International Women's Day 2021: Anne Summers keynote

How is Australia reckoning with its treatment of women?

A keynote address from Dr Anne Summers AO at our International Women's Day 2021 livestream event.

May I start by acknowledging that UTS is situated on the land of the Eora people of the Gadigal National and by paying my respects to its Elders past, present and emerging.

Second, may I wish everyone a happy International Women’s Day.

As you all know, IWD is the day on which we acknowledge, and celebrate, the progress we have made towards gender equality - and take stock of what still needs to be done.

Some years the balance is more skewed towards what remains to be done than on what we have accomplished to date. Some years, we even feel as if we are sliding backwards.

This year seems like one of those years.

Before I start, I want to say how very pleased I am today to be making my first public ‘appearance’ as the holder of a Paul Ramsay Foundation Fellowship.

The Paul Ramsay Foundation is Australia’s largest philanthropic organisation whose mission is to break cycles of disadvantage in Australia. The Foundation has recently adopted domestic and family violence reduction as a priority area for its social investing. This is a massive development, and one for which the Foundation should be congratulated. It is yet one more indicator that ending domestic and family violence is becoming widely seen as integral to achieving other important social and economic goals.

I am honoured to have been awarded this Fellowship which will enable me to conduct innovative research into several specific areas of domestic and family violence.

The Foundation has partnered with UTS for me to do this work, and I would like to thank UTS – especially Deputy Vice-Chancellor Shirley Alexander - for hosting this Fellowship, and members of the Transdisciplinary School for welcoming me into their ranks and providing support for this important work. I am also especially grateful to the Foundation for being willing for me to do this work remotely from New York.

I have only just begun this project so it is too early to be able to present any results, but I hope that I can do so at a later date – perhaps at a forum similar to this one.

Instead, today while my sister panelists Dixie and Cat will be sharing their experiences from the front line of dealing with DFV, I want to address the broader question of whether we as a country are succeeding in reducing domestic and family violence against women.

As I scarcely need to spell out for this audience, the short answer is: No. We are not.

A 2019 report from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare tells us that ‘levels of partner violence and sexual violence have remained stable since 2005’.

This conclusion is based on evidence collected by the Personal Safety Surveys (PSS) conducted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics in 2005, 2012 and 2016.

This is at a time when all other crimes, especially violent crimes, are declining.

For instance, in NSW, armed robberies, break and enters, muggings, shopliftings and car-thefts have declined by significant amounts – muggings down by 36%, car thefts by 21.9%.

Yet domestic and family violence remains ‘stable’.

What is especially disappointing about this is that the National Plan to Reduce Violence against Women and their Children 2010-2022 has been in place for eleven years.

It has just one year to go – and it appears to have failed.

As I am sure everyone remembers, the National Plan was launched with great promise andhuge expectations.

It was the brainchild of the brilliant Tanya Plibersek, who was Minister for the Status of Women at the time; it was launched by Julia Gillard who was Prime Minister (and endorsed by every state and territory leader) and Jenny Macklin, who’d just got Paid Parental Leave legislated, was the Minister given responsibility for presiding over its implementation.

The National Plan was launched at a time of optimism and activism, when wrongs were being righted with long-awaited reforms finally coming into effect.

Finally, we were going to address the appalling prevalence of violence against women and their children in a planned and systematic way.

The National Plan had a hugely ambitious vision: ‘Australian women and their children live free from violence in safe communities’.

It was a bipartisan exercise and distinguished by the fact that it was:

• long-term, designed to run from 2010 to 2022,
• based on evidence gleaned from research and community consultations
• coordinated across jurisdictions, thus attempting to circumvent the state definitional silos and turf battles that have beset every reform effort in this country since federation
• designed to focus on prevention
• intended to focus on making perpetrators accountable and encouraging behavioural change

And, just to clarify, the National Plan made clear that was specifically targetting domestic and family violence, and sexual assault: ‘gendered crimes – that is they have an unequal impact on women’.

To achieve this Vision, an unambiguous Target was set:

to achieve ‘a significant and sustained reduction in violence against women and children, during the next 12 years, from 2010 to 2022’.

Eleven years later, in 2021, family, domestic and sexual violence has not reduced at all, let alone in ‘a significant and sustained way’.

The 2016 Personal Safety Survey tells us that more than a quarter of a million women (n=255,600) had experienced partner violence in the previous two years.

We can be pretty sure those figures are on the low side, that they have not taken into account some forms of violence such as financial and technological abuse and other aspects of coercive control that we have a better understanding of now than when the Personal Safety Survey was first designed.

So, it would seem that the National Plan has had zero impact on levels of violence against women. If anything, given the likely undercounting, violence against women (and their children) has actually increased.

So, we have to ask: what went wrong?

I SO HOPE that someone is working on a history of the National Plan because we need to know, in granular detail, how it went awry. In the time available to me today, I can provide only the briefest account of my view of how it went off the rails. (And I would like these remarks to be seen as a work in progress as I hope to be able to develop them further in the near future.)

There are two basic reasons: political failure and bureaucratic ineptitude, manifested in the absence of any indicators to measure progress towards achieving the Target. They are linked of course. Had the political will been there, the bureaucracy would have been required to do things differently.

Let’s look first at the politics.

In 2013, two years after the National Plan was officially launched, the federal Labor government was defeated, ushering in what so far has been eight years of Liberal National Party rule.

