E&OE TRANSCRIPT
DOORSTOP
Melbourne City Mission, Melbourne
Friday 20 FEBRUARY 2026
Topics: Funding Boost for Domestic and Family Violence Services in Victoria; ISIS Brides; Epstein Files; Australia Post
SARAH WITTY, MEMBER FOR MELBOURNE: I want to welcome everyone here today, particularly Minister Plibersek and Minister Stitt to make an announcement about what's happening at Melbourne City Mission and the amazing work they do on the ground, supporting people in the most vulnerable situations. Also, welcome Assistant Ministers Kearney and Richardson. I’ll hand over to Minister Plibersek now.
TANYA PLIBERSEK, MINISTER FOR SOCIAL SERVICES: Thanks so much Sarah Witty, who's the fantastic new local member for this electorate. It's a real pleasure to be here with my state colleague Ingrid Stitt, with the Assistant Ministers Tim Richardson and Ged Kearney, to be here with representatives of Melbourne City Mission, and most particularly with the fantastic Conor Pall who has done so much to raise up the voice of children and young people who have been victims of family and domestic violence and demand that they receive services in their own right, the services that they deserve so that they can take off in life. It's a real pleasure to be here with the Victorian government today because Minister Stitt and I are able to announce an additional $180 million of funding in the new Federation Funding Agreement. The Commonwealth and State governments are partnering to make sure that this $180 million flows to frontline services like this, that provide help and hope when people need it. So we're delighted to be here today with our partners, the Victorian Government, to announce $180 million in the new Federation Funding Agreement. This will help frontline services like Melbourne City Mission and services right across Victoria do what they do best, which is offer help and offer hope for the future. Of course, this is just one of the areas that the Commonwealth government is investing in. Since being elected in 2022 the Commonwealth has pledged more than $4 billion of funding to family domestic and sexual violence services. That means we can partner with states and territories on frontline services like this. It also means our own investment in huge new projects like the making the Leaving Violence Payment permanent. It's a payment of up to $5,000 for someone who is leaving a violent situation so they can get back on their feet. We're also, of course, investing well over $1 billion in new crisis and transitional housing, and our new national partnership for legal services is almost $4 billion as well, and that includes doubling the funding for family violence prevention legal services. As a Commonwealth government, we are absolutely committed to working with the states and territories and working with frontline service delivery partners like Melbourne City Mission to turn around the shocking statistics on family, domestic and sexual violence in this country. We are determined to see better help for people who need it, and change in the behaviour that has driven so many people out of their homes that has affected so many Australians. I'm going to hand over to Victorian Minister Ingrid Stitt. Thank you, Ingrid, for joining us today.
INGRID STITT, MINISTER FOR PREVENTION OF FAMILY VIOLENCE: Thank you very much, Tanya, and it is wonderful to be able to join the Commonwealth in today's announcement. And I also want to just thank and acknowledge the work of Melbourne City Mission. They do incredible work on the ground. They're a trusted service deliverer, but they're also very innovative in some of the programs that they deliver. More about that in a minute. But it is wonderful to have such a strong partner in Canberra, and we are thrilled to be able to partner with the Commonwealth government for a new Federation Agreement, which will significantly boost the supports across the state so that we can tackle family violence and break the cycle of violence. One of the things that's so pleasing about this funding package that we have secured together is that it really does focus a lot of the funding on early intervention and turning around people's lives early. We know that family violence can have a terrible impact on peoples lives, and we know that that can be long lasting. So early intervention is critical, and the programs that organisations such as the Melbourne City Mission are running are all about giving that early support to people so that we can give them the best chance possible to turn their lives around. And the Amplify program is a great example of that kind of innovation. We know that young people are victim survivors often of family violence in their own right, but historically, our service systems have not really been geared towards addressing their particular needs. So part of the funding that we're announcing today will continue the great work of the Amplify program which does focus on young people who we know are particularly vulnerable to homelessness because of family violence issues in their families. So it's wonderful that part of the funding will go towards this project, and to give them that continued certainty about their project for the next few years. I also want to acknowledge my colleague, Tim Richardson, who's the Parliamentary Secretary for Men's Behaviour Change, and note that part of the funding arrangements are about tackling those dangerous misogynistic attitudes that we are seeing on the rise, particularly in the online environment. And as a government here in Victoria, we're absolutely committed to not only tackling family violence and breaking that cycle of violence, but also challenging those dangerous attitudes, because we know that those sorts of attitudes do nothing to improve respect across the community. So this is a really important funding announcement today. It's going to make a big difference for our services right across the state. And I want to again acknowledge and thank Minister Plibersek and Minister Kearney for their strong support of the work that we continue to do here in Victoria.
