs this expert knowledge.
Wesnet, our hosts here today, do incredible work through the Safe Connections program, gathering information on trends about technology-facilitated abuse directly from practitioners, training those practitioners, and providing material relief to victim-survivors by handing them safe phones that can’t be tracked and working with technology companies to reduce the risk of abuse in their systems. I’m proud that our government supports this essential program.
I know that this year’s Wesnet Technology Safety Summit will be part of the events here this week, where no doubt new and ever more disturbing trends will be examined.
One practice which I find deeply troubling, reported by Wesnet as part of their last National Survey of Technology Abuse and Domestic Violence in Australia, was perpetrators giving their children smartphones that they are told to hide from their mums, which are then used to track the family. This means that no matter how hard the mothers try to sanitise their own devices, they are still being tracked unwittingly through their children, with these fathers having no qualms about using their children this way.
The work to keep ahead of evolving areas such as technology-facilitated abuse is constant, and we will never underestimate the determination of the men who use violence to terrorise and control.
We as a government understand the extraordinary efforts of women’s refuges to keep women and their children safe.
As many of you are hopefully aware, we’ve invested $16.6 million over four years for the eSafety Commission to establish a dedicated support service for frontline workers like you, combining telephone-based advice with online resources, building the capacity of frontline workers to respond to technology-facilitated abuse impacting their clients.
The rapid pace of changing technology is not only a challenge for ensuring women reach and maintain safety.
It’s also bringing a new and, I believe, existential threat to our children and young people in the form of violent pornography, nudifying apps, and sexualised AI chatbots – all served up to them through algorithms - including through reaching them through social media sites.
This is an enormous challenge for our efforts to prevent domestic, family and sexual violence and child sexual abuse.
Last week the Australian Bureau of Statistics released their latest data on recorded crime, with sexual assaults recorded by police increasing to their highest number ever recorded – over 40,000 in 2024 – a 10 per cent increase on 2023.
81 per cent of victims were women or girls. More than 50 per cent were under 18.
Each year, children are being exposed to sexually violent material at younger and younger ages.
And we have to understand that this is changing them – from their developing brains to their sense of self and their relationships to others.
The fastest growing type of sexual violence and abuse is between children.
Young kids are seeing choking in sexual relationships before they’ve had their first kiss.
Research undertaken last year with over 4,700 Australians aged 18-35 has revealed the alarming rates at which young Australians are engaging in sexual strangulation.
61 per cent of young women now report being strangled or choked during sex.
Young women participants in this research shared their experiences of this new reality –
Georgie, 18 years old - “We’ve accepted that in sexual encounters it’ll probably happen. They won’t ask first.”
Amy, 19 years old - “I've been in situations where I feel like I'm genuinely being murdered.”
The use of non-fatal strangulation is one of the strongest known predictors of intimate partner homicide.
The porn industry has turned the greatest indicator of risk to life we have and normalised it as a common sexual expectation for a generation of young people.
And medical experts advise that there is no safe way to strangle – and the consequences are not just at the point of strangulation, but may occur in the minutes, hours, days, weeks and months that follow.
Powerful online influencers are also targeting boys and young men with misogynistic content, trying to convince them to dominate others, to control women and to feel ashamed of themselves if they don’t embrace this as a way of life.
As a mother with two young sons, I see the difference even across the 6 years between my first and second. Gendered expectations are more prevalent now than they were for my eldest. It’s no coincidence that this is happening precisely when algorithms are targeting boys with this harmful content.
A recent report by the Movember Institute of Men’s Health found that these influencers have gone mainstream, with 63 per cent of participants reporting that they watch this type of content.
It found regular viewers are more likely to hold misogynistic beliefs, more likely to engage in risk-taking behaviour, and more likely to report worse mental health outcomes than non-viewers.
Data from the HILDA Survey shows that Gen Z men are more likely to hold traditional gender beliefs than older men — and far more so than their female peers.
And we know the danger of living by these gendered rules and expectations to exercise power and dominance over others, of coercion and control, of shame and invulnerability – Jesuit Social Services Man Box research found that men who most strongly endorse these ‘Man Box’ rules were found to be 17 times more likely to have hit a partner.
As a government – we are absolutely committed to taking action. And we don’t underestimate the forces working that are against all of us – as the e-Safety Commissioner recently put it – how the richest and most powerful companies in the world are seeking to profit from capturing our children from the earliest possible age– no matter the cost.
