In 2022, a new National Plan to Reduce Violence Against Women and their Children will set the agenda for the next decade on key priorities and investment areas.
The next National Plan must do better than its predecessor, which failed to reduce the rates of violence perpetrated against women.
First Nations communities have been loud and clear in calling for a specific plan designed and delivered by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.
So will the new plan reflect the insights offered by victim-survivors, frontline workers, and researchers, and hold policy makers to account with measurable outcomes?
Senator Jenny McAllister, June Oscar AO, Anne Summers AO and Verity Firth discussed the National Plan’s impact in the last 11 years, and what results the next plan must deliver.
VERITY FIRTH: Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. I'll just let ‑ I'll wait about 30 seconds as more people enter the virtual room and then we'll begin.
Well, we've reached 150 people in our virtual room, so I think that's a good time to start. Hello, everybody. Thank you 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. I live in Glebe, so I'm on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation and that's also the land upon which UTS stands, so a particular respect to the Gadigal people as the traditional custodians of knowledge for the land upon which our university is built.
My name is Verity Firth. I'm the Executive Director of Social Justice at the Centre for Social Justice & Inclusion at UTS. It's my real pleasure to be joined today by an incredibly distinguished panel of speakers. We have Senator Jenny McAllister, June Oscar and Dr Anne Summers and I'll give them all a proper introduction in a minute, but I just want to take us through a couple of housekeeping matters.
The first is that the event today is live captioned, so to view the captions you click on the "CC", or Closed Caption, button at the bottom of your screen in the Zoom control panel and we're also posting a link in the chat now, which will open the captions in a separate internet window if that's what you would prefer.
You will have the opportunity to ask questions today, which is good, but we get you to do this through the Q&A box, which is also in your panel there, in the Zoom control panel. You can click on that. You can ask any question you like, although we do ask that you keep them short and relevant to today's topic, but it also gives you an opportunity to upvote other people's questions. So when I go to actually put the questions to the panel, I often take the questions that have the most support, often because they are relevant and so forth, so put your questions in there if you'd like to ask a question.
I also want to acknowledge that today's discussion does include topics that are upsetting and can cause distress or be triggering. So if at any time you feel you are becoming overwhelmed or distressed, just take a break from the webinar. You can turn it off. You can always rejoin later if you feel like it, but you don't need to sit there feeling distressed or triggered. If you do feel overwhelmed in any way, please speak to somebody you trust and you can also contact 1800 RESPECT, and we're going to post those contact details in the chat box now.
So this year I've had the privilege to speak with women working across a range of sectors raising awareness and addressing the emergency that is violence against women and children in Australia. It's an issue that has caught the national spotlight time and time again, amplifying the calls to reform responses, processes and the culture of Australian society. Violence against women and children is an issue that plagues every community and every institution from our schools to our parliament.
In 2022, the Government is set to release a new National Plan to Reduce Violence against Women and their Children. It will set the agenda for the next decade on key priorities and investment areas. But will this plan rectify flawed approaches, like not having a standalone plan by and for First Nations women? Will this plan make a difference to the devastating rate at which women are being killed?
Today's speakers have been working tirelessly to change the outcomes for women and children. We're honoured to be joined by each of them and I look forward to hearing their ideas on what the next plan needs to deliver.
We're first going to hear from Senator Jenny McAllister. Senator McAllister has served as a Senator for New South Wales since 2015, representing the Australian Labor Party. She is currently the Shadow Cabinet Secretary, Shadow Assistant Minister to the Leader of the Opposition in the Senate and Shadow Assistant Minister for Communities and the Prevention of Family Violence. Senator McAllister is committed to addressing the challenges that lead to many Australians facing poverty and disadvantage as well as being a strong advocate for women and children fleeing family violence. Welcome, Senator, and I'd like you to give us some opening remarks, please.
SENATOR JENNY McALLISTER: Thank you very much, Verity. I'm really grateful to you and to UTS for putting on today's event. I'm joining from Gadigal country and I pay my respects to Elders past, present and emerging also. I'd also like to acknowledge June and Anne. I had the very good fortune of attending a big meeting in Broome with Kimberley women, where June was talking to that group about her ground‑breaking report, Wiyi Yani U Thangani, and you could almost feel the respect and admiration for June in that room when she spoke and I think also the pride in that work that June has done and the pride in that community in seeing their voices reflected there.