SHORNA MOORE, MELBOURNE CITY MISSION: Thank you, Ministers and everyone here. We truly welcome this news. I mean, this is quite emotional. It's gotten us, it's taken a long time for us to get here. Today the Federal and Victorian governments have recognised something that young people like Conor, myself, many others, have known for generations, that family violence also happens to young people, it's not only to adults, and that young people do need a pathway to safety. So the refunding of Amplify while we're here today is not just another initiative, but it's really a structural fix to a long ignored gap, a gap that's left thousands and thousands of young people not asking, why wasn't there help for me? And you know, every year, we have over 12,000 children and young people who walk into homelessness services alone, most of them are escaping family violence. Most don't have protective parents, and some are at real risk of death, and that's why we created the Amplify program. It embeds youth focused family violence team in Melbourne's or Victoria's youth homelessness access point and one of our largest youth homelessness services in the state, and we provide support for young people who turn up alone, young people, or children, I should say, who are often considered too young for adult family violence services or the wrong gender and too old for child protection. And you know, the Amplify program helps young people name the violence, often for the very first time. It helps them stay safe, stay in school, access legal protections that you mentioned, and the support and resources that were just so out of reach. You know, this program is working. It's reducing risk. It's as I said, keeping young people in school, and it's just, it's just helping young people to really be on that path that they deserve. We also provide as part of the program, peer workers who work, who walk alongside the young people, to really help make them feel that the system is safe to navigate. And as I said, this program, this program is a revelation to everyone at Melbourne City Mission, and it's our hope that programs like Amplify are available to all children and young people across the state and in every territory in every state in Australia. And it is really society's opportunity, I think, to disrupt harm before it becomes lifelong, and help young people to heal. So we really want to thank again, the Ministers for recognising this program, and also especially for all the young people, including Conor, who have helped shape this program from the very beginning, from the research and from the co-design, and it wouldn't have been as successful if it wasn't done in partnership with people with lived experience, so thank you.
CONOR PALL: Thank you, and I really just want to welcome today's announcement that will see the Amplify program move from a pilot to an ongoing program for young people across our state. This is about more than funding. It's about a program that delivers life changing support and hope for young people who experience family violence in our state. Amplify works because it was co-designed with young people who have lived experience of family violence. It has been evaluated and it's providing real outcomes for victim survivors. It was just 10 years ago that Victoria embarked on our nation leading Royal Commission into Family Violence. A Royal Commission that we must not forget, was sparked because the death of a child. It was the death of Luke Batty that sparked our nation leading work and our decades long commitment to making sure family violence and victim survivors get the support that they need and deserve. But if we're honest, in the 10 years since our nation leading Royal Commission, we have often forgotten about children and young people. We've forgotten the child. I was just 12 years old when Victoria embarked on our Royal Commission. My life, my childhood, like so many children and young people's lives in our state and in our country was plagued with family violence. I thought the violence I was experiencing was normal. That's a common story I hear from children and young people most days. When I finally found the courage to ask for help, I was met with dismissal, doubt and disbelief. There wasn't a service, a dedicated service for me to go to. I needed a service like Amplify when I reached out for help just five years ago. And I'm proud today that young people across our state will be able to continue to access this life-changing support. Today is a massive win, but it's just the beginning. We must not forget about young people living in regional and rural communities across our state. I grew up in Mildura. Mildura is six hours from Melbourne, so I would have had to travel to Melbourne to get access to Amplify. So again, I welcome todays commitment, and I welcome the support from Minister Plibersek and Minister Stitt, but I'm hopeful that children and young people across our state and indeed across our country, will be able to get access to life changing support that Amplify offers, because accessing support like Amplify shouldn't be a postcode lottery. We need to see children and young people as victims in their own right, deserving of their own support, not just extensions of their protective parent, if they're lucky enough to have one, because all children and young people deserve to know that the abuse that they're experiencing was never their fault and never will be. Thank you.
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Conor, thank you just such an incredible advocate. Any questions? Can we start with questions about the Federation Funding Agreement, or this program?
JOURNALIST: Obviously, $180 million is a large amount, but does it go far enough?
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Well I'm never going to say that we're doing enough on family, domestic or sexual violence while there is one victim in this country, I'm never going to say feet up, job done. But this $180 million that the Victorian and Commonwealth government are contributing to the Federation Funding Agreement is only part of the investments that we are making as governments. The Commonwealth government has invested more than $4 billion since the 2022 election into measures around family, domestic and sexual violence, and that includes some very substantial new investments, like making the Leaving Violence Payment permanent. I haven't included in that $4 billion the very substantial additional investments like the $3.9 billion for legal services and the doubling of funding for family violence prevention legal services, and we're also, of course, investing more than, well over $1 billion in crisis and transitional housing. Too often we say, why didn't she leave? When we should be asking, where would she go? And that applies to young people, of course, as well. So this is a very significant investment in frontline service delivery, but it's not our only investment. The question about, you know, have governments done enough? I'll never be content. I'll never be content while there is one victim of domestic violence or one victim of sexual assault.
