Recording: International Women's Day 2021

THE HON. VERITY FIRTH:  Thank you, everyone, for joining us for today's event.  Before we begin, I'd like to acknowledge that wherever we are in Australia, we are on the traditional lands of First Nations Peoples.  Here at UTS we're on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation and I obviously want to pay my respects to Elders past, present and emerging of the Gadigal people and also recognise their role, their traditional knowledge, the traditional custodians of knowledge for the land upon which this university is built.

 

So my name is Verity Firth.  I am the Executive Director of Social Justice here at UTS and I also lead our Centre for Social Justice and Inclusion.  I'm very excited to be joined today by some very distinguished guests ‑ Dr Anne Summers, Dixie Link‑Gordon and Catherine Gander ‑ and I will have an opportunity to introduce them properly in just a minute, but before I do that, there's a couple of pieces of housekeeping and then I'll introduce our Vice‑Chancellor.

 

So housekeeping:  firstly, today's event is live captioned.  If you need to use the captions or would like to view the captions, you click on the link that is in the chat and you can find it at the bottom of your screen in the Zoom control panel.  The captions will then open in a separate window.

 

If you have any questions during today's event, we are going to be allowing Q&A from the audience, but we do it in a moderated way.  So what you do is you type your questions into the Q&A box and, again, you can find that Q&A box in your Zoom control panel.  The good thing about the Q&A box is you can upload questions, so you can actually vote for other people's questions, and I tend to err on the side of the most popular questions because they're the ones that people most want answered, but do try to keep your questions relevant to the topics that we're discussing here today.

 

I also want to acknowledge that today's discussion will include topics that can be upsetting and they can cause distress or be triggering, so if at any time you feel yourself becoming overwhelmed or distressed, please take a break from the webinar.  You can always rejoin if you then want to rejoin us when you feel better, but don't force yourself to sit here in distress.  If you do feel overwhelmed or distressed in any way, speak to somebody you trust or contact 1800RESPECT, and we're posting those contact details in the chat box as well so you can find them in your Zoom control panel.

 

So to begin today's event and officially welcome you all, it's my real pleasure to introduce Professor Attila Brungs, who's the Vice‑Chancellor of UTS.  Attila leads UTS in its social justice agenda, ensuring that public purpose and positive social impact is at the heart of everything we do as a university.  Over to you, Attila.

 

PROF. ATTILA BRUNGS:  Thank you, kindly, Verity.  A very warm welcome to everybody.  I appreciate everybody taking the time to join us today.  Before we continue, I too would like to pay respects to the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, particularly acknowledging Elders past and present as the traditional custodians of knowledge for this place.  As I say frequently, knowledge is at the heart of what we are as a university.  Knowledge, the use of knowledge, to solve societal problems, to make the world a better place is at the heart of what we try to achieve.

 

It is an absolute privilege to be here today to officially welcome you all to this International Women's Day livestream event.  I'd like to give a very warm welcome to Dr Anne Summers, Dixie Link‑Gordon and Catherine Gander, who will be taking part in today's important discussion.  Thank you very much.

 

In 2020, a new term was coined, "the shadow pandemic".  It was capturing how severe domestic violence is in our society and how much of it has increased and intensified under the conditions and restrictions of COVID‑19.  Violence against women and children is pervasive, as you all know, in Australian society.  It's in our homes, in our institutions, in our parliaments, right to our high schools.  The media attention over the last few weeks has only reinforced the terrible impact on survivors and difficulty women face in seeking and achieving justice.

 

Today's speakers have decades of experience working to end domestic and family violence, but as they more than any would know, it is an endemic problem.  We all have a role to play to understand what domestic and family violence looks like, how to address the underlying causes that put women at risk and confine men to toxic ideas of masculinity. 

 

Like many fundamental societal challenges, universities have a critical role to play.  Universities must contribute our support, resources, must work alongside experts in the community and frontline practitioners to challenge and to tackle particularly these critical issues. 

 

At UTS our vision is to be a leading public university of technology, not just for those who teach, not just for those people who work directly, but for all society.  That's what it means to be a public university.  We know we can only achieve that vision if at the heart of everything we do is positive social change.  This means challenging stereotypes, fighting bias, broadening perceptions and solving injustices wherever we see them. 

 

I am particularly delighted the brilliant minds of UTS are working in this space, from the appointment of Jess Hill as inaugural journalist‑in‑residence at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, to the wonderful work Dr Anne Summers has joined us to do, to the work students do in community groups right across and around community, to fantastic research being done in each and every part of UTS to make the world a place where women can be safe and thrive. 

 

UTS is also a proud and active part of the Respect.Now.Always campaign.  This is a campaign across all Australian universities that aims to eliminate sexual assault and sexual harassment on all Australian university campuses because everybody has a right to live, study and work in safety. 