Anne of course has always broken new ground and her book Damned Whores and God's Police really shook up the way we thought about women in Australia. She hasn't really stopped doing that since. It's a great honour to share the stage with these two women, even remotely. They are giants in Australian public life.
I thought I'd start with a quote by a survivor advocate named Geraldine Bilston, and she might be familiar to some of you listening on because she's very prominent and she said this: "In 2010, Australia's previous national plan to reduce violence against women and children was established. This was at almost the exact same time that I met my perpetrator. On a national level, what followed was a decade lacking in political will to achieve the plan's goals. For me, I would spend a lot of that time living with and loving a man who I should have been able to trust, but instead I was left physically injured and psychologically destroyed. My experience of domestic abuse sits alongside our nation's story of failure in achieving a future free from violence. And so I can't help but think how differently my own life may have transpired had Australia truly committed to ending violence against women."
Now, that is a really powerful quote from Geraldine and I find it very sad because we all know the statistics, but Geraldine's story asks us to reflect on what might have been different and also why listening to survivor advocates matters. So today I wanted to reflect a bit on what actually did happen over that decade and how we might do better in the next one.
In 2007, Labor came into government and we were determined to tackle the epidemic of violence against women and children. Kevin Rudd and Tanya Plibersek set up the National Council to Reduce Violence against Women and Children and asked them for recommendations and the council recommended the creation of a national plan which could coordinate a concerted effort to end violence right across the federation. In the first few years of the plan, Julia Gillard, Jenny Macklin, Julie Collins, Kate Ellis, Tanya Plibersek and other Labor women made the most of this opportunity and one of the clearest markers of this is the institutional framework that they established. We saw the creation of a national hotline 1800 RESPECT, a violence prevention body Our Watch, and the Australian National Research Organisation for Women's Safety, ANROWS. These years represented some of the most productive and progressive periods for women's safety policy.
Now, it is deeply unfortunate ‑ and this is the kindest way I can say it ‑ that this enthusiasm, this energy and this progress did not survive the 2013 change of government. The first Minister for Women under the Coalition Government you may remember was Tony Abbott and that set the tone for the eight years that followed. For most of that time, the attitude of this government to women's safety policy has oscillated between benign indifference and muted hostility.
Now, the national plan has saved us from the worst consequences of this. The rhythm of the national action plans has meant that every three years successive coalition governments have had to do something, anything, to move women's safety policy forward. But that is not a recipe for the ambition and coordinated action that is required and it shows.
In one particularly lacklustre year, continuing funding for 1800 RESPECT was listed as an initiative and you can imagine the conversation in the Minister's office ‑ "What should we announce?", "What are we going to do?" "I know we will announce that we do not intend to cut a vital service." A national plan without national leadership will struggle to achieve national progress.
Now, state and territory jurisdictions, such as Victoria, have attached the problem energy with attention and a substantial commitment of resources but a woman's safety should not depend on where she lives. Now, the current national plan expires this year and a consultation process is under way to develop a new one.
Now, I've given a bleak assessment, but I do want to offer this note of hope. We have never been in a better position to demand a more ambitious response. We know much more now about the actions and mentality of perpetrators, about how abuse manifests, about the psychosocial consequences on victims and children, and about the short‑ and long‑term physical harm.
A network of survivors and advocates has also worked incredibly hard to educate Australians and policy makers like me owe it to Rosie Batty, Grace Tame, Jess Hill, women like Geraldine, who I quoted earlier, and we owe it to them to leverage the public awareness they have created. And Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have made it abundantly clear that services will be most successful when they are designed and delivered by First Nations people.
Now, I don't know what will be in the next national plan, but I wanted to talk about three key changes to deliver the ambition, creativity and urgency that violence in our community demands. First, it is time to unequivocally recognise the context in which violence occurs. I'm increasingly convinced that the reason the coalition's response to women's safety is so piecemeal is because they're unwilling to recognise this context.
In Scott Morrison's interview with Tracy Grimshaw earlier this year he used the word respect 14 times. He did not use the word equality once. And this is a problem. Violence against women and their children is a function of inequality and without addressing this deficit in all of its manifestations, we will never make lasting progress and we will continue to see, as we saw in the last budget, a grab bag of policies rather than a coordinated response.
