Anne Ruston’s new job is a rebranding of her old job, but the time for political tricks is over

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has annointed Senator Anne Ruston as Minister for Women’s Safety, implying a new caring responsibility has been added to her portfolio of Families and Social Services.

In fact, it’s no more than a branding exercise, giving a fancy title to a responsibility she’s had since she took over the portfolio in May 2019.

Social Services Minister Anne Ruston is the last in a long line of LNP MPs to hold the job. Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Morrison should know as, when he had the portfolio himself in 2014-15, he, too, was responsible for women’s safety. As was Kevin Andrews and Christian Porter and Dan Tehan and Paul Fletcher.

Between 2013 and 2019 these five men each had a turn at being social services minister and each was required to administer the national plan.

That is the National Plan to Reduce Violence Against Women and their Children 2010-2022, a carefully designed program created by Tanya Plibersek, when she was minister for the status of women in the Rudd government, to develop a long-term strategy for addressing domestic violence and sexual assault.

The plan was officially launched by Prime Minister Julia Gillard in 2011, after being signed off on by all state and territory leaders. Social services minister Jenny Macklin, who had recently delivered the country’s first Paid Parental Leave scheme, was given the job of pursuing its unambiguous target: to achieve “a significant and sustained reduction in violence against women and children, during the next 12 years, from 2010 to 2022”.

Scott Morison was in charge of looking after women’s safety when he was minister for social services.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Before Labor lost office in 2013, the basic edifice had been put in place: the 1800RESPECT telephone helpline, Our Watch to raise awareness of domestic violence, Australia’s National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety, or ANROWS, to provide the evidence base for policy development among other initiatives.

The “significant and sustained reduction” in violence was meant to follow.

It has not happened.

It is fair to say that from the moment Kevin Andrews replaced Jenny Macklin as minister responsible, not a lot has happened under the national plan.

A 2019 report from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare tells us that “levels of partner violence and sexual violence have remained stable since 2005”.

This conclusion is drawn from Australia’s premier data source on such violence, the Personal Safety Survey, or PSS, conducted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics in 2005, 2012 and 2016.

Yet other violent crimes are declining. For instance, in NSW, armed robberies, break and enters, muggings, shopliftings and car-thefts have declined by significant amounts: muggings by 36 per cent, car thefts by 21.9 per cent.

The 2016 PSS reports that 255,600 women experienced partner violence in the previous two years.

We can be pretty sure those figures are on the low side, not taking into account some forms of violence such as financial and technological abuse and other aspects of coercive control that we have a better understanding of now than when the PSS was first designed.

So, it would seem that the national plan has had zero impact on reducing violence against women. If anything, given the likely undercounting, this violence has actually increased.

After being in effect for eleven years, eight of them with the LNP Coalition in power, the plan designed to deliver women’s safety appears to have been an abject failure.

So, what went wrong?

Five (male) ministers in the first five and half years was hardly conducive to focus or effectiveness. Nor is the spend.

The total federal government “investment” in the plan since 2013 has been an estimated $1180 million.

To put figure that in perspective, the federal government is spending $500 million to redevelop and expand the Australian War Memorial.

In other words, $500 million to memorialise overseas wars, but only $147 million a year to save Australia’s women and children from violence on the home front.

The second big problem with the national plan is that it does not have clear measurable targets; instead, it promises vaguely worded “outcomes”.

In 2019 a scathing assessment by the Auditor-General of the Department of Social Services’s management expressed doubt that the national plan was on track, or even had the tools in place, to achieve its basic objectives.

For instance, he reported, the measure of success for Outcome 1 (Communities are safe and free from violence) “does not consider actual levels of violence or broader community safety”.

“In addition, no outcomes or measures of success have been established for each three-year action plan that sits under the national plan,” the Auditor-General said.

One reason for this is that, apart from the Personal Safety Survey, we have no consistent and thus comparable national data measurements. The planned new data sources were never developed. No hard targets were set. Success cannot be measured and accountability for women’s safety has not been required.

Perhaps it is time to start.

Before her apparent promotion this week, Minister Ruston told Senate Estimates she was planning to resume the summit to design the post-2022 national plan (that had been deferred because of COVID) and would involve women’s and community groups.

But the time for talking up women’s safety, or substituting sleight-of-hand branding exercises for effective action, has long passed. It is now time to establish hard targets for actually reducing violence against women and their children. And making ministers accountable for them being reached.

Lives depend on it.

Twitter: @SummersAnne