Beyond Equality: a community where respect is the standard, not the goal.

I know this terrain personally. As a survivor, as a Woman of the Year, and as an NDIS provider who has spent years working alongside carers — overwhelmingly women — who are underpaid, undervalued and overlooked, I'm not coming to this fight with a policy document. I'm coming with lived experience and a plan.

Safety in Box Hill is about protection, not punishment. This page sets out my full platform: from Respect@Work to child safeguarding, from tech-facilitated abuse to the care economy, from community policing to women's leadership. It is one platform because these are one fight.

Box Hill is not unsafe. But residents — particularly women, seniors and recently arrived migrants — increasingly report that they don't know where to turn when something goes wrong. Local services are stretched, frontline officers are leaving the job faster than they can be replaced, and the community infrastructure that quietly prevents harm is being asked to do more on less.

Science is now clear: climate disasters drive a rise in family and gender-based violence. Displacement, financial stress, and loss of community infrastructure all increase risk for women and children. Yet our policy response to climate change almost never mentions this. I will advocate for a National Climate-Violence Response Strategy that recognises this link and funds it accordingly.

Safe Hubs in every hub

Our Neighbourhood Houses should be accredited Safe Spaces — trained, resourced, and permanently funded to provide first-response support for women experiencing violence. These buildings are already trusted. We just need to resource them properly.

Through my role on the Whitehorse Multicultural Advisory Board, I've followed the funding situation closely. Clota Cottage, Box Hill South Neighbourhood House, and Louise Multicultural Centre — part of a 10-house Whitehorse alliance — are running at a real funding gap of around 25% against costs. I will restore base funding to close that gap, indexed to wages and rent, with multi-year agreements so houses can plan, hire and retain coordinators.

• Commit to the full implementation of all 55 recommendations of the Respect@Work Report.
• Commit to the Set the Standard recommendations to ensure Parliament — and Box Hill — is safe for women.
• Advocate for permanent Safe Hub accreditation and training funding for all three Box Hill Neighbourhood Houses.
• Restore base funding to close the 25% gap across local Neighbourhood Houses, indexed to wages and rent.
• Advocate for a National Climate-Violence Response Strategy linking disaster response to family safety funding.

For the full Neighbourhood Houses funding plan → Read the Community Heart Plan

A Working With Children Check is a baseline — not a child safety strategy. The plan builds out four things the current system leaves to chance:

Image-based abuse, online grooming, deepfakes and sextortion are no longer fringe harms — they are increasingly the precursor to escalating family violence. The plan addresses them as the family-violence issue they are.

• Digital-safety education in schools, neighbourhood houses and senior groups.
• Specialist support pathways for image-based abuse and sextortion victims.
• Early-intervention funding for services that catch escalation before it becomes physical.
• System coordination between police, schools, family-violence services and online platforms.

More than 70% of Australia's care workforce — the people keeping our elderly, disabled, and vulnerable community members alive and connected — are women. They are also among the lowest paid workers in the country, with no superannuation parity and no recognition as essential infrastructure. As an NDIS provider, I have seen this first-hand. It has to change.

The Box Hill Care Dividend

Childcare workers and aged-care workers are not a nice-to-have. They are the infrastructure that makes everything else possible. I will advocate for federal and state subsidies that treat local care workers as Essential Infrastructure — on par with roads and public transport — including full superannuation contributions for part-time and casual care workers.

• Close the superannuation gap for carers — no woman should retire in poverty because she spent her career looking after others.
• Advocate for childcare and aged-care workers to be classified and funded as Essential Infrastructure.
• Require transparent gender pay-gap reporting for any developer or company receiving government contracts in Box Hill.
• Support sector-wide pay equity reviews for the care and disability sectors.

Box Hill is one of the most culturally diverse communities in Victoria. Our leadership — in local government, in parliament, in business — should look like us. That means not just more women, but women from multicultural backgrounds, women with disabilities, and women who have never seen themselves represented in the rooms where decisions are made.

The Next 100 Leaders

I will work to establish a local mentorship program, based in Box Hill, that pipelines young women from diverse backgrounds into local government, advocacy, and STEM. Because representation doesn't happen by accident — it happens by design.

• Implement Positive Duty laws strictly — shifting the burden of proof from victim to employer to prevent harassment before it starts.
• Mandate intersectionality in governance: diversity on boards and advisory panels must include women from multicultural and marginalised communities.
• Support the establishment of a Next 100 Leaders mentorship initiative for young women in Box Hill.
• Advocate for gender-responsive budgeting at all levels of government.

Training a new Victoria Police officer costs the state more than $100,000. Losing an experienced one — to burnout, pay or housing — costs all of that and the institutional knowledge that doesn't show up on the balance sheet.

• Retention incentives for experienced officers — pay, housing, mental-health support.
• A local recruitment pipeline through Box Hill Institute and other eastern TAFEs.
• Community policing capacity restored to Box Hill Station.

Punitive responses to addiction and homelessness move the problem around the suburb without solving it. The plan resources the responses that actually reduce harm.

• Early intervention services — mental health, addiction, family violence — funded to local need.
• Housing First as the default response to rough sleeping in Box Hill.
• Safer public spaces by design — lighting, sightlines, activation, not displacement.

Neighbourhood Houses aren't just buildings. They are the front line of women's safety and economic connection in Box Hill. They are where isolated women find their first safe conversation. Where migrant women learn the language they need to ask for help. Where carers find each other. To cut their funding is to compromise women's safety. Period.