Secondly, we need to address the whole cycle of violence. Our public conversation about violence I think understandably tends to focus on crisis and crisis response and this is incredibly important of course, but it is time to do more. We need to build on what we've learnt about the nature of violence and extend the focus to prevention, to early intervention and to recovery. And this has to be matched by investment. These responses need to work for all people, especially those who've been left out in the past. Women from migrant backgrounds, women with disability, First Nations women, LGBTI people. First Nations women have made it clear that they seek a standalone plan for their communities and this is a call that Labor supports.
Thirdly, we need to take advantage of the opportunity to drive change across jurisdictions and across portfolios. We need the Federal Government to look at the areas it has responsibility for and really do this with a real creativity and ambition to drive change.
Now, the Prime Minister is quite fond of pointing out that everything is the states' responsibility and it is true that the responsibility for tackling domestic and family violence does not only lie with the Commonwealth. The role of states and territories is vital. But the fact that the Commonwealth does not control all the leaders does not mean it does not have a significant role to play. The Commonwealth needs to make a meaningful contribution in the areas that it controls and that is quite a lot ‑ it's social security, it's migration, it's the National Disability Insurance Agency, it's family law, it's the workplace relations system. And victim survivors rely on government services to support them, to keep them safe and to help them rebuild their lives.
These services cannot be allowed to enable abuse and I've seen little evidence that reforming these services is a priority for the current Government. In the end, the Commonwealth is by far the biggest player. It controls the purse strings and it is the only level of government that is able to bring others together and to lead.
Domestic violence destroys families, communities and the ability of victim survivors to live full and happy lives and contribute to their communities. And we also know how the presence of violence affects children and the trauma can stay with children for a lifetime. Across the country, more and more women are giving voice to the hurt and the trauma of their past. They demand action and they demand we do better. They're asking this simple question. If our leaders can come together to respond to a pandemic, why should they not be able to apply the same level of dedication and focus to an epidemic of domestic and family violence? Thanks, Verity.
VERITY FIRTH: Thanks very much for that, Jenny. We're now going to move to our panellists and it's my absolute honour today to introduce June Oscar and Dr Anne Summers to the discussion. June Oscar AO is the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner. She's a proud Bunuba woman from Fitzroy Crossing in Western Australia's Kimberley region. She is a strong advocate for Indigenous Australian languages, social justice, women's issues and has worked tirelessly to reduce foetal alcohol spectrum disorder.
June has held a raft of influential positions, including with the Kimberley land Council, the Kimberley Language Resource Centre and the Kimberley Interpreting Service and with WA's Lililwan project. June began her five‑year term as Australia's Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner in 2017. Welcome, June.
Dr Anne Summers AO is employed under a Paul Ramsay Foundation Fellowship at UTS in order to research innovative solutions to domestic and family violence in Australia. Anne is journalist and author of nine books, including the classic Damned Whores and God's Police. She has had a long history of involvement in the women's movement in Australia, including helping to found Elsie, Australia's first modern women's refuge. She ran the Office of the Status of Women in Canberra from 1983 to 1986 and was advisor on women's issues to Prime Minister Paul Keating in the early 90s. Welcome, Anne.
So my first question ‑ I'm going to come to you first, June, and then I'd like a response from you as well, Anne. The current national plan that Jenny actually talked about was launched in 2011. What, if any, impact do you think it has had on reducing violence against women and children? June?
JUNE OSCAR AO: Thank you, and before I begin, I'd like to acknowledge the lands of the peoples that we all gather on today, all of us, and I acknowledge my Bunuba people as I come to this meeting from the Children and Parents Centre here in Fitzroy Crossing, the lands of the Waladjari people. Thank you very much.
I'd like to acknowledge all of those women that have gone because of the violence and the pain and the trauma that they have suffered. We will remember them always in all of our families.
Things have barely changed, in my view, and in many ways they have become worse. The statistics of harm faced by our women and children are devastating and they are not moving. I can rattle off, you know, numbers, statistics. For example, our women are 32 times as likely to be hospitalised due to family violence as non‑Indigenous women. We are killed by family violence at two times the rate. Our children are taken away at 11 times the rate of non‑Indigenous children in our country, a large number because of the violence and the abuse, and we know our women are afraid of reporting violence because of this staggering rate of removals.
The numbers goes on and on and paints a picture of an appalling situation that has not changed since the first national plan was launched. I think what the plan has done, though, it has raised awareness amongst Australians at the level for violence that exists in this country, but I don't think that it has improved Australians' understanding of the violence experienced particularly by First Nations women and children and our families. I don't think as a public we understand the unique circumstances and living historical legacy in which violence has been, and continues to be, perpetrated against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and children and so much of the violence we experience is driven by external structural forces.