The Albanese Labor Government has taken a leading role globally on holding social media companies to account for the harms their platforms cause.
That includes delaying access to Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, X and Snapchat until users reach the age of 16, which is due to come into effect from December this year.
Of course it may take some time to see the positive benefits of a change as big as this come through.
But I’m confident that stopping our kids from being fed harmful content will lead to healthier, happier kids and help reduce the risks of violence in their relationships.
Just last week, my colleague Anika Wells, the Minister for Communications, announced we will work to restrict access to predatory technologies like nudify apps and undetectable stalking tools – both of which you here today have no doubt seen used against women and children who present to your services.
We are also legislating to create a Digital Duty of Care, to put the onus on tech companies to proactively keep Australians safe and better protect against online harms.
That’s on top of the bans on deepfakes and doxxing that we passed in the last term of government.
And we have invested $3.5m in the Healthy Masculinities Trial and Evaluation – because we must engage boys in strength-based ways, inviting them to belong to positive communities that accept them for who they are and that don’t require them to dominate and control others to be accepted.
These suite of measures are aimed at doing everything we can to address technology facilitated abuse and harmful online content in our efforts to prevent violence against women and children and all forms of gender-based violence.
I don’t need to explain to anyone here about the epidemic levels of violence facing women and children in Australia today – but it is worth noting that the latest Ten to Men Study from the Australian Institute of Family Studies found one in three men reported using intimate partner violence. One in three.
The Australian Institute of Criminology intimate partner homicide dashboard recorded that 46 women were killed in 2023-2024.
And data from the 2021-22 ABS Personal Safety Survey found 21.9 per cent of participants had experienced childhood abuse or witnessed violence before the age of 15. That’s more than one in five Australians.
Since returning to government 3 years ago, Labor has increased our commitment, our investment and our determination to end violence against women and children.
In October 2022, we released the second National Plan.
It sets out a comprehensive, whole-of-society framework aimed at preventing and addressing gendered violence.
It calls not only on governments, but also communities, businesses, educational institutions, media, sporting clubs and individuals to be united in that shared vision of ending family and domestic violence.
We have made women and children’s safety a National Cabinet priority; we have convened the Women and Women’s Safety Ministerial Council, bringing together all State and Territory Ministers, and we established the Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence Commission – because if we’re serious about change we need to hold ourselves and each other to account about what’s working and how we’re tracking on efforts to end this violence.
But devastatingly, we have continued to lose too many women and children to men’s violence – young women whose lives were only beginning. Older women who had so much more to look forward to.
And there are so many more women whose lives are forever changed through physical injuries and psychological harm by the men who have chosen to use violence.
I know that women’s lives are being saved every day by the efforts of all of you here today and our essential frontline specialist services.
It’s why First Ministers committed over $700m in new matched Commonwealth and State funding for frontline services – because the work you do helping the women most at risk is absolutely essential.
We also understand that one of the most common reasons that a woman can’t leave violent partners is a lack of safe housing. This is unacceptable, and we must do more.
We are investing over $1 billion into crisis and transitional housing for women and children experiencing domestic violence and young people experiencing homelessness.
We’re also providing $275 million through Safe Places Emergency Accommodation and Crisis and Transitional Accommodation programs for women and children escaping violence.
We have committed more than any Australian Government ever before – over $4 billion to ensure that Australian women and children have the support and resources they need to live free from violence.
This record investment represents action across the four domains of the National Plan, focusing on specialist services for women, tailored support for children and young people to heal and recover, and men’s behaviour change – from the Leaving Violence Payment that’s been made permanent to the early intervention trial for adolescent boys who have experienced family and domestic violence.
And we have made the single biggest investment - over $262 million - directly towards addressing immediate safety needs of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families and communities through the dedicated Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Action Plan.
This includes $32.2 million to making sure crisis support services are adaptable to the needs of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women, particularly in regional and remote areas.
This helps organisations like Warringu in Cairns, who are providing support to 14 sister shelter regions in Queensland.
I am proud of the collective work that has been done through these plans. But it’s clear to me that we cannot be complacent about the new and emerging ways perpetrators will find to inflict violence on women and children or the new countervailing forces we face, such as those from the online world.