 

So, in concluding, again, I'd like to acknowledge and thank everybody joining us today.  It is now my very great pleasure to hand over to Professor Shirley Alexander, Deputy Vice‑Chancellor.  Shirley has worked tirelessly for many years at UTS and beyond to uncover, address and to solve issues under topic today.  Over to you, Shirley.

 

PROF. SHIRLEY ALEXANDER:  Thank you, Attila.  When I was asked to introduce Anne, I thought long and hard about how to introduce someone who is not only a household name, but is someone who is so revered.  Her public achievements are widely known:  the fact that in 1970 she and a couple of others squatted in two rundown houses and turned those into the Elsie Women's Refuge to provide shelter to women and children who were victims of domestic violence; her career, which alternated between being a journalist and that included a period where she won a Walkley Award for her investigation into New South Wales prisons and resulted in a Royal Commission; and she alternated that career as a journalist with politics, which included being an advisor to two Prime Ministers, Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, and was head of the Office of the Status of Women and then back to journalism as Editor in Chief of Ms, America's landmark feminist magazine. 

 

All of those achievements are on the public record.  I had the privilege of getting to know Anne when we were both on the board of the Powerhouse Museum and that experience, and having read three out of her eight books as well as countless other essays and articles, has given me a little bit of an insight into how she has achieved so much.

 

So for me Anne is one of the most courageous and resilient people I have ever known.  She has faced extraordinary challenges, but has always found a way to move on.  It's again a matter of public record that her childhood was far from idyllic, but Anne moved on and found a way to forgive. When she encountered challenge after challenge in her career, she simply found a new pathway.

 

Another interesting thing about Anne is that at a time when everyone was encouraged to have a five‑year plan, Anne did not, or not that I could see anyway in what I've read.  She was very comfortable in her own skin.  She knew what her interests and skills were and was just fearless in giving any opportunity to make use of those a go and if that meant moving careers, moving countries, she was happy to do so.

 

And finally, she's never been a bystander.  She has called out and documented, for example, the extraordinary treatment of Julia Gillard and the way in which it incited violence, produced explicit cartooning.  It was hard to believe at that time that this was happening to our first female Prime Minister and Anne called it out in a very public way and one that I hope caused the boys to take a long, hard look at themselves.

 

If you look at her website, there's a prominent quote that says, "I was born into a world that expected very little of women like me.  We were meant to tread lightly on the earth, influencing events through our husbands and children, if at all."  Anne has done anything but travel lightly on the earth and we're all very grateful for that.  She's had an enormous influence in multiple spheres of public life, ultimately impacting on all of our lives. 

 

I'm very pleased to introduce Adjunct Professor Anne Summers, who is now the recipient of a Paul Ramsay Foundation Fellowship to use transdisciplinary methods to reimagine the end of domestic and family violence.  Thanks, Anne.

 

DR ANNE SUMMERS AO:  Thank you for that wonderfully generous introduction and thank you also, Verity, for inviting me to do this keynote today.  I also start by acknowledging that UTS stands on the land of the Eora people of the Gadigal Nation and pay my respects to their Elders past, present and emerging.

 

I wish everybody happy International Women's Day.  As we all know, this is the day on which we acknowledge and celebrate the progress we've made towards equality and take stock of what still needs to be done.  Some years gender equality in the balance is more skewed to what remains to be done than what we've accomplished so far.  Some years it even feels like we're sliding backwards.  This year seems like one of those years. 

 

I also want to say how pleased I am this is my first public appearance as a Paul Ramsay Foundation Fellowship holder.  I'm grateful to the foundation for awarding me the fellowship to do research into domestic and family violence, UTS sponsoring me, and particularly to both organisations for allowing me to do this work remotely from New York because I'm not able to get back to Australia just yet.

 

I've only just begun the project, so it's too early to be able to present any results, but I hope I can do so at a later date perhaps at a forum such as this.  Instead, today, while my sister panellists Anne, Dixie and Cath, will be sharing experiences from the frontline, 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 point out to this audience, the short answer is no, we are not.

 

A 2019 report from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, which was based on the surveys done every few years by the Personal Safety Surveys of ABS, tells us that levels of partner violence and sexual violence have remained stable since 2005.  This is at a time when all other crimes, especially violent crimes, are declining.  For example, in New South Wales, armed robberies, break and enters, muggings, car thefts have declined by significant amounts ‑ muggings down by 36%, car thefts down by 22%, 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 to 2022 has been in place for 11 years.  It has just one year to go and it appears to have failed. 

 

As I'm sure everybody remembers, the national plan was launched with great promise and huge 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 Jenny Macklin, who'd just got the first paid parental leave legislation through the parliament, was the Minister given responsibility for presiding over its implementation.  It was launched at a time of optimism and activism, when wrongs were being righted, the long-awaited reforms finally coming into effect.  Finally, we thought we're going to address the appalling prevalence of violence against women and their children in a planned and systemic way. 

