Estimates - Prevention of Family Violence

Ms BURNET - Minister, I just wanted to go to the preventive health strategy and sexual violence prevention and, of course, modelling is important for the government to undertake on long-term health, justice and social cost-savings associated with the investment in prevention, early intervention of sexual violence and child sexual abuse. But can you identify the funding in the 2026-27 budget that contributes to implementation of Tasmania's preventive health strategy? Specifically in relation to family violence and sexual violence prevention, please, and those primary rather than tertiary responses?

Ms HOWLETT - Well, prevention is absolutely the key. As far as in relation to health, I would have to take that on notice and receive that information from the Health minister, but we recognise that funding in this area is complex, allocated from various different funding streams and spans multiple parts of the system. The complexity brings its own challenges in meeting increasing demand across the sector and responding to emerging national and local focus areas. Our focus is how we continue to invest to meet the needs of victim/survivors and hold perpetrators to account and improve system and legislative response to family and sexual violence. Ms Hurworth, would you like to add any more to that?

Ms HURWORTH - Through you, minister, it is really complicated to ascertain the amount of overall government investment in prevention because so many things that we do could be preventative and because family violence is has a gender basis that could flow through to a whole lot of activity around those sorts of dynamics. A case in point is to Respectful Relationships Education in the Department of Education. For example, we fund through the minister's action plan a component of that. We fund two FTE to coach teachers directly in schools on how they implement the Respectful Relationship Education package. We also fund a partnership with Our Watch and an Our Watch senior advisor who also works with the Department of Education on RRE, but then the Department of Education itself funds significant elements of RRE, and it also provides funding to SAS, for example, to do consent education, to Family Planning Tasmania to do respectful relationships education. The Department of Health funds Child Health and Parenting Service (CHaPS). CHAPS also looks at respectful relationships.

Ms BURNET - Okay. I see the predicament and I won't take up the anymore of the committee's time. I suppose you've pointed out how complex it is to actually measure what is really occurring. But thank you.