JOURNALIST: This is obviously very welcome funding, but I guess something that's linked to domestic and family violence is gambling and alcohol, which we know are contributors to the issue. We haven't seen alcohol regulation changed or gambling reforms to limit advertising and reduce poker machine concentration in vulnerable areas. Where is the government at with all of that?
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Yeah, thank you. That's a terrific question. Look, there's so much that we need to do to reduce rates of violence in our community, and it's fantastic to have Tim Richardson here, because one of his focuses, of course, is on the sort of behaviour change programs that we need to invest in. We're very substantially increasing investment, including doing some very specific work with adolescent boys, who've been exposed to violence in the home and are at risk of using it in their own relationships. We're doing well over $30 million of additional funding for children's counselling to make sure that children don't go on to repeat the cycles of violence that they've been exposed to as children. But on issues like alcohol and gambling, of course, we're making progress as well. The Commonwealth government has contributed a $1 million to FARE, which is the alcohol research organisation, which is working with the states and territories on their liquor licensing regimes. We've seen progress in South Australia and the ACT in particular, they're looking at how they particularly deal with things like very late-night delivery of alcohol straight to your door, that's seen, in many cases, a spike in incidents of violence. We're working on gambling reform. We've made some very important changes already. You can't gamble with a credit card anymore, you have to pre-register, you get a statement every month of what you're losing. It's number of changes we've made. And of course, the Commonwealth is always looking at what more we can do in the area of gambling reforms. We are up for this, to change rates of sexual violence, family and domestic violence in our community it's going to take us doing all of these things. There's not one answer to the change that we need in our community, but we are up for that.
JOURNALIST: Those poker machine regulations seem to stalled though, when are we going to see that happen?
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Well, poker machines are a matter for state and territory governments. But I can say, as the Federal Minister, we are very much up for working with the states and territories to reduce the harms that we see coming from some of these areas. I would say, because a lot of this regulation does sit with the states and territories, we need to be moving to better regulation, and I was really disturbed to note that in the Northern Territory, they've made alcohol cheaper and more available. So remove the floor price that was introduced on alcohol and introducing new liquor licenses in places where they previously didn't have them. I think it is important that we are working together and moving in the right direction on some of these issues.
JOURNALIST: Minister Stitt mentioned the online space and misogyny on there. How's the government looking at tackling that?
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Another great question, thank you. We've made some really significant changes to the online environment. Now there's a few things going on online that are really challenging because they're evolving so quickly. The first thing to say is we know that there is tech facilitated abuse that we need to tackle. We're doing that work with the eSafety Commissioner to tackle tech facilitated abuse. It is extraordinary that one of the first things that has to happen now when a woman turns up at a refuge is that they check her car, her luggage, her bag, her phone, for either hidden tracking devices or hidden programs that have been loaded onto the phone or computer. We've heard of violent ex-partners giving kids a secret phone or a secret iPad saying hide this from mum, she won't want you playing games when in fact, what they're doing is tracking the family that has finally escaped to safety. So we're working very closely with the eSafety Commissioner to tackle some of those online harms, including looking at how we ban those stealth tracking apps that people don't even know they're being tracked. We're also working, we've banned the non-consensual sharing of images. We're working on how we deal with deep fake pornography that's generated to harass and intimidate people. Again, this is a completely new frontier that we need to tackle. Just as we think we're beginning to address some of the areas of family, domestic and sexual violence, and bring rates down or bring incidents down in one sense, a new frontier opens up, and it is so important that we continue to evolve within those new frontiers. We've been working with the banks, for example, to make sure that bank transfers aren't used to harass and intimidate and stalk ex-partners. The other thing I have to say is, I do truly believe that our world leading restriction on under sixteens accessing social media will make a big difference in this area. We know that young Australians are getting too much of their sex education from pornography, and that that pornography is often violent and degrading and actually just delaying a little bit the first introduction to the massive world of online porn and doing good sex education about respectful relationships with young people, so that they've got an alternative narrative in their head about what a healthy relationship looks like I think that's a really important step as well
JOURNALIST: I wouldn’t mind talking to Conor if that’s okay. I just wanted to get a bit more of your story. What were you facing as a young person? And I guess, what would you have done without the Amplify program?