 

The national plan was hugely ambitious, had a hugely ambitious vision:  Australian women and their children live free from violence in safe communities.  That was the plan.  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 definition of silos and turf battles that have beset every reform in this country since federation.  It was designed to focus on prevention and it was intended to focus on making perpetrators accountable and encouraging behavioural change.

 

To achieve this vision, an unambiguous target was set to achieve a significant and sustained reduction in violence against women during the next 12 years 2010 to 2022.  Eleven years later, in 2021, family domestic and sexual violence is not reduced at all, let alone in a significant and sustained way.

 

The 2016 Public Safety Survey tells us that more than a quarter of a million women ‑ 255,600, to be precise ‑ experienced partner violence in the last two years and we can be pretty sure that those figures are on the low side.  They have not taken into account some forms of violence, such as technological and financial abuse and other aspects of coercive control that we have a better understanding of now than when the Public 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 history in the national plan because we need to know in granular detail.  In the time available to me today, I can provide only the briefest account of my view of how it went off the rails.  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're 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, just 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 ‑ that is the one that runs from 2019 to 2022 ‑ is $340 million over three years. 

 

Now, to put that figure into perspective, that 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 wars, but only $340 million to save Australia's women and children from violence on the home front.

 

Another measure of political 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.  The brilliant Jenny Macklin was succeeded by Kevin Andrews.  He was followed by Scott Morrison, who was succeeded by Christian Porter, followed by Dan Tehan and finally Paul Fletcher ‑ five men. 

 

You have to wonder how committed to or even interested in the plan most of these men were.  At least some of them hacked away at it.  Christian Porter, for example, moved the national crisis hotline 1800RESPECT from the women‑run Domestic Violence Services Australia to Medibank Private.  It was not until 2019 that a woman was once again put in charge, Liberal Senator Anne Ruston.

 

The second big problem with the national plan is it's never had clear, measurable targets.  Instead, it promises vaguely worded outcomes.  In 2019, the Auditor‑General released a scathing assessment of the department's 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 number 1, which was communities are safe and free from violence, does not consider actual levels of violence or broader community safety.  You have to wonder what it was measuring.  One reason for this is that apart from the Personal Safety Survey, we have no consistent and thus comparable data measurements. 

 

Creating a National Data Collection and Reporting Framework to address this was an early action point in the national plan, but 11 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 found it never happened.

 

He also said that, 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 to six years ‑ he's referring to the Personal Safety Survey ‑ and there are other sources that could be used, he said, but are not.  In other words, there's nothing much to measure because there's no data there.  You have to wonder why this is so. 

 

You also have to wonder why the national plan hasn't, for example, made use of the Australian Institute of Criminology's National Homicide Monitoring Program because it would actually have some good news to report if it did.  Overall, murders in Australia have declined by 39% since they started measuring in 1989.

 

And although it doesn't seem like it as we learn almost every week it seems that another woman has been murdered by her former or current partner, the actual number is the lowest on record.  In 2017/18, the latest year for which we have figures, 33 women were murdered by an intimate partner.  Now, that's 33 too many, but it is down from 59 such murders in 1989 and 73 in the very bad year of 2001.

 

The current Minister, Senator Ruston, has promised to take account of the Auditor‑General's complaints and develop some quantifiable metrics.  She said that in 2019.  Let's hope she does it.  We've got one year to go and so far we haven't seen any.

 

To conclude, I'd just like to say that the national plan has not been totally ineffective, it's achieved some important reforms ‑ for example, in 2017, the national Apprehended Violence Order Scheme.  Finally ‑ it only took 20 years.  It created national 1800RESPECT.  It created ANROWS, it created Our Watch, and 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 and we might benefit from the example of Closing the Gap, the framework that charts outcomes between Indigenous and non‑Indigenous outcomes. 

 

The targets for closing the gap are backed by hard data, as are the measurements of progress or lack thereof, and we know that the progress in closing the gap has been pretty poor in most areas, but the point is we have data, so we know.  We know that we can measure failure and we know where to be putting our efforts in order to succeed. 

 

I believe we need comparable targets based on hard data for reducing and ultimately eradicating domestic and sexual violence against women and to be able to do this, we need to adjust some of our thinking.  It's no longer enough to say 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.

 

So finally, I hope that today I've at least encouraged you to think about the need for realistic targets and ways to measure how to inform against them if we have any hope of eliminating violence against women.  Thank you.

 

THE HON. VERITY FIRTH:  Thanks for that, Anne.  That's truly thought provoking that speech, so thank you.  Just a reminder that we're recording this session, so we'll be able to share this link afterwards so that people can listen again.  I've been scribbling notes and I definitely want to plough into that speech later.