To address it, we have to look at the intersections of poverty, inequalities, racism, and sexism and how they disproportionately impact our women and too often dehumanises us. In the Women's Voices national engagement, which I led, and I spoke to thousands of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and girls right across our country, women were absolutely clear we have to look at the underlying root causes of inequality and all the intersecting factors if we are to address violence. We simply cannot address violence unless we understand the context in which it occurs and the plan in its previous state has not done that sufficiently for our women and children and that is why we absolutely need a distinct plan.
VERITY FIRTH: Thanks, June. Anne, what do you think? What impact do you think the current national plan has had?
DR ANNE SUMMERS AO: First of all, Verity, before I respond to that question, I would like to acknowledge that I am speaking to you this evening ‑ it's my evening here ‑ from New York, from the land of the Cayuga Indians, unfortunately none of whom have survived the onslaught of the arrival of many generations of other people since they first inhabited this island.
It's not very common in this country to acknowledge the original inhabitants of the land and in fact many African American visitors who used to come to Australia when I was there were quite intrigued by the practice that we have and I think they've found it to be quite a wonderful idea, but it's not something that's really taken off here, but I just wanted to mention that.
Look, my views about the national plan ‑ I've spoken about them before, including at a previous webinar hosted by your centre, Verity, back on International Women's Day this year. I mean, I just think it is a tragedy beyond ‑ almost beyond measurement or comprehension that we've had a plan that was meant to reduce violence against women and their children in place for 11 years. There is no evidence at all that there has been any reduction.
We know if we just look at it purely from a crime point of view, because domestic violence is of course a criminal offence, most crimes in Australia ranging from stealing motor vehicles to robbery, burglary, even murder, have all declined in the period of the plan. The crimes against women in the form of domestic violence have not declined and in fact have probably increased.
One of the issues here ‑ I think there's two issues. One is that the official statistics as measured by the Personal Safety Survey which the Australian Bureau of Statistics conducts every four years, it's our major measurement of violence in this country ‑ according to the most recent one, which was done in 2016, another one has just been done and the results will be coming out next year, but according to the 2016 survey, 17% of all Australian women had experienced violence at the hands of a partner. That sounds like a high number until you take into account that that number refers to every Australian woman over the age of 18, including the very large number who've never had a partner, so immediately the figure is too low.
If you start to dig into those figures, as I have for the current project I'm working on, and I will be releasing a report early next year in which I will be showing that the actual prevalence of violence amongst women who've actually been in a situation to experience ‑ ie, living with a partner ‑ is many, many, many times higher than the national figures suggest. So we all sort of know that instinctively, we know that anecdotally, but I'm telling you we can measure it and we can measure the failure of the plan by the fact that the prevalence of violence against women, speaking women generally here ‑ I'm not talking about breaking down particular groups right now, but I will be doing that ‑ we know that the plan has absolutely failed to reduce violence, it has in fact, while the plan has been in existence, that violence has increased not only I think in extent but also in form.
We know there are new forms of violence that are now being practised by many perpetrators, some of which do not involve physical violence. We know the biggest increase is in what we call psychological warfare, you know, the emotional abuse, we call it coercive control. There are other names for it, but it's behaviour which is designed to control women and deny them their autonomy and many women will tell you that it is as bad in many ways as physical violence. It's harder to prove, you can't get the police to believe you, so it's very hard to even have the fact that you're suffering this violence accepted and understood by people and it leaves very long‑lasting scars on women and kids who have been controlled in that manner, and that's something that I think we do understand more about now than we perhaps did earlier on.
I agree with June that having a national plan there has made us face the consequences of violence a bit more perhaps than if it wasn't there, but I think that it wouldn't have happened without the efforts of brave individuals like Rosie Batty, who used her position as Australian of the Year to go around the country and say, "Look, family violence is not something that happens to poor people in poor suburbs, it happens everywhere to everybody, it happened to me, you know, a nice middle‑class woman like me, it happened to me. I experienced violence myself and my son was murdered by his father." She did more than any government I can think of to make domestic and family violence an issue in this country.
