Julie Oberin has been appointed alongside former Victorian Police Commissioner Ken Lay and domestic violence advocate and Australian of the Year, Rosie Batty.

Those appointed to the panel have been nominated by the Commonwealth and each state and territory and have specialised knowledge across domestic and family violence, sexual assault, online safety, violence within Indigenous and culturally and linguistically diverse communities, and people with disabilities.

Their task is to advise the Council of Australian Governments on the issue of domestic and family violence and make recommendations on how governments can best respond.

The panel will run for up to 18 months and will immediately begin advising COAG on practical ways to address violence against women.  

By the end of 2015, COAG will agree on a national domestic violence order scheme, where orders will be automatically recognised and enforceable in any state or territory of Australia; develop national outcome standards for intervention against perpetrators and holding them accountable; and enact a national approach to dealing with online safety and the misuse of technology, to protect women against newer forms of abuse.

"It’s a new tool, the same behaviours but a different tool and it’s increasingly being used against women,'' Ms Oberin said.

"We don’t want technology to go away, we don’t want women to stop using technology because that’s part of their empowerment and crucial to achieving gender equality, so we need to teach them how to use it safely and keep themselves safe with it and teach them how to use it to collect evidence.

"We were taking calls six months ago where women were being tracked through their phone and sometimes their car, now we are getting calls saying that she has found a listening device in her bed base.''

Ms Oberin said she was thrilled to be appointed to the panel, and her key message would be that the community knows enough about the national emergency of violence against women, and it's time for change.

"One of the problems with just doing a community awareness campaign without doing prevention work – is that it raises demand for services, it increases women challenging the perpetrator’s behaviour and she may decide she is going to leave, he escalates his behaviour and it becomes more dangerous for her particularly if there’s nowhere to go and no specialist services that she can access,'' she said.

"So we are going to see more women killed until we actually do two things, we are going to need to increase the resources for the front line services because demand is going up and at the same time we need to do real prevention work which is around reducing gender inequality and how that interacts with other social inequality.

"If we just do community awareness we simply raise demand for all these over strapped services.

"Most people in Australia, men and women are against violence – but they in some way may still support violence-supporting attitudes and beliefs and unhelpful gender stereotypes.

"We know enough about the issue, we really want change now.

"This is a national emergency all round, not just about the increasing domestic murders, it’s going to just implode the system, it’s going to cause unforeseen damage to children growing up over the next 10 or 20 years. We need to take this opportunity now to get it right."

Ms Oberin is joined on the panel by: Ken Lay APM, Rosie Batty, Heather Nancarrow, Tracy Howe, Ed Mosby, Dr Vicki Hovane, Maria Hagias, Commissioner Darren Hine APM, Sue Salthouse and The Hon Bess Price.

Julie Oberin is the CEO of Annie North Women’s Refuge and Domestic Violence Service in regional Victoria.  Julie has worked in the domestic and family violence sector for more than 20 years. She is an experienced practitioner both working with women and children who have experienced violence, and also with men who have used violence against family members.  She has a strong interest in how technology assisted abuse is increasingly being used against women and how it can be used to assist in the empowerment of women and to gather evidence against perpetrators.

Julie is the National Chair of WESNET (Women's Services Network) National Committee; National Chair of the Australian Women Against Violence Alliance (AWAVA); a founding member and current national Executive Board member of Homelessness Australia; Chair of the Loddon Campaspe Family Violence Advisory Committee; Board member of the Centre for Non-Violence; Regional Chair delegate on the Victorian Statewide Family Violence Forum; and Australian Board member of the Global Network of Women's Shelters.