 

So now it's my pleasure to welcome today's panellists.  So we're going to have a panel session now and, as I said, there'll be opportunity to ask questions.  Dixie Link‑Gordon and Catherine Gander are joining us on the panel.  Dixie Link‑Gordon is a prominent First Nations sexual assault and family violence advocate.  She established Breaking Silent Codes, a safe environment for First Nations women to share their deeply personal stories.  Dixie has extensive knowledge and experience having worked for more than 30 years in the human service sector, specialising in sexual assault and family violence.  She brings invaluable insight into this critical issue facing First Nations women.  Dixie is also the founder of Breaking Silent Codes, Senior Community Access, Women's Legal Service NSW, and also an Adjunct Senior Lecturer at the University of New South Wales.  Welcome, Dixie. 

 

Catherine is the CEO of DV West, which provides crisis accommodation, transitional housing and outreach support to women and children in the Nepean, Blue Mountains, Blacktown/Hills and Hawkesbury districts.  She has worked in an advisory capacity to government and as an expert representative for the sector at both a state and national levels.  She welcomes the increased community engagement and awareness of violence against women as an urgent gendered issue and the focus on its prevention.  Thank you, Catherine, for being here.

 

I'm going to start with you, Dixie.  Could you please give us I suppose some more detail into your work with the Breaking Silent Codes movement?  Unmute.

 

DIXIE LINK‑GORDON: Okay, the original conversation that came about with Breaking Silent Codes I was to make with my friend, colleague over in New Zealand at one of the CSUN gatherings and we talked about ‑ my friend is a Maori woman and myself as a First Nations Australian ‑ what were the codes that were keeping us quiet about violence and sexual abuse happening in our communities, what's preventing women from talking more, what can we do to bring a movement of us Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and Pacifica women together.  And the first thing that ‑ topics that we wanted to talk about was around religion, family, community and authority, you know, the bad relations with police, community not feeling confident to report, family and the impact of religion on us as women having a voice.

 

So movement from there ‑ that was like 2017, 16, we'd had conversations.  So I approached Professor Megan Davis, said we want to do something, want to create something, and I was put in the direction of the Gender Violence Research Network at UNSW and the wonderful Professor Jan Breckenridge and Mailin Suchting and both of these deadly women, they helped resource and support us to have our first gathering. 

 

So 42 women, First Nations women across Australia, Torres Strait and Pacifica, we all came together and that's where we started about what was for us to talk about and those codes ‑ really codes that kept us silent, the codes that you don't report to the police, the code that you don't even talk about it in your family and that went on for us.  It just grew legs really. 

 

I must say we never ever had a cent for this, so it was people's commitment to letting us ‑ not letting us, people to support us as First Nations women having our own voice and determining how we were going to address these issues. 

 

So we had our first conference in 2018, opened up at UNSW by ‑ that was in July.  Of course, because of NAIDOC Week, that was the year and we opened there.  Then in September (inaudible) in 2019 New Zealand ran one in Wellington and we did a trip over to the CSW in 2020.  Of course it was cancelled, but we were able to network up with First Nations women there and we had a beautiful book that was photography and stories that was taken by photographer Belinda Mason that just showed the stories of what it looked like for us to gather together and talk and that's where we were hooked up with Anne over in New York, which we had a very good meeting and gathering together.

 

So now ‑ where are we now?  Well, women ‑ we're going to go to the Torres Strait hopefully this year in September.  So it's really about us coming together and not being afraid to talk together as a group and gather and I feel very confident that younger women are taking up this and that we are a voice for ourselves and we can be that to each other as sisters and of course all the sisters ‑ all sisters of all Australian women who I've worked with over the years and their support has been very welcome, yeah.

 

THE HON. VERITY FIRTH:  Wonderful, Dixie.  We'll talk a bit more about Breaking Silent Codes movement in a minute.  Catherine, can you tell us about the demand for your services at DV West?

 

CATHERINE GANDER:  Yes.  First of all, I'd like to acknowledge the different Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander lands and waters that we come together on today and pay my respects to Elders past, present and recognise this land was never ceded.  I'd also like to acknowledge the women who are here today or joining us who have experienced violence and the courage they show in speaking out. 

 

I currently work for DV West that provides specialist domestic violence services in the Nepean, Blue Mountains, Blacktown/Hills and the Hawkesbury districts.  It's a large area with high rates of violence against women.  In the last financial year we supported close to 1,300 women and children from diverse backgrounds and circumstances. 

 

DV West staff ‑ we've got a great team there.  I don't think I've ever worked with such a dedicated team.  However, the uneasy fact is that in the same year that we supported those 1,300 women and children we were forced to turn away 1,376 because we had no capacity.  All crisis accommodation was full.  87% of those women and children that were turned away did not want to take up outreach support or temporary accommodation as they didn't see it as a suitable or safe option for them. 