The second point I'd make is that I was terribly, terribly disappointed in the Women's Safety Summit that was held in Canberra a few weeks back and I was disappointed by the fact that there was absolutely no recognition or acknowledgment of the fact that the current plan has failed. I know governments don't like to admit failure, so maybe they wouldn't have used that language, but I think it did behove the Government to say, "Okay, we haven't reduced violence. Why not? What went wrong?" And yet there was no examination at that safety summit of what went wrong.
I attended one of the pre‑summit consultation groups and again, there was no discussion about what went wrong. All it was ‑ and I think one of the weaknesses of the summit itself and also of the consultations that went on prior were that they replicated the silos that we currently have. The groups that work on the plan never talk to each other. You know, there's the sector ‑ the women who run the refuges and the shelters and who deliver these incredible emergency services, there's the people who work in the legal areas, there's the people who work on primary prevention and all the other groups and they rarely intersect with each other and I think ‑ and one of the problems with the consultations prior to the summit is that they were based on those existing groups and there was no capacity for conversations across sectors so that we might learn from each other.
So I think that was a fundamental weakness. So we had a summit, they had all these you beaut talks and sessions and seminars and workshops and at the end of it what do we have? We had no acknowledgment or explanation for why 11 years later we have failed to reduce violence and not having acknowledged that, not having examined that, and not having tried to figure out what we did wrong, it means that we're going to a new plan on a false premise and we think oh, let's call it a plan.
Well, actually, if it is to be a real plan, it has to have objectives ‑ I know we're going to come to this in a minute, but a plan is not just a good intention, it's not a strategy, it's not a set of great ideas. A plan is something that has a set of objectives, it has measurable targets that have to be achieved.
One point I would make is that I completely agree with June that having a separate plan for First Nations women is probably a good thing to do, but it's going to suffer from the same problems if it isn't approached properly and treated as a plan with clear, measurable objectives to which the Government has to be held to account.
VERITY FIRTH: Yes, and I am going to come back and talk to you, Anne, about that, because I'd also like to get the Senator's views on accountability really, how do we actually keep the Government accountable.
June, before I do that, you were very clear in your opening remarks about the need for a standalone plan for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. You've said that we are now at this window of opportunity. Is this going to happen? Are you confident that this plan and investment to match will be delivered.
JUNE OSCAR AO: Thank you, Verity. Look, I'm hopeful. I am always hopeful. I carry hope. But to be confident, we need to witness a very different way of working from government with our communities. Commitments must follow through with genuine long‑term action, not action or announcements that are targeted and one‑off for a news appearance. We need actions that lead to an ongoing shift, a transformative shift in the way that government does business and we are yet to see that.
However, I'm pleased to acknowledge and say that the Government finally listened to what our women have been calling for for a very long time. They have agreed to a distinct action plan that sits within the mainstream plan and I have been very clear in my communications with government that agreements are one thing, but the resourcing, the resources need to be in place to make sure we can develop a meaningful action plan that is well implemented, is outcome focused and has strong accountability mechanisms.
And I agree absolutely with what Anne just pointed to in plans and their enabling and functioning and delivering abilities. We have to start putting in the structural mechanisms to guarantee results. An advisory council is a very good first step, but they should be well resourced. They should have access to the specialist advice of a dedicated taskforce and groups and communities across the country need to be consistently engaged throughout the development and the actualisation of the plan.
I've also been very clear and have been advocating tirelessly for more than just this plan. If we are serious about ending violence, as the Government has said that they are, we need a broader holistic approach to realising intersectional gender equality. I'm calling for a national framework for action for First Nations gender justice and equality. This was a major recommendation and although we have been pursuing the development of this plan with government, I'm yet to receive any funding support to make it happen.
I'm very afraid that if we do not see a commitment, we will see another landmark report and this one specifically addressing the needs of our First Nations women and girls end up on the shelf exactly at the time when we are meant to be implementing self‑determined solutions to address the needs of our women and girls and again, throughout women and girls could not have been clearer to address all issues, including violence.
We have to respond to the intersecting factors of housing, employment, creating meaningful economies based in opportunities where there's culture and language and on country. We have to put care and supports for caring work at the centre of how we operate and eradicate poverty. Australia does not have a framework in place to achieve gender equality in this nation and that is what we really need and I believe it should be spearheaded by our First Nations women. Thank you, Verity.
