Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has announced $925 million to help victims of violence leave abusive relationships and a ban on deepfake pornography as new measures to combat violence against women. Source: The Guardian.
After a National Cabinet meeting yesterday, Mr Albanese announced the “leaving violence payment” of $5000 to help meet the costs of leaving a relationship along with services, risk assessments and safety planning.
The Commonwealth said it would deliver a range of new measures to tackle factors that exacerbate violence against women – such as violent online pornography and misogynistic content targeting children and young people.
The measures include: legislation to ban deepfake pornography; $6.5 million of additional funding for the eSafety commissioner to pilot age verification to protect children from pornography and other age-restricted online services; and introducing anti-doxing legislation in early August.
Mr Albanese said “serious criminal penalties” would apply to creating and sharing sexually explicit material without consent, using technology including artificial intelligence.
The federal Government will run a new phase of the Stop it at the Start campaign from mid-June until May 2025.
At the meeting, state and federal ministers agreed that justice system responses needed to be strengthened, with a focus on high-risk perpetrators and serial offenders, to prevent homicides.
Attorneys-general and police ministers plan to develop options for improving police responses, including sharpening deterrence and improving fixated threat strategies.
Jurisdictions agreed to improve information sharing about perpetrators, and risk assessment and responses to sexual assault – work to be led by Victoria and South Australia.
Mr Albanese said on Wednesday the suite of measures was “a further step forward” but said he could not be satisfied when a woman died in Australia, on average, every four days.
FULL STORY
Australian government pledges almost $1bn to help women leave violent relationships (Paul Karp, Josh Butler and Jordyn Beazley, The Guardian)
