The government's family and sexual violence elimination strategy will be bolstered by $114.5 million in this year's Budget.
Photo: RNZ / Samuel Rillstone
The funding, the first to be budgeted since the strategy was announced, will be split across five areas:
- $38.1m for the Integrated Community Response approach
- $37.6m for six primary prevention initiatives for different groups: Māori, Pacific, ethnic communities, older people, and youth
- $26.7m for skills and capacity support in several initiatives, including $9.8m for victim support services
- $8.1m for health system responses including specialists and strangulation supports
- $4m to build on Māori-Crown partnership arrangements to support communities' monitoring, sharing and learning
Announcing the move this morning, Minister for the Prevention of Family and Sexual Violence Marama Davidson said the investment in the 2021 Te Aorerekura strategy was a major milestone.
"We have a massive problem ... it impacts on every part of a person and their family's lives but it also impacts far too often on their members of their families after generations," Davidson said.
"The evidence shows us that to eliminate violence, government must enable primary prevention that changes social norms and behaviours, fund responses that support people to get to safety and ensure the accountability of those who have used violence, and the accountability of our systems."
The funding for the Integrated Community Response would be spread across police and the ministries of Justice, Corrections and Social Development, she said.
It would enable five locations already set up across the country to share what worked, address cost pressures, continue family violence response coordination networks, and provide senior probation officers.
Future expansion of this would stabilise responses in more locations and improve the approach for commissioning community services, Davidson said.
She said programmes like the Campaign for Action on Family Violence, E Tū Whānau, and Pasefika Proud would be among those benefiting from the $37.6m.
Three similar initiatives yet to be developed would target ethnic communities, older people, and youth.
Ngā Uri o Whiti Te Rā Mai Le Trust is a provider of E Tū Whānau, and chair Saviour Sevia Nua said it enabled them to develop initiatives specifically suitable for Māori and Pacific people.
"Providing them with sense of cultural identity, of who they are as people of the moana, finding refuge and connection through cultural art forms and nurturing one's mana by creating their own stories."
Youth Minister Priyanca Radhakrishnan, who is also Associate Social Development Minister, said close to $1b had gone towards responding to family violence in the past four years and addressing the chronic underfunding, but unless the norms that allowed violence to thrive were addressed it would continue.
"Changing the conditions that allow violence to flourish, that is what we're focusing on here and that is a massive shift and it's something that the sector has also been calling out for."
The funding for the health system response would help more victims get timely access to referrals to specialist services and supports, particularly in relation to non-fatal strangulation.
"Not just for the crisis timeframe, but for the long-term healing and specialism for both physical and mental injury, as well as providing the ability for reports to be written up from that specialised help to support the justice process."
Social Development Minister Carmel Sepuloni said prevention had not been a priority in the past.
"Prevention is not just one thing, prevention has not been a priority to the extent that it needed to be in the past, so I think that the focus that we're putting on prevention is really the story now."
Davidson said gendered violence also needed to be addressed.
"All genders can be victims of violence ... all genders can use harm. But it is also very clear that we need to resolve and eliminate the sexist attitudes towards women that upholds the drivers of violence."
She said with an independent executive board now set up there would be clear lines of accountability and responsibility across several agencies, but further work would also be needed.
"In itself, today is a celebration of actually showing further follow-up, this isn't just a plan and a strategy that's going to sit and gather dust. We're doing stuff, we're funding it, we're resourcing it, but Te Aorerekrua is bigger than any one budget alone."
She said she would soon will be announcing a ministerial advisory group to communicate with the minister directly, as well as further announcements relating to the workforce.
National leader Christopher Luxon said the party was supportive of anything that could demonstrate success in reversing New Zealand's abysmal record on family violence.
"The key thing for me is making sure that we are backing programmes that are delivering outcomes and actually making a big difference. We've been unable to make sufficient progress on this issue and it's a shameful part of New Zealand's track record.
"Anything that is actually backing programmes that work, to really get to prevention, to actually really move our records to a much better place is a really good thing."