 

So the rate of unmet demand ‑ it often means these women are returning ‑ they can't leave, they continue to live in violence.  It's shared with like services across Australia.  We're not unique.  I think that level of demand would be consistent.  And I think that their voices are rarely heard because it's not safe for them to speak publicly and also no data is kept on what happens to them when they are unable to receive help at the time that they request it. 

 

We are talking about large numbers of women across Australia every day who do not get the help they need.  So the demand is completely outstripping what's available and we can see across the system as well that it's not just that we haven't got a vacancy.  We can cross our state, for example, and see there are no vacancies anywhere else.

 

So while changing attitudes and behaviour takes time, possibly generations to fully be effective, in the meantime we need to maintain investment and resources in crisis services while we invest in the prevention area.  Specialist services like domestic violence refuges save lives and the safety and homicide prevention is at the forefront of our thinking and our work and to turn women away is not acceptable.

 

THE HON. VERITY FIRTH:  No, it's terrible.  Anne, I'm thinking of the keynote you just gave us, where you pointed out that the total Federal Government investment is $340 million over three years at the same time that the Government spent $500 million for the War Memorial.  That's the stark difference in terms of what Cat is talking about and the amount of investment. 

 

You also talked in your speech ‑ so investment, yes, but also the need for clear and achievable goals and targets, which again is pointing to Cat's thing about the data and being able to track this.  How do we go about ‑ I think everything you said is absolutely correct.  How do we go about actually achieving this and influencing this political agenda at this time?

 

DR ANNE SUMMERS AO:  Well, it's obviously a huge task and what I find so frustrating, it makes me very angry to think we've wasted 11 years when it should have been being done and we should be much, much further along this road now than we are, but we've got to basically start from scratch I think and that is ‑ we being probably the women's movement, unless we can get some agencies interested in this because the Government doesn't seem to be interested unless they undergo a big change of heart as a result of some of the issues that are currently occupying the spotlight. 

 

It would be nice to think there might be some longer‑term and differential impacts.  But we have to decide okay, what do we mean by ending violence, let's make some clear targets.  Instead of saying we want to be safe, of course we do, let's break that down into achievable bits.  Maybe we do it by region, maybe we do it by different groups of vulnerable people, maybe we decide what the targets are, what the groups are, whether they're population groups, geographical groups, economic groups, single parents, whatever, and then we set realistic targets.

 

The thing about this way of thinking is that it makes you plan properly, it makes you ‑ if you have a target ‑ it's like KPI at work.  If you have to achieve something to get paid, you damn well do it, you find ways to do it.  That's what we need to be doing.

 

I think the whole area of data collection around domestic and family violence, as Cat was saying, and the fact we know so little about refuge populations or worse those that try to come to shelters and can't get in, what happens to them and we don't know, we don't know whether they have to go back home, what happens to them.  The fact that we have such poor knowledge means that we can't do the sort of prevention work that we need to do and I think to say okay, we're teaching kids to be respectful of each other at school, well, great, but we have a crisis on our hands.  We need to be acting in more ways than that I think as well.

 

THE HON. VERITY FIRTH:  Yes.  And Dixie, in light of all of that and in the work you've been doing with Breaking Silent Codes, are there particular issues in the First Nations communities that need to be taken into account, particularly as we set these targets and go for further investment?

 

DIXIE LINK‑GORDON: I can honestly say it's around education, education that we have with each other as First Nations people and also around authority.  If you don't trust the police, you're not going to go and report to the police.  It's as simple as that.  People are going to stay locked in within their communities, locked in within their homes, locked in with self and have these horrifying experiences of abuse happen to them. 

 

So there has to be a lot of trust going on and a lot of genuine progress with policing of domestic violence, with First Nations women being supported when they do go and report.  That only comes with education, appropriate education where people are culturally aware what's happening and for us as First Nations women, we do have the right to have safe homes, we do have the right to have safe lives within our communities, our schools, our (inaudible) and (inaudible) around community education, yes all over.

 

THE HON. VERITY FIRTH:  Sorry, I hope that other people heard Dixie, but the internet went a little bit funny there for a moment.  But yes, that's right.  Can you just repeat your last sentence?

 

DIXIE LINK‑GORDON: Just saying about community education is very important for us, for everybody.  We all should have easy access to education around safety and our human right to be safe in this country and across the Pacific, yes.

 

THE HON. VERITY FIRTH:  Yes.  And Catherine, what do you think we need to change to better support victims and survivors of violence?

 

CATHERINE GANDER:  Look, sometimes I think we've got to start all over again, but you've got to start somewhere and I guess we just need to stop covering up.  I think there's so much cover‑up about what's actually out there when it isn't and accept that we have a culture of not believing women when they disclose violence.  It's really downplayed and not given the importance that it needs to be given. 

