Page 4090 - Week 12 - Tuesday, 22 October 2019
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To wait for 10 years is an appalling situation. It is worse than the Northern Territory government, who, admittedly after two years, still have not provided a government response to the Royal Commission into the Protection and Detention of Children in the Northern Territory. It is no wonder that some members of our local Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community are feeling really disaffected and not part, in any way, of government consultation processes. Time and again they were consulted and yet, as far as I can see, nothing changes.
We know that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women have higher rates of violence, 32 times higher hospitalisation rates and are 11 times more likely to die from family violence-related incidents than non-Aboriginal women. Yet we still do not have adequate resources in the community—the Indigenous community in particular—to deal with this.
As I heard at a forum hosted by Beryl women just last week, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community is very, very clearly saying, “Nothing can be done for us without us.” The key is that we listen when we ask for their opinions; we listen when they suggest solutions, even if they are not the solutions that we whitefellas think are the solutions. They are the experts in their own lives and in how their community works. This means resourcing the community as the community thinks should happen, rather than dictating all the time what we think should happen. Clearly what we think should happen is not working, is it? That is the bottom line. We have to do something different.
One of the comments that was made at the forum I went to last week was that so many people felt that they were over just consulting with the government, because they could say all that they felt but the government did not listen and certainly did not act in the way they thought the government should.
The other thing I would say is that the government should not address the issue of domestic and family violence in silos, recognising that the impacts trickle far and wide into the care and protection system, the out of home care system, the youth justice system and the adult criminal system, the health system and the mental health system. All these systems need to be linked because the common thread of family violence runs through them. But, most importantly, the common thread of community and humanity should run through all of them.
I note that last week my colleague, Minister Rattenbury, announced funding to local emerging Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander-led and informed organisations to work in the area of justice reinvestment, which was not mentioned by the minister but which is equally as important as the work of Our Booris, Our Way and the family group conferencing, the functional family therapy child welfare program and restorative justice. I emphasise again that these justice reinvestment programs are linked and should work together.
More importantly, of course, we need to work in partnership with our local Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders in the spirit of the Ngunnawal word “yindgamurra”—and I apologise if I have mispronounced that—which means
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