We have to keep working together across a broad and diverse movement for change – with curiosity and collaboration.
We have to seize absolutely every opportunity to help women and children reach safety sooner.
And we have to build pathways for their recovery.
And we need to engage with the men who are using violence in targeted and effective ways that centre women and children’s safety.
This is already well underway – from that first National Plan to now – and we must strengthen this effort.
And we also need to do better for the women, children and communities who are experiencing violence at the greatest numbers and who face the greatest barriers.
This is why First Nations women have been calling for targeted, community-led programs and a standalone Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander National Plan.
Labor has heard these calls. We are in the final stages of developing Our Ways, Strong Ways, Our Voices – the first stand-alone Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Plan to end family, domestic and sexual violence.
And we are establishing a new Peak body to oversee the delivery and implementation of the plan – because we know that self-determined solutions are the most effective and enduring.
I was fortunate to be in Alice Springs last week, where I visited organisations such as NPY Women’s Council and saw first-hand the community-led, integrated programs making a difference – programs that mainstream services can learn from.
And it’s why we have been working in partnership with disability stakeholders, such as Women with Disability Australia, on the disability lens on the 1st Action Plan, to ensure that policies and actions recognise and respond to the experiences of women and children with disability.
I look forward to working to embed this further in the 2nd Action Plan and drastically improve how we prevent and address violence against women with disability.
And of course, we must ensure our efforts are informed by and securing safety for all women and communities who are marginalised because of their class, race, sexuality or background.
The broad prevalence of violence across our community requires us to expand and broaden the people, services and systems who must play their part in preventing violence and intervening at the earliest opportunity.
We know that the earliest years of a child’s life lay the foundation for who they become and what they may achieve.
Our schools must see and act on the signs of violence and ensure a pathway to safety and recovery.
They need to understand that a child’s behavioural issues might be connected to family violence and provide the trauma-informed and therapeutic supports that child needs.
The recent South Australian Royal Commission heard that too often schools missed this opportunity. Heartbreaking testimony directly from children highlighted how damaging this was for them.
Children also shared about when school was a lifeline – a place where they were heard, believed and supported. The difference was immense.
This uneven response is not unique to South Australia and must be addressed systemically across the country.
Our Maternal and Child Health Services need to understand family violence risk at this critical time and wrap supports around mum, bub or the whole family.
We need to expand these services to support fathers and all parents – to provide parenting and mental health support and strengthen protective factors.
GPs need to appropriately respond to disclosures, understand risk factors and make connections to trauma-informed counselling and supports. This is often where disclosures are made by women in need of being believed and supported – before she has been in touch with a specialist service.
And our tertiary degrees and vocational training should reflect the reality that the prevalence of violence requires embedding knowledge and capability of addressing domestic, family and sexual violence into courses and curriculums.
Professional bodies should embed this capability building throughout career development as an ongoing core competency.
We know that when we keep mum safe, we often keep children safe too. But we also know so much more now about the impact of trauma on the developing brain; how children and teenagers face their own risks and have their own needs and deserve their own response.
The National Plan has a strong focus on the impacts of violence on children in their own right. Yet there remain gaps in our response to children which must be closed if we are to genuinely address intergenerational harm and prevent cycles of violence.
Kids who grow up in violent and unsafe homes are at greater risk of going on to use violence in their future relationships or be a victim of it – and we absolutely have to break this cycle – we will never significantly reduce levels of violence until we do.
We must make sure teenagers and young people have somewhere to go for help when they are escaping violence on their own.
Kids deserve to grow up safe, happy and healthy and for too many kids this is just not their reality.
Data from the Australian Child Maltreatment Study found among 16-24 year olds who were surveyed that:
Over 28 per cent experienced physical abuse
Over 25 per cent experienced sexual abuse
Nearly 35 per cent experienced emotional abuse; and
Nearly 44 per cent were exposed to domestic violence.
These are the numbers – but the voices of children are even more important. I’ve already mentioned the recent South Australian Royal Commission.
The Commission conducted interviews with 53 South Australian children and young people aged 13 - 18 years old. These children highlight where they believe gaps in support services and systems exist. Again – these gaps would be found in states and territories across the country.
The report makes for heartbreaking and harrowing reading. But it is also filled with hope.
As the report notes, children and young people know what they want.
They want to feel safe.
They want to be believed.