 

If we take sexual assault, for example, we know that the false reporting of rape is very low.  Yet in New South Wales, between 2008 and 2018 there was 52,000 reports of sexual assault to police in New South Wales.  After police investigations, there's 13 of them that result in charges being laid and just over half make it to court, but in the end of that you end up with shy of 4,000 that actually end up with a guilty charge.  So it means that if you report rape in New South Wales, you have a 7% chance of a perpetrator being found guilty.  I think it's an example ‑ that's an example, but I think it's across the board.  It's so difficult for women to get the help they need and to be believed.

 

So we need investigations by police and courts to be thorough and focused on the spectrum (inaudible) of behaviours and hold perpetrators to account, not a system that re‑victimises the survivor.  I think we need properly funded services across government and non‑government.  We need services that are victim/survivor led in their design and response. 

 

There's many changes that happen.  But at the moment we've got quite a mainstream system where services have been added in here and there and I don't think that works.  We probably need to even think about extending our work in prevention to actually also include the cultures and attitudes within government departments because at the moment women that go to seek help absolutely do not get at all treated like somebody who's trying to escape a violent situation.  So that would be like Centrelink, housing, the whole lot, so whether we need a separate department that is specialised, the courts and programs sitting under that, you know, these are things (inaudible).

 

THE HON. VERITY FIRTH:  I think Anne's reading out the five men who have been responsible for the national plan was just so depressing in terms of that lack of political will and the lack of cultural change at the very top, let alone within bureaucracy and in communities. 

 

I'm now going to move to some of the questions that have come from our audience, so I'm going to come back ‑ I have a few more questions I want to ask you, but in the interests of democratic participation, I'm going to move to some of the audience questions. 

 

I will answer ‑ someone wrote up in the audience about what UTS's representation was like in terms of women and men at senior leadership positions.  I will answer that on behalf of UTS.  We're not too bad, we're not too bad.  We've got three women out of the seven senior executive positions at UTS, four out of eight Deans are women at UTS and in terms of directors and executive directors, there are 17 women and 19 men.  So always room for improvement, but we're actually at least tracking all right on those stats at UTS.

 

Now, the highest voted question by far, which I think in lots of ways does go to this cultural change question in particular, is from Kim Graham.  She asks, "It seems that no matter the level of activism from women, men largely hold positions of power.  Without engaging and activating men in women's issues, it doesn't seem that change will occur.  What else can we be doing to bring men on board with creating cultural and structural change?" From Kim.  So who would like to have a first stab at that?  Anne, I'll throw it to you.

 

DR ANNE SUMMERS AO:  Okay.  Well, this is a question I guess we've been trying to get our heads around for 40‑odd years now and at times we thought we were doing quite well, but at the moment it doesn't look as if we've got very far. 

 

In terms of the responsiveness of the political system, particularly in Canberra, not only the treatment of women, staffers and politicians in Parliament House, which is the current focus and which is truly shocking, but of course is no different to what happens elsewhere in society and in other workplaces and other institutions and other parts of our society.  So the disrespect, the assault, the abuse and the actual violence are endemic and I just find it extraordinary that we haven't been able to make society as a whole, and that means men as well, particularly those in leadership roles, feel any sense of obligation towards first of all even recognising and acknowledging it, and we're seeing a massive denial happening at the moment in respect of one of the previous ministers for the national plan and until we get ‑ I don't see any way to make that happen apart from voting them out of office.  That seems to be the only thing that works. 

 

I kind of hope that this current surge of activism might produce some results.  Even if it doesn't change the government, it might change a few of the members and get a few more of those great independent women into Parliament who sit there on a cross bench and are able to be very influential and that seems to be one of the directions in which politics is going because the parties are somewhat (inaudible) when it comes to reform.

 

THE HON. VERITY FIRTH:  Dixie, what are your insights around this issue?  How do you bring men on board with creating cultural and structural change?

 

DIXIE LINK‑GORDON: Well, I just want to first acknowledge what Anne has said, and so Anne talking broadly about Australian women, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women, Pacifica women, we are treated less again.  So for us to ‑ I think there's a whole bunch of us ‑ not bunch of us, there's a whole movement for us to do healing together and gathering together as First Nations women to talk about how we are treated. 

 

This is why the value of community education and talking about our whole status in the Australian landscape, you know.  We don't often get to ‑ very rarely get together and talk about sexual abuse, domestic violence, how it's impacting us, yet we're high on all the stats all across the country. 

 

So I think that our men ‑ yes, they will have their groups and their talking, but I think there needs to be more room for us women to be talking amongst ourselves in regards to First Nations women.

 

THE HON. VERITY FIRTH:  Mmm.  Catherine, do you have anything you want to add to that?

 

CATHERINE GANDER:  I don't understand ‑ nobody is keeping men out of this.  Men can support this movement.  I don't think it's about us taking men along.  I don't really understand that.  I think that men can contribute, they can contribute in many ways.  So I don't see what's stopping men, you know, supporting this movement to end violence against women.

