E&OE TRANSCRIPT
PODCAST INTERVIEW
7 AM PODCAST
MONDAY, 25 MAY 2026

Topics: DOMESTIC, FAMILY AND SEXUAL VIOLENCE; SECOND ACTION PLAN; REFORMS TO CHILD SUPPORT.

DANIEL JAMES: Australia is again being forced to reckon with the violence being inflicted on women and children.

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JAMES: The PM's sudden disdain for Royal Commissions is out of step with what thousands of Australians want to see in response to the scourge of domestic violence. After another devastating week, thousands of people from all walks of life have backed calls for a Royal Commission into the killing of women and children at the hands of an intimate partner or someone they know. But the government says the country doesn't need another inquiry, it needs action on what is already known.

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JAMES: I'm Daniel James, and you're listening to 7AM. Today, Social Services Minister Tanya Plibersek, on the pressure for a national reckoning, the limit of government response and the growing concern about how violence is shaping the lives of young people. It's Monday, May 25. Minister, welcome to 7AM.

TANYA PLIBERSEK, MINISTER FOR SOCIAL SERVICES: It's a pleasure to be with you.

JAMES: Minister, in the last week five women and two children have been killed in very devastating circumstances that have shaken a lot of people in this country, and yet when the PM was asked about calls for a Royal Commission into the killing of Australian women and girls, he said ‑‑

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JAMES: That's a pretty dismissive response, isn't it?

MINISTER PLIBERSEK: I understand why people want a Royal Commission, 'cause they say this is such an important issue for our society, and when an issue is important, they think a Royal Commission is an appropriate response. What people who work on the frontline have said to me again and again is, ‘we've been consulted, we've had eight Royal Commissions and major reports in recent years with 1,000 recommendations’. Our Family Domestic and Sexual Violence Commissioner Micaela Cronin last year totalled up all these recommendations, and I've got a lot of sympathy for the argument of frontline workers that we've been consulted, we know what the problem is; what we need is sustained action to change the incidence of violence in our community.

JAMES: Just if we just stick on the idea of a Royal Commission for a moment. The Prime Minister in 2021 said about the Royal Commission into Defence and Veterans' Suicide that a Royal Commission is the most powerful form of inquiry that we have, and we'll ask the hard questions, we'll find the hard truths.

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JAMES: Why is that different for this particular circumstance?

MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Because we know so much of what we need to do. I go back to those 1,000 recommendations. Frontline workers ‑ I've just come from a service now, multicultural workers working with refugee and immigrant women. They'll tell me what I need to do.

JAMES: I'm sure they will.

MINISTER PLIBERSEK: I'm meeting people every single day who say, ‘we've been consulted, this is what we need more of’, and like I say, I mean in Victoria you've had a Royal Commission here, the South Australian Government's had a Royal Commission, we've had the Coronial inquests in the Northern Territory, we've had the Rapid Review that all of the Premiers and Chief Ministers and Prime Minister commissioned a little while ago.

It's not that we don't understand family domestic and sexual violence, unfortunately we understand it all too well because it is so prevalent. We also know the answer to some of what is working to change. Where we're seeing positive change, we've got some really good pointers to what we should be doing more of. And so, actually, the big opportunity now I think is in refocusing our efforts to do more of what's working, less of, you know, what's not working, and pick up where we've got gaps. So, we've got a national plan on violence against women and their children, we're launching the consultation on the Second Action Plan for that. This is sounding very bureaucratic; I don't mean it to. What that means is what are the specific practical actions that we need to be doing now as a Federal Government, as State and Territory Governments, and right across our community to change the incidence of violence in our community. Those deaths are horrific.

JAMES: Yes.

MINISTER PLIBERSEK: And they are the most obvious pointer to where we've failed, but for every death there are thousands of people who never come into contact with police ‑‑

JAMES: Yes.

MINISTER PLIBERSEK: ‑‑ or the service system. We need to be reaching those people with better supports and most particularly, we need to be changing the attitudes and behaviours in our society that allow this sort of thing in the first place.

JAMES: Yeah.

MINISTER PLIBERSEK: It's a huge job. We know so much of what we need to do to do that. We need to get on and do it.