One measure of the government’s commitment to the National Plan is the amount of money it has been prepared to spend on women’s safety.

The total federal government ‘investment’ for the current, and final, Action Plan, which runs from 2019 to 2022 is $340 million. Over three years.

To put that in perspective, the same federal government announced in 2020 that it would spend $500 million to redevelop and expand the Australian War Memorial.

So, $500 million to memorialise overseas wars, but only $340 million to save Australia’s women and children from violence on the home front.

Another measure of political commitment is who is put in charge.

Since 2013 there have been six different Ministers. Six. So not much continuity or long-term vision. And that wasn’t the only problem.

Jenny Macklin was succeeded by Kevin Andrews. He was followed by Scott Morrison, then Christian Porter took the reins, followed by Dan Tehan and then Paul Fletcher.

Five men.

You have to wonder how committed to, or even interested in, the Plan’s success most of these men were. At least some of them hacked away at parts of it. Christian Porter, for instance, moved the national crisis hotline 1800 RESPECT from the women-run Rape and Domestic Violence Services Australia to Medibank Private.

It was not until after the 2019 federal election that a woman was once again put in charge: Liberal Senator Anne Ruston.

THE SECOND BIG problem with the National Plan is that it has never had clear measurable targets; instead, it promises vaguely worded ‘outcomes’.

In 2019 the Auditor-General released a scathing assessment of the Department’s [of Social Services which administers the National Plan] lack of attention to implementation planning and performance measurement’.

He expressed doubt that the National Plan was on track, or even had the tools in place, to achieve its basic objectives.

For instance, he reported, the measure of success for Outcome 1 (‘Communities are safe and free from violence’) ‘does not consider actual levels of violence or broader community safety.’

One reason for this is that, apart from the Personal Safety Survey, we have no consistent and thus comparable national data measurements.

Creating a National Data Collection and Reporting Framework to address this was an early action point in the National Plan but, eleven years later, it has not happened.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics was asked in 2014 to develop the foundation for such a Framework but, the Auditor-General’s 2019 report found: ‘governments have not agreed an implementation plan and consequential funding arrangements for the long-term development of data assets. An implementation plan was drafted in 2011 but the department was unable to verify whether it was endorsed.’

The Auditor-General’s report made clear why data is so important:

‘Under the National Plan it was expected that “as data collection improves and is more consistent new sources of data [would] become available.” To date, [he is saying this in 2019] no new measures of success or data sources have been agreed by governments.

‘In addition, no outcomes or measures of success have been established for each three-year action plan that sits under the National Plan. The data sources currently used are surveys run every four or six years [he’s referring to the Personal Safely Survey]. Additional annual administrative data sources are available and could be used to complement these survey results, such as Australian Bureau of Statistics collections on Recorded Crime — Victims and Recorded Crime — Offenders.’

This is not done. Why not?

If the National Plan made use of the Australian Institute of Criminology’s national homicide monitoring program it would actually have some good news to report.

Overall, murders in Australia have declined by 39 per cent since the monitoring program began in 1989.

And although it does not seem like it as we learn, almost every week it seems, that another woman has been murdered by her current or former partner, the actual number is the lowest on record.

In 2017-18, the latest year for which figures are available, 33 women were murdered by an intimate partner.

That is 33 too many.

But it is down from 59 such murders in 1989 (and 73 in the very bad year of 2001-02).

The current Minister, Senator Ruston, has promised to take account of the Auditor-General’s complaints.

‘At the end of this three years, I’d like to think we’d be in a position to give some quantifiable metrics about what we’ve achieved,’ she said in 2019.

Let’s hope so because we have one year to go and so far, we have not seen any such metrics.

To conclude: I need to say that the National Plan has not been totally ineffective.

It has achieved some important reforms, including:

• the establishment in 2017 of a national Apprehended Violence Order scheme (finally, it only took about 20 years)
• creation of the national crisis hotline 1800RESPECT
• creation in 2013 of ANROWS, the national research organisation intended to provide the evidence base for actions to reduce violence
• creation in 2013 of Our Watch, the national organization intended to work on primary prevention activities, and to raise awareness of violence against women

A lot of good and important work has been done by these organisations.

But the National Plan is due to end next year.

The government is indicating privately that it will be extended, but I think we should be asking whether we want it to continue in its present form.

I argue we need a total overhaul of its design.

We might benefit from the example of Closing the Gap, the framework that charts and aims to reduce, and ultimately eradicate, differences in life expectancy, educational achievement and other outcomes between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.

The targets for Closing the Gap are all backed by hard data, as are the measurements of progress – or lack thereof. 

We know that progress in closing the gap has been poor. It has been quite successful in some areas, such as early childhood education but has fallen short when it comes to employment, life expectancy and other measures.

But the point is: We have hard data so we know. We can measure failure and know where to be putting our efforts in order to succeed.

We need comparable targets, based on hard data, for reducing, and ultimately eradicating, domestic and family, and sexual violence against women.

To be able to do this, we need to adjust some of our thinking.

It is no longer enough to say that we need gender equality in order to reduce violence.

Rather, we should be measuring reductions in violence as a performance indicator of our progress towards achieving gender equality.

I wish I had more time today to develop these thoughts, but I hope that I have at least encouraged you to think about the need for realistic targets, and ways to measure how we are performing against them, if we are to have any hope of eliminating violence against women.

Thank you.