Senator URQUHART (Tasmania—Opposition Whip in the Senate) (12:54): I rise to speak today on a matter of grave concern to us all: family violence. It's one of the greatest community safety and law and order issues that we face in Australia, and it is the greatest community safety and law and order issue that we face in my home state of Tasmania. It's also one of the most preventable causes of death and disability, particularly for women, in our country. Family violence is still at unprecedented levels nationally, despite hundreds of millions being spent by governments, yet last week, when asked to acknowledge the role of guaranteed funding for a key family violence service in Tasmania, the Hodgman Liberal government declined. The Family Violence Counselling and Support Service is a key part of the Safe at Home service, which is Tasmania's integrated criminal justice response to family violence. It offers professional and specialised services to assist children, young people and adults affected by family violence. It provides information, counselling and support; information and support to family and friends; referrals to legal aid and/or court support; and group work programs for affected adults, children and young people. It acts as an advocate in accessing assistance with housing and Centrelink. It arranges assistance from police, assists in organising safe places to stay and liaises with the government and the non-government sector on behalf of clients. For many years now it has done so much great work to safeguard people, mostly women and children, from the perpetrators of family violence, yet the Tasmanian government, led by a premier who has appointed himself Minister for the Prevention of Family Violence, will not commit to the future of the service or to adequately fund it. It beggars belief. Eradicating family violence in our community and ensuring victims and survivors receive the support they need should be above politics. It should be above ideology. It is simply not acceptable in this day and age for a government to deliberately deny support to a long-term frontline service working to protect those experiencing family violence in our country. The workers employed by this service are highly skilled specialists and they deserve our very best efforts, not the obfuscation of daily politics. They deserve secure jobs and a reasonable workload, not years of overwork and stress. I say to the Minister for the Prevention of Family Violence in Tasmania, the Premier: you can have as many reviews as you like; you can utter any number of concerned platitudes about improved service delivery and the refinement of models; and you can speak of stakeholder consultations, of 'clarifying the role of services' and of 'a wider service network', but the consistent underfunding and implicit undermining of this service through lack of consultation, and not even mentioning its name in the Tasmanian government's new Safe Homes, Families, Communities action plan, indicates that you are talking the talk without walking the walk. Thankfully, as a community our understanding of family violence is changing. We know that it has a devastating impact on the health and wellbeing of victims. As attitudes change, more individuals are seeking help to escape violent and abusive relationships. This increase in demand is evident at the Family Violence Counselling and Support Service, with over 6,000 referrals last year. In the north of Tasmania, the demand for services has tripled since 2005. However, the service is only funded to deal with 2,000 referrals a year. They were operating on about one-third of the funding that they require. To understand this issue fully, it is important to know that the Family Violence Counselling and Support Service is different from other service providers in Tasmania. They provide a service not provided by other non-government bodies or any other providers in this area. Its staff are among the most highly trained people in the country. They provide a specialist response, a response that has been showcased around the nation, and they are desperately swamped with the demands that they are now facing. Despite their expertise and commitment, the situation is taking its toll on these vital support workers. They provide the fastest and most timely response after incidents. Each day they get the police reports and are able to respond to those reports. This is not information other people have or are able to respond to. No non-government related service could do this, because of the way in which this service accesses police reports. They respond. They do cold calls. They advise, support and wrap services around people so they're able to take the necessary steps to keep them safe and to keep their families safe. Ali, a decade-long service user, wrote to me saying: This service and the staff were all that held me together through multiple incidents of family violence and consistent failures of the justice and prison system. I could not have done it without the experienced and dedicated staff. These workers listened to the most intimate details of the abuse I experienced. They respected my personal experience and supported me to begin to heal. The Family Violence Counselling and Support Service she is speaking of, that held her through all that trauma, had 10.3 full-time equivalent staff in 2012-13. Over the years, the staffing level has diminished, to 9.4 in 2017-18 having dipped as low as nine full-time equivalents in 2016. This may not appear to be a significant shift, but the nature of referrals during that time has changed dramatically. With 10.3 full-time equivalents over 2011, 2012 and 2013, their average case allocation was about 430, but by 2017-18 there were 6,126 referrals with four fewer staff. That means the average case allocation per full-time staff was 651. That is extraordinary and appalling. It equates to a 200 per cent increase in overall referrals to adult programs statewide. What's driven the increase? That would be changed community sentiment, increased education and awareness of services and victim-survivors feeling more comfortable about speaking out. Another driver of this demand is Tasmania's housing crisis. There is a lack of affordable housing, and the government is rushing to fill a policy void and, to be frank, to cover its tracks on its extraordinary negligence in the provision of public and affordable housing for many Tasmanians attempting to flee family violence. There is often nowhere to go but a car, a tent or the street. Further, the total lack of recognition of this service in the government's new Safe Homes, Families, Communities action plan is simply offensive. Many people have reached the conclusion that there is a deliberate strategy to underfund the service to the point that it becomes so unviable they can kill it and wind it up, and then outsource it and put it out to tender—losing the extraordinary expertise of its staff and, along the way, losing still more secure jobs in Tasmania. This is all in the context of Premier Hodgman repeatedly saying eliminating family violence is a top priority for his government. In the most conservative of assessments, Tasmania's Family Violence Counselling and Support Service has identified a shortfall of 11.54 full-time equivalent staff simply to cover the basics. If you wanted to provide an excellent service for Tasmanians, if you genuinely wanted to assist children, young people and adults affected by family violence, you would employ those extra staff and you would find the money. You would also seek out the advice of these staff in every consultation for every new plan and count yourself lucky to be part of a government that had people with such an incredible body of knowledge and skills in this area, which is one of the great policy and social challenges of our time. I call upon the Tasmanian government and the Morrison government to beware of the facade of clever words, to look to the specifics of what you are actually providing, to look to the specifics of what expertise you're nurturing, to look to the welfare of the staff providing those services and to safeguard services that are truly making a difference to the lives of thousands of vulnerable Australians. It's important to recognise that state and federal governments as well as many, many courageous survivors of family violence have shone a light on this, but that means little if we do not also adequately resource the dedicated professionals on the end of the phone.