Dame Quentin Bryce at Victoria University’s Young Women & Leadership Q&A Source: Supplied

Dame Quentin, who is to lead a taskforce aimed at fast-tracking six-month-old recommendations from her Queensland domestic-violence inquiry, was asked which issue she felt was the most important on the nation’s agenda.

Given a choice between complex matters including mental illness, gender discrimination and domestic violence, Dame Quentin said for her the answer was unequivocal; domestic violence.

“I have to say for me at present, it is domestic violence. I have spent many months sitting with women who are survivors, with families who have had daughters, loved ones killed,” she said. “We talk about the statistics of one or two women a week in our country being killed. We don’t focus so much on the grave serious permanent injury to health, the long-term brain damage, in NSW alone there are three cases of that a week.”

Dame Quentin said the response to domestic violence should not come only from government but from all of us who should seek ways to eliminate this “horrific, grave, serious” human rights issue.

She pointed to the four “appalling” domestic violence tragedies in Queensland last week and said we need more refuges as they were packed to capacity, we needed to change deep-seated cultural and attitudinal issues and we needed legal and judicial reform.

We also needed to better care for children affected by the blight, she said.

“The cost to Australia is $13 billion and more of domestic violence. What we don’t focus on are the effects of it on little children. I keep asking myself what about the children?,” she said.

“I sit opposite women who have been through terror, fear, psychological, physical — this is gross human rights abuse — and I don’t want to live in a country with that.

“So that for me is the one, because that’s what I’m working in now and I care about it very, very deeply.

“We have to confront it as individuals and ask ourselves ‘what am I, me, going to do in my neighbourhood?’ And learn how to talk about it. Take the courage to do that and don’t be a bystander.”

Speaking to girls from more than 60 Victorian schools at Victoria University’s Young Women & Leadership Q&A, Dame Quentin answered questions on a host of subjects ranging from mental illness, gender pay inequality, refugees and balancing private and public life.

But her overwhelming message to the girls was to stand up and be counted and to make their voices heard: “Be bold, be bold, be bold” she said.

For instance on pay equity and an 18 per cent pay gap between the sexes she said: “You know, we have been working on this so hard and for so long and you, I want to hand the responsibility of that to you because it is so unjust and so unfair and there are things that absolutely have to be done about it.

“It is, in some ways a complex issue, but it’s outrageous to hear about young graduates coming out of university, a man and a woman doing the same job and getting different pay.”