Anthony Albanese has announced $925m to help victims of violence leave abusive relationships and a ban on deep fake pornography as new measures to combat violence against women.
After a national cabinet meeting on Wednesday, the prime minister announced the “leaving violence payment” of $5,000 to help meet the costs of leaving a relationship including services, risk assessments and safety planning.
“This acknowledges financial insecurity is closely linked to violence, and can prevent women leaving a violent relationship,” a national cabinet statement said.
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 would include legislation to ban deepfake pornography; $6.5m of additional funding for the eSafety Commission to pilot age verification; bringing forward a review of the Online Safety Act by one year; and introducing anti-doxing legislation in early August.
“Digitally created and altered sexually explicit material is a damaging form of abuse against women and girls that can inflict deep harm on victims,” the federal government said in a statement.
Albanese told reporters in Sydney that “serious criminal penalties” would apply to creating and sharing sexually explicit material without consent, using technology like 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 need to be strengthened, with a focus on high-risk perpetrators and serial offenders to prevent homicides.
Attorneys-general and police ministers planned to develop options for improving police responses to high-risk and serial perpetrators, 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.
Ahead of the meeting, Labor had come under pressure from the Coalition to introduce age verification for pornography.