 

THE HON. VERITY FIRTH:  Yes.  So the next question is from Kay Powell.  She writes, "Last week, Grace Tame gave a speech to journalists with the lack of regard that journalists can have to the traumatising experience of being essentially demanded to tell their story again and again on journalists' terms.  As you have worked in journalism and helping survivors, Anne" ‑ it seems to be more for you, Anne ‑ "what can journalists do to make this process less traumatising for survivors who wish to tell their story?"

 

DR ANNE SUMMERS AO:  I'll do my best.  It's hard for me to answer it when I'm not in Australia at the moment and not close ‑ I have been trying to follow what's been happening and the awarding of Grace Tame as Australian of the Year was fantastic, as was the fact that the four Australians of the Year this year were all women and included a very diverse group of women.  That was great. 

 

One of the things I think that's been very interesting, though, that I have observed just in the past couple of weeks is the way in which women in the press gallery have really changed and in fact Katharine Murphy in The Guardian wrote a very good column about this a few days ago where she compared the way in which women journalists are taking the lead on reporting these stories of sexual assault and abuse and rape by politicians allegedly and of political staffers in a way they never would have done in the past and she's compared that ‑ the fact that the women like herself, like Laura Tingle, like Samantha Maiden and various others ‑ the way in which they are not only taking the lead in reporting but taking a very sympathetic stance towards the victim survivors and she's compared that to the way in which the press gallery, including the women in the press gallery, acted when Julia Gillard gave her sexism and misogyny speech, where they all reacted with sort of standard political scepticism and said "she's using the gender card" and "this is outrageous" and "she's disgraceful" and all the rest of it.  And the press gallery was really taken aback and shown up. 

 

And what Catherine (inaudible) 10 years later now very ashamed of the way they responded and not understanding what a huge cultural moment that was when Gillard gave that speech and there seemed to be a similar movement happening now. 

 

So the fact that journalists are now more willing to listen to women, report women, be sympathetic to women and not be scared they'll be accused of playing a gender card or using sex or being soft on the story or that kind of thing, which is what used to happen when I was in the press gallery and wanted to write about women's issues, you thought you were being soft and the real stories lay elsewhere.  So that's a very important change. 

 

And I think there's also ‑ there needs to be some understanding about the way in which you interview survivors, the way in which the questions you ask, the sensitivities that are required, the fact that traumatised people shouldn't be subjected to countless interviews about the same thing by countless people ‑ all of that kind of thing and I think the fact that we're having this conversation now, people like Grace Tame, is a very, very good step forward.

 

THE HON. VERITY FIRTH:  Does anyone want to add on the journalist issue or would you like me to move to the next question?  Dixie, Cat?  No, all right, the next question.  So this is from Nilmini Fernando:  "The mainstream women's movement in Australia currently is white, liberal and fails to adequately understand or represent the intellectual and political strategies of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and the labour struggles, sexual assaults and workplace segregation of non‑Indigenous women of colour.  What needs to happen to change this?"  So Dixie, do you want to answer that first?

 

DIXIE LINK‑GORDON: Can you hear me?

 

THE HON. VERITY FIRTH:  Yes.

 

DIXIE LINK‑GORDON: Well, like I said, for us to feel I think it's empowered and equipped together, we have to be able to maintain our own dialogue as First Nations women to be able to present in a way that this is who we are, we feel culturally sound speaking and just being respected and brave in what our words mean as First Nations women of this country. 

 

So look, for me working in the sector for so long it is a journey.  You're going to have some wonderful supportive sisters along the way ‑ you know, First Nations, non‑Aboriginal, non-First Nations women walking with you, and I don't know if that's really going to answer it properly, but there's a movement of change, but it is a slow one.  I can say that.

 

THE HON. VERITY FIRTH:  Yes.  Cat, do you have anything you want to add to that?

 

CATHERINE GANDER:  Look, I think that's been a struggle and I think that it's something that is slowly changing and that it is a bit more inclusive than it's been in the past.  But even looking at how organisations can make it more culturally safe for Aboriginal women to be there and participate I think is really important and I think that there's so much value and so much to be contributed that it's a real loss if we don't have our First Nations sisters in the movement as well.

 

THE HON. VERITY FIRTH:  Anne?

 

DR ANNE SUMMERS AO:  Well, obviously this is a very hotly discussed topic at the moment and it has been for some years and the onus is on all of us, I guess particularly those who try to show leadership in these various areas of struggle, to make sure that they're not just talking to themselves or to people like them and to be open to the inclusion of all women involved and active measures need to be taken to ensure that that's possible.

 

THE HON. VERITY FIRTH:  Now, I'm mindful of time, so I'm just going to move to one of the questions I had and if we've got time, I'll ask one or two more from the audience pool, because there's a lot of questions there.  We've had wonderful engagement from our audience. 