JAMES: Absolutely. Just one final point on the Royal Commission and I'll drop it and we'll move on. Isn't that part of what a Royal Commission can do, it can spark a national conversation? Because from ‑‑

MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Yeah.

JAMES: ‑‑ I guess from a punter's perspective, people on the street, that aren't on the frontline and in terms of provision or in advocacy around this, there's a mix of, you know, funding from one place, there's State police, there's courts in another, there are separate legal services, separate prevention campaigns. Couldn't a Royal Commission sort of force all those systems to talk to each other, but also, more importantly, I reckon start a national conversation around what we need to do as a society to address this scourge?

MINISTER PLIBERSEK: I think that's an absolutely vital question for us as a community to answer, and I'm so pleased to be talking to you today, and you know, I have a lot of opportunities to have this conversation with the Australian public. The Second Action Plan consultation is exactly that opportunity.

JAMES: Yep.

MINISTER PLIBERSEK: And it's a great opportunity for every Australian to have their say. Can I add to that though, what often happens is there's a horrific event, we have so much talk about it for a few days ‑‑

JAMES: Yeah.

MINISTER PLIBERSEK: ‑‑ and then it drifts out of people's consciousness. What we really need is for this conversation to be sustained, and that means every one of us taking some responsibility personally for doing that. Governments can do a lot ‑‑

JAMES: Yep, it's a societal issue.

MINISTER PLIBERSEK: ‑‑ you know, commissions, inquiries, we can do a lot. We've got actually a really important inquiry on in the Parliament at the moment about deaths that are suicides, but where there's been a history of family domestic and sexual violence, because we know suicide and FDSV are intrinsically linked.

These inquiries do play a really important role, I'm not for a second dismissing that. But every one of us, when we see behaviour that troubles us in, you know, the relationships that we observe in our friendship circles or in our family, when we see young men in particular talking about women in a way that is disrespectful or supports those really gendered stereotypes that we know so often become permissive of violence, every one of us has the opportunity to change that conversation, and we shouldn't be waiting for any inquiry or commission to do that. Every one of us needs to take responsibility for that every day.

JAMES: The question that's always being asked when it comes to any sort of portfolio is, is the government doing enough? And I guess that's the question in this particular space as well, Minister. You've got a national plan to end violence against women, which has so far invested $4.4 billion over four years. But the government's just announced an additional $5.3 billion per year on new Defence spending. Does the money focused in this space equate to the priorities of the government?

MINISTER PLIBERSEK: So, I will never in my life say we're doing enough while there is a single woman or a single child or a single person experiencing violence or coercion or control, or whether they're frightened at home or on the street. I'm never going to say, ‘yep, job done’.  I've been working in this area for decades and I've seen amazing progress but not enough progress for me to think that we don't need to continue to push. But I think it's also important to acknowledge where progress has been made, because unless you celebrate the wins it's hard to keep people motivated.

And so, acknowledging we've added $4.4 billion of funding in an area, that includes around $1 billion, for example, for the Leaving Violence Program, which gives people up to $5,000 support to leave a violent relationship. When I first started working domestic violence, if you had told me that we could help a woman with $5,000 of support to leave a violent situation immediately, I would have thought, wow, that will change everything.

JAMES: And on top of that you've got $5,000 in access to goods and services and safety planning as well.

MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Yeah. Safety planning is a really important part of that. Actually being able to talk to someone about making your safety plan, leaving safely, because we know most violence, including most homicides happen when someone's leaving a violent relationship. We've got $1.2 billion going into emergency housing. We're doing big reforms in both family law and child support to make these big government systems safer for victims of violence. We're working with the private sector, like financial institutions to prevent abuse through, you know, financial abuse through things like banking apps. We're working with the tech sector on stalking and nudify apps, and all the things that technology‑facilitated abuse are throwing up as new challenges.

There's so much work going on, in fact we've got over 500 activities right now with the States and Territories coming out of that First Action Plan. Will I say that that's enough? Never. Not while there's a single person who is still subject to violence or abuse or fear.

JAMES: Coming up, the Minister's emotional response to the task at hand.