CONOR PALL: So my story of family violence growing up in regional Victoria was one where I didn't feel safe at home. I was living between two houses and only one felt like a home, and that was with my mum. My mum, who I'm very lucky to have, and is the strongest woman I know, and why I do the work that I do today. But like I said before, for years, like so many children and young people, I thought that the things I was experiencing were normal. I thought it was normal to go [inaudible] normal to be yelled at and to be abused until the violence escalated and I realised that the things that I were, that I was experiencing wasn't normal, and police were called, and that's when I got a family violence intervention order put in place. But what I really want to make clear is children and young people, it is everyone's right, the right to live a safe and free life from violence is inherently held by everyone, including children and young people. So, I'm ambitious about seeing Amplify, expanded and rolled out one day to regions like Mildura and other regional centres to make sure that the burden of ending violence in a generation, as the national plan sets out, doesn't sit with young people like me who couldn't access dedicated support. And then, I'm 22 now, and I've been spending the last four years of my adult life, trying to make sense of the things I've experienced, but also fight to make sure that other young people don't have to, not only experience family violence, but experience a system that wasn't built with them in mind, because it's not just the abuse young people experience, it's the fact that the system wasn't designed with children young people in mind. And you know, there are waiting lists across our state and across our country, you know, upwards of nine months for counselling services for children and young people and Victoria has invested, I think it's important to acknowledge, Victoria has invested more than most states and territories combined in our response to family violence. But as Minister Plibersek said, our work won't be done until no other woman or child or young person is experiencing the harm caused by family violence, and I won't stop fighting until you know my 12-year-old self and other kids out there like him right now know that they have a right to be safe and free from harm.
JOURNALIST: Sorry, just to clarify. So did you make use of the Amplify program or it wasn't available to you as a young person? That's why you're advocating for it?
CONOR PALL: It wasn't, the Amplify program wasn't available to me because it's only been, it was co-designed four years ago.
JOURNALIST: Minister, the Passport Act gives the Foreign Minister powers to cancel passports. Would you support Penny Wong, using that for the 11 women who are currently in Syria known as the so-called ISIS Brides?
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Look, any questions on legislation are really for the Home Affairs Minister, or as you've said, the Foreign Minister. I would say this in general terms, taking children into a war zone like this is child abuse, and it is important to understand the responsibility that these parents took in making this decision. It is really a matter for the Home Affairs Minister to answer questions about legislation, but again, I mean, we've got the Liberals and Nationals now saying that they want a different legal approach. When they were in government not only did these foreign fighters go to the Middle East under the Abbott and Turnbull and Morrison governments, a number of them were welcomed back to Australia. If they wanted to take action on changing the law at the time, they should have changed it at the time.
JOURNALIST: Save the Children say the best place for these women and children would be back in Australia where we can monitor the women with our security agencies and so that the children can be supported. Would you agree with that sentiment?
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Well, that's really a question for the Home Affairs Minister.
JOURNALIST: Michaelia Cash has accused the Australian Government of lying to the Australian people over the involvement of the return of women and children from Syria. What do you make of that accusation?
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Well, it's characteristically Michaelia Cash, isn't it?
JOURNALIST: Wayne Swan has confirmed that Australian officials have spoken to the ISIS brides. How far does that support extend?
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: We've made it absolutely clear that no assistance is being provided.
JOURNALIST: Has the government been transparent about the support provided to this group?
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Well, I think you'll find the Home Affairs Minister has been doing multiple interviews every single day and answering many, many questions about this.
JOURNALIST: Does the government though have any responsibility to help those children, just as they do other Australian children who are unsafe or being abused elsewhere, even our country?
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: I've got a lot of sympathy for the kids. I think it's child abuse to take a kid into a war zone like this, but it's their parents that have made these decisions.
JOURNALIST: But should the government now not be stepping in to support Australian citizens who are overseas and under threat?
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: We’ve made it very clear that we won’t be offering any assistance.
JOURNALIST: Are you proud of the actions of the late Virginia Giuffre? We’ve finally now seen arrests made with Prince Andrew, and that really stems from the action of an Australian woman who blew the whistle and spoke up for justice here.
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Well, I won't comment specifically on the questioning overnight of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor because that matter obviously will go before the courts. What I will say in general terms about the fallout of the Epstein files is it is shocking and distressing to see the extent of the child abuse that, you know this criminal and his associates engaged in. It is, I hope, some comfort to the victims to see that it seems that no one is above the law. I hope that there are thorough investigations and where warranted prosecution that come from the release of these documents, and I hope that victims get the justice that they deserve.
JOURNALIST: There are safety concerns over the new Australian Post uniforms that are too thin, workers getting sunburnt. Will it need to be scrubbed, and at what cost the taxpayer?
MINISTER PLIBERSEK: I'm sorry, I can't answer that question. Of course, we want to make sure that anybody who's out there in the sun or exposed in a workplace in any way to anything that's unsafe, they're properly looked after.
ENDS