They want age-appropriate supports that are accessible and designed with the needs of children and young people front of mind.
And they want systems to work for them – not against them.
This is the work we collectively need to do.
It’s why we have provided an $80 million boost to enhance and expand child-centric trauma-informed supports for children and young people.
And we must do more as we develop the 2nd Action Plan, due to begin in 2027.
I’ve also come to realise that it’s critical to focus on the men who use violence, because if we don’t, once frontline services have gotten one woman to safety, more often than not he will go on to harm and terrorise another, then another.
We need to better understand how to do this well and ensure our efforts are effective.
We understand the danger posed by the men who are particularly high risk.
This is why we have committed to trialling new focussed deterrence models and Domestic Violence Threat Assessment Centres.
These centres will be able to use intelligence, monitor individuals and intervene with those at high risk of carrying out homicide.
Work with jurisdictions is underway for nominations for the focused deterrence and DV Threat Assessment Centre pilots, as part of the high-risk perpetrators package.
As a government we have also committed almost $27 million to partner with states and territories to trial innovative approaches to address perpetrator behaviour.
This has supported programs like the Choose Change program in Western Australia, which focuses on early intervention for men who have used violence in intimate and family relationships.
One repeat offender who participated was taught emotional regulation strategies and encouraged to reflect on his own childhood experiences and violent behaviour he had witnessed in others, giving him insight into his own tendency toward violence.
Through the program he expressed remorse, regret, and a desire to repair relationships. Since the program he has attended weekly drug and alcohol counselling and is no longer using alcohol and illicit substances. He has started family counselling and connected to a safe parenting program.
He has had no further reported incidents of family violence since completing the program and remains engaged so safety can be monitored.
Providing funding for programs like these, testing new ways of doing things as new threats emerge, is one of the most important things my government can do to expand the ways we can address violence.
That’s why I’m pleased to announce today that the Albanese Labor Government is delivering on our election commitment to boost our Innovative Perpetrator Response program with an extra $8.6 million in funding, allowing states and territories to expand trials and scoping studies across the country that target prevention. I have written to my State and Territory counterparts inviting them to make an application for this additional funding.
Now that I’m back in this role, I’m more motivated than ever.
I know where I should have gone harder last time.
I want my tenure in this portfolio to be marked by a sense of urgency, purpose and engagement; urgency to implement the things that work; purpose to get things done; and engagement to make sure that the steps we are taking are informed by the best possible advice and that is your advice.
The National Plan recognises the whole of government and whole-of-community effort that is needed to drive change.
We need this comprehensive effort because of the evolving context and nature of violence that I’ve mentioned, and because we need to address every form of violence, from intimate partner violence to sexual violence.
We must build on and strengthen our approach as we develop the 2nd Action Plan.
Women’s refuges are at the forefront of understanding the evolving behaviours of the men who perpetrate violence and I will always value the advice you provide to our government.
This is why I will be consulting widely on the development of the 2nd Action Plan – because I understand the knowledge and expertise that exists in rooms like this.
We must learn from what is working from our long-term effort, from the new work underway and critically assess where there are gaps, and emerging new challenges to tackle.
And we need to keep grappling with the sheer scale of the prevalence of violence in our communities.
All women and children deserve to live, love and grow old without fear of violence.
To achieve this, we need to come at this enduring societal problem – a problem that exists in every community across the world represented here at this global conference today - from every angle and in every way we possibly can.
As Minister for Social Services, I have been privileged to stand with you in our shared efforts to drive change.
From those across history who so bravely fought for advances in safety and societal change, like that small group of women who created Elsie Women’s Refuge more than 50 years ago.
And to those shaping the future too: young women – like Grace Tame, Chanel Contos, and Sharna Bremner of End Rape on Campus – who are demanding a better future for their generation. So many inspiring young leaders.
Thank you to all of you here for the work you are doing supporting women and children across the globe.
The women’s refuge movement, and the broader feminist movement, should be proud of the fact that action to end violence against women has become mainstream and bipartisan.
I’m so glad that you have the opportunity to share and learn from one another, to recognise the strength in each other and in yourselves, and to take what you have learned back to your home countries to help create a better future globally.
Everyone here shares the commitment to ending gender-based violence and to help women and children reach safety, recover and thrive. I know the power of that shared aim will drive the change we need.
Thank you.
ENDS