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Let's talk about one of those touch points that the government can have a very direct impact on, and that's around reforms to child support, because the system is being weaponised ‑‑

MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Oh, yeah.

JAMES: ‑‑ against women and children. For people who've never dealt with it, how does a payment system become a form of abuse?

MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Oh, well, look, there's a lot of families that just sort out their financial arrangements after separation themselves, they're fine on their own. About half of separated families use the child support scheme to collect money from the paying parent and pass that on to the child and the parent that they're living with most of the time. In most cases the paying parent is the dad, in most cases the receiving parent is the mum, but of course there's always variations to this.

How can it be misused? Let me tell you people are very creative in punishing their former partners. Just one example is never lodging a tax return, so you as the receiving parent never get the money you're entitled to 'cause there's an assumption that the paying parent is on a much lower income than they're actually on.

JAMES: Minister, I also want to talk about how young people are showing up on both sides of the sexual violence data.

MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Yeah.

JAMES: More than half of recorded sexual assault victims in 2024 were under 18 at the time of the incident, and 15 per cent of offenders in 23/24 were aged 10 to 17, mostly male.

MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Yep.

JAMES: Will the new action plan treat young people as one of the central parts of this crisis?

MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Absolutely. So the new action plan gives us an opportunity of doing more of what's working, as I said, but it also is really an important opportunity to identify any gaps in what we're doing at the moment, and I think treating young people ‑ children and young people on their own specifically as victims of family domestic and sexual violence is a really big gap in the current action plan.

But one of the most alarming statistics ‑ there's a lot of areas, as I said, where we're seeing slow, gradual improvement that we should celebrate. One of the areas that I'm most worried about is this violence between young people where both the victim survivor and the perpetrator are under the age of 18. Sometimes it's in the context of relationships, sometimes it's not. I'm really worried about it because, you know, your question earlier about are we putting enough resources in, we'll never be putting enough resources in if we're growing a new generation of people who use violence.

JAMES: I mean, yeah, I can hear it in your voice. I mean how worried are you about the rise of things like online misogyny in young people, and how it connects to domestic violence and sexual violence; how do we develop a plan to address that? Is that part of the plan ‑‑

MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Hundred per cent.

JAMES: ‑‑ is that what you'll be consulting on?

MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Hundred per cent. And in the discussion paper that we're releasing, it's one of the areas that we specifically identify as an area that needs focus, because there's a lot of really bad stuff happening on the online world, so that's why we've raised the, you know, age to 16 when you can have your social media, and it's why we've got an age verification for pornography now.

I know a lot of people don't like that, they think it's such an intrusion on their civil liberties, but we are seeing kids who are, you know, 10 years old watching pornography that involves choking before they've had their first kiss. And we need to be really explicit in addressing this with young people, we need to be much more explicit in our respectful relationships and sex education talks like, you know, the spermatozoa goes to the egg and the ‑ that's all ‑ kids know that, that's not complicated. What they don't understand is consent or pleasure or desire or negotiation. And while ever we think adults, we think that we're protecting kids because we don't talk to them about sex, we are missing the opportunity of setting healthy norms for them.

JAMES: Finally, Minister, there's every chance by the time this interview goes to air that another child or woman will have been killed by a man that they know. How do we ensure that these victims don't become statistics and that their stories and their memories aren't left behind in the scramble to tackle this scourge? How heavy does the responsibility to get this right weigh on you?

MINISTER PLIBERSEK: I feel it extraordinarily. I remember, you know, I remember so many of the victims that I've heard about over the years, I've met so many of their family members, and I know how missed they are. And I also, you know, I meet so many people who've been victims of violence and see and hear from them the impact that it's had on them long‑term, in many cases how they felt they might be the next homicide statistic. I feel the responsibility of it extraordinarily, and I am absolutely determined that this Second Action Plan will give us some really practical things that we can do to reduce the rates of violence in this society. But, and I don't want this to sound like an excuse at all, governments have to lead, but this has to be a whole of society effort.

JAMES: Minister, thank you so much for your time.

MINISTER PLIBERSEK: It's a pleasure.

ENDS