 

I was just interested in how COVID‑19 has affected your work.  I suppose this is specifically for you ‑ particularly for you, Cat, but Dixie, I imagine you have some wisdom on this as well.  So Cat, how has COVID‑19 affected your work and do you think any of the changes will be permanent or what has COVID brought out?

 

CATHERINE GANDER:  Look, (inaudible) end of last year (inaudible) want to read it, but just give you some of the outcomes.  For example, one of the things (inaudible) there was no increase in domestic violence in terms of reports to them.  We had a really big increase in women self‑referring, so there was a 50% increase in women coming directly to us.  So they're not going through any other referral pathway, they were going online, they were doing their own research and working out the best place they could get support.  And interestingly, we thought that might have been something that was just happening through COVID, but in fact that figure even with the reduction in community transmission has not reduced.  In fact, it's increased slightly.  And that was high also for Aboriginal women because we have an Aboriginal‑specific service and there was a 45% increase in self‑referral from Aboriginal women as well.  So that might be a change in women's help‑seeking behaviours that we can keep an eye on. 

 

We also had a 91% increase in the number of women that we provided outreach support to, so it was pretty ‑ the demand was very high and for obvious reasons that we've all been ‑ we've all heard about, the circumstances women have found themselves in at home.  So I think there is a lot to learn.

 

We found that we could support women quite well remotely.  That was a big surprise to us.  We thought that that was going to be really difficult to do, but in fact we found that women engaged in more regular for shorter periods of time and that in some ways I think for some women that suited them better rather than having to tell the whole story over an hour and come to some office and arrange child care and that's definitely something we would keep as an option for women. 

 

So I think we learnt a lot and some of those things will stay.  I wish some of the things would stay around government departments because they were definitely much more easy to access and things happened much quicker, things like victims of crime, you know, applications were going through in 48 hours when they can take weeks.  There were just many ways that that improved and I really wish that there would be some work done at those department levels to see because we're trying to feed that back and we cover that in the review as well that it's obviously a giant benefit the speed at which things could happen.

 

THE HON. VERITY FIRTH:  That's very interesting insight.  We should definitely make sure that they look at that.  Dixie and Anne, any COVID insights?  Dixie, was there anything that happened ‑‑

 

DIXIE LINK‑GORDON: I think for us ‑ can you hear?  So, yeah, for us here in my everyday workplace at Women's Legal, Legal Service, I think the online, just people getting used to operating online and phoning in when they did need service was a bit of a challenge.  So we had a whole year of not travelling out of office and catching up with people which was pretty difficult.  But when we did eventually go this year in February, look, we did a whole bunch of organisations up the coast because we are a state service and the communication lines were ‑ we had groups of women sitting down willing to talk about what was happening in their regions. 

 

So that was ‑ for me that was pretty encouraging that there are so many people out there still doing that work and supporting women and families in coming through and those who had the experience of violence and abuse but still able to hold their families together, you know.  Australian people are pretty resilient and the women in the communities that we operate with.  But yeah, it's been a challenge like for everybody, yeah.

 

THE HON. VERITY FIRTH:  Thanks, Dixie.  Now, we're just on 1 o'clock Australian time so I might let you have the last word, Anne, because we are very excited, the Paul Ramsay Foundation Fellowship that Anne has been awarded around domestic violence and she'll be here at UTS with us.  So we're very excited to have you now an official UTS person.  Is there anything you'd like to round off with I suppose at the end of this Women's Day event or any final remarks you'd like to make?

 

DR ANNE SUMMERS AO:  Thanks very much for the opportunity, Verity.  Already I'm working with Dixie on a project, she and I are cooking up something, which we hope will lead to something important and I've also been talking with Cat and other service providers.  So I'm looking forward very much to continuing to have this close relations with the people who are doing the work on the frontline. 

 

I have no direct experience of the impact of COVID but I've learnt so much from talking to service providers about what has happened ‑ not only what Cat has just mentioned to us but also the patterns of abuse that have occurred when people were confined to the house, new ways of abuse, if you like, being deployed by perpetrators and I think we need to study that and learn from that.  I think we also might be perhaps at the brink of some changes to the way in which we design and construct shelters in the future because (inaudible) there are many advantages to perhaps not using the communal model of accommodation which had to be basically closed down for social distancing reasons during COVID.  So there are going to be a lot of important lessons that we can learn.  All I can say is I'm very grateful to be back doing this work and let's hope we can make a small contribution towards things getting a bit better.

 

THE HON. VERITY FIRTH:  Thank you, Anne, thank you, Dixie, thank you, Cat - really appreciate you taking the time today - and thank you to all of the audience for joining us for International Women's Day.  Go out, have fun, stay strong and, yeah, I suppose hopefully find a bit of power from listening to these women today talk about what's possible when we get together and actually make change occur.  So have a great International Women's Day and we'll see you all soon.  Thank you.