Press conference - Juno, Preston

GED KEARNEY, ASSISTANT MINISTER FOR SOCIAL SERVICES AND THE PREVENTION OF FAMILY VIOLENCE: Good morning, everyone, and thank you so much for coming along today. I'd like to acknowledge that we are on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nations, and I pay my respects to elders past and present.

But I'm especially excited to have Minister Wells here with us today, who has a very important announcement with respect to her new portfolio, Minister for Communications, and it is part of a really broad agenda that the Albanese Labor Government has to assist women and families experiencing family and domestic violence.

As the newly minted Assistant Minister for the prevention of family and domestic violence, I'm very proud to say that we take a whole of government approach to this issue, and that there are ministers from our Attorney General through to Minister wells, Minister Butler in health and, of course, Tanya Plibersek, Minister Plibersek, who is the Minister for Social Services and the prevention of family and domestic violence, and many other departments and portfolios as well.

We have to tackle this incredibly important issue, an issue that is a scourge on our society, through a whole of government approach. And that's why it's so important that the announcements made today are made and are part of the answer to that problem.

So, I'd like to introduce Minister Wells.

ANIKA WELLS, MINISTER FOR COMMUNICATIONS AND SPORT: Thanks so much, Minister Kearney. It's a real pleasure to be here in the beautiful electorate of Cooper this morning and to meet people like Tanya and her hard-working team, who have been plugging away on this important work for a very long time.

And it's a real privilege that Minister Kearney and I get to pick up this work and deliver an outcome like this today, and that outcome is through the Australian Communication Media Authority ACMA a new industry standard for victim survivors of family, domestic and sexual violence. And an industry standard is really important because it will better protect and support our victim survivors when it comes to engaging with telecommunications issues which often strike at the heart of people's decisions to stay or to go.

So, what this industry standard will mandate is a better level of service from telcos when it comes to dealing with victim survivors. What does that mean? It means that victim survivors will no longer have to engage with their perpetrator when it comes to resolving telco issues, and that's really important, and it's a really great outcome.

Another one is that victim survivors will be able to have sensitive information, for example, calls to 1800 Respect hidden from their bills. It also means that they will be better protected, and they'll get faster resolutions, so they'll get their new phone reconnected sooner as a result.

And finally, there'll be better staff training for all members of staff in the telcos who may engage with victim survivors, they’ll be better able to identify victim survivors and support them where they can.

So those are four practical outcomes as a result of this industry standard that will help victim survivors resolve telco issues. Minister Kearney and I are really thrilled to be able to take on the work of our predecessors and land this for not just Australians or victim survivors, but people like Tanya and Juno who have worked with these people and will continue to do this really important work in the years to come. So please, let's hear from Tanya about how that's going.

TANYA CORRIE, CEO JUNO: Thank you. Thank you, Minister Wells and Minister Kearney. We know firsthand how important it is to have control over your communication devices. One of the first things we often do when someone comes in to get support from us at Juno is monitor, scan their phones and make sure there aren't any apps. They're not being monitored, etc. So, it's often used as a really, really strategic tool by people who choose to use violence to control their partner.

We also know that being able to untie and untether yourself from a perpetrator of violence is really difficult and having control over that is also a really important part, too. So, reforms like this are so essential for victim survivors to both stay safer and reduce their capacity for people to control them, but also to recover when they do want to leave, that they're able to actually gain their independence. They're able to get their own number. They're able to access the help and the supports they need.

Because we actually see really, really regularly, its used as a means of control and a way of actually making it really hard to leave. So, I really commend these changes. I think they're important. I think industry has such an important role to play in domestic and family violence prevention and response, so it's really great to see telecommunications industry get on board and make these changes.

JOURNALIST: Tanya, can I just ask a question, so I understand that this industry standard is aimed at helping victim survivors from not having to repeat their story. How exactly does that process work?

CORRIE: I'm not sure how it would work in practice with an issue like this. I know for us; we have things like narrowing information sharing to make sure that clients and victim survivors don't have to retell their story.

So sometimes it could just be a kind of case note that follows them from service to service to service. If they've got agreement among services, most of the companies I'm aware of that do this sort of work have lockdown kind of systems, so they can just make sure that there is a flag for someone's file to know that if whoever they're talking to, they're able to access that information. So, they know that this person has requested this kind of support.

JOURNALIST: And what's the significance for you and the staff here at Juno working on the frontline and seeing this day to day? How huge is this for you?

CORRIE: It's really significant for us. So one, phones, they're essential. They're essential for anything. They're essential for any kind of communication, they're essential to get access to Centrelink. They're essential to get access to anything.

So, if they've been controlled and monitored in any way, shape or form, that's really unsafe for a victim, survivor. And so, at the in the first instance, as I mentioned, the first thing we almost always do is check their phone make sure we get that. We've got great partnerships with organisations like Westpac that give us access to free mobile phones if we need to actually have to start a parochial drop, and we do, because the phones are heavily monitored.

But then when we go through to that recovery phase, and we need to be able to help get a phone put in their own name, for example, we need to be able to remove the perpetrator or the person using violence as the owner of the account.

It seems it can be really difficult because of the way ownership works and so being able to actually remove that will be really significant for us in terms of just getting access to that technology as quickly as she needs to.

JOURNALIST: Can I just ask about anti-gambling advocates, sort of raising concern about your new portfolio, and whether there might be any potential for a conflict of interest between Minister of Communications and Minister of sports when it comes to anti-gambling ads.

MINISTER WELLS: Did they articulate why there's a conflict?

JOURNALIST: Just that there might be a conflict of interest coming up in terms of sporting ads and then gambling ads, I think just the possibility that there could be a conflict of interest.

MINISTER WELLS: I guess people are entitled to their opinion. I don't share that. I think that there are a lot of public policy areas where sport and communications overlap, there's some really great opportunity to do important things and to set our country up for the future. Both communications and sport are forward leaning, future facing portfolios.

They're all about opportunity and they're all about what we could do. Communications is about future infrastructure, essentially, and sport is about how we use sport for kids to have opportunities, to get good public policy outcomes in other spaces, like social cohesion or like health. They have overlapping stakeholders when it comes to the communications portfolio and sport portfolio. So, I think there's lots of opportunity there, and I'm really grateful the Prime Minister gave me both those portfolios to work on.

JOURNALIST: Some advocates have suggested that maybe the issue of gambling might sit better with Minister like the Minister for Health. What do you think of that?

MINISTER WELLS: Well, I think there, in terms of gambling harm, the Minister for Social Services leads the federal work in that. But it is an area where it's tentacular in that it sort of it seeps into lots of different public policy areas, not just contained to federal jurisdiction, but state and territory jurisdictions as well. And minister Rishworth, obviously, in the previous term, led that work nationally about gambling harm. Minister Rowland as Minister of Communications, led to work on online harm. Sometimes there are places where that intersects, and Minister Plibersek and I are working together and looking forward to doing more work in that space in our second term. Fantastic.

JOURNALIST: And is that work together if an issue does come up, for example, that is a conflict, conflict of interest. Is that something that your work be willing to work together to navigate towards?

MINISTER WELLS: I guess that's hypothetical. If, if these views aren't being expressed as to a particular issue, I guess, but in the same way to any conflict you know, we would need to navigate. I guess, you know, I held two portfolios in the last term, aged care and sport. Sometimes there was intersectional public policy there, such as early onset dementia and the impact of CTE and how sport and aged care public policy interacted there. People never said that was a conflict. People saw that as an opportunity to actually try and resolve intersectional issues. And I think it's great opportunity.

JOURNALIST: Could I just ask about the Monash IVF as a former Assistant for Health?