VERITY FIRTH: Thanks, June. That's absolutely right in terms of ‑ I'm just going to come to you, Anne, because I now want to talk about targets and ministerial accountability and actually getting this to happen and I know that you've had roles in government doing this sort of thing, so I'm really interested in your views. But what June was talking about, the structural mechanisms to guarantee results and that broader holistic approach, like how you actually bring in, how you break down those silos and then have structural mechanisms to guarantee results ‑ what are your thoughts around that, Anne, and then I'm going to come to you, Jenny, from a sort of senator's viewpoint. Anne?
DR ANNE SUMMERS AO: Well, Verity, I think I'd actually approach it from the other way around because I think I have to say when I was in government, we didn't have anything like this. In fact, violence ‑ when I ran the Office of the Status of Women, violence against women was barely on our radar. I mean, it was just ‑ I guess this shows us how relatively ‑ that was 30 years ago, how relatively recently we have recognised the extent of violence and we have determined that we need to do something about it and we have made governments listen.
I would say the first plan I would give Tanya and Julia and Jenny and all those responsible for it credit for the fact they did set objectives in that plan, but what they didn't do was set targets whereby we could measure whether or not those objectives were met. The objectives tended to be a little too vague in my opinion. Like one of them was, you know, community should be safe. Well, that is a very laudable aim, but how in the hell do you measure whether or not that's happened? So my view is that we have to have hard targets and there has to be meaningful reporting against whether or not they've been achieved.
I think the Closing the Gap is a kind of an example of where we could go, but the kinds of data points that are measured by Closing the Gap, such as improvements in literacy, improvements in employment, improvements in education, and so on, are not quite the right points that you'd use for violence. We need to develop different ways of measuring violence and it's not for me to say how it's done.
It's something I wish the summit had at least started to talk about, but I would say this. We talk about domestic violence or family violence or intimate partner violence. We're talking about a huge range of different behaviours when we talk about that violence and I think in order to have meaningful targets and meaningful ways of measuring progress in reducing violence, we have to break it down into different categories and we have to have different strategies and different targets for different types of violence.
Now, for example, we are all aware of the increase in financial abuse and technologically‑enabled violence. They are both two forms of violence which are much easier to recognise by outside parties, not just within the prison of the home, and we know the banks are doing some very good work in assisting here with women who are subjected to financial abuse by their partners. So those are two areas that will be relatively easy to identify targets and set ways to achieve them.
The other point I'd make is that none of this can be achieved without data. We have to have data. Otherwise we cannot measure progress. So I never thought I would ever say those words, I've never been a data person, but over the past year I have buried myself in the data of violence against women and I have had my socks shocked off what I've learnt and will be sharing with the wider audience.
The final point I'd make, I think we have to do two things when it comes to measuring the impact of violence and the reduction in violence. We have to measure actual violence and, as I said, we might want to break it down in different categories and find different ways of working out how to measure those, but I think we also have to measure the lives of women post escaping violence. So once the woman has left the violent partner, once she has escaped the refuge ‑ left the refuge, I should say, once she has started to remake her life, what is that life like? You know, is she employed? Does she have enough money to support herself and her kids? Does she have adequate housing? Are her health needs being looked after?
We know, for example, that women who have experienced violence, their general health is far worse than other women. They're more susceptible to cancer, they're more susceptible to all kinds of health problems and we need to bring those sorts of measurements into the equation about how we measure the impact of violence in this country.
VERITY FIRTH: That's really pertinent, Anne. Senator?
SENATOR JENNY McALLISTER: You can hear I think in these contributions from both June and Anne that we can either start glass half empty or glass half full and we kind of have to keep an eye on both perspectives, right? The glass half full side would say that one of the good outcomes from the plan is that we actually do have a lot more ‑ a lot of work has been done about how to measure.
So Our Watch, which is one of the big institutions set up in the first plan, has developed ‑ done some really clever thinking about how we would measure progress. They make a couple of points. One is that, as Anne says, you must actually measure whether or not ‑ the prevalence of violence. They point to the prevalence of violence in the last 12 months for sexual violence and for intimate partner violence. They also point to lifetime, the lifetime experience and they make the obvious, draw the obvious conclusion that the first is likely to change more quickly than the second because of the lag effects.
But they also say, you know, these things are going to be slow to change and we are going to need some nearer‑term measures. Some of those will be about attitudes towards violence, attitudes that condone violence, and we do have better information about that as well now than we did in the past, and some of it should actually just be about measuring whether or not we've got the institutional capability to deliver solutions, whether we've got the organisations in place, skilled workforce in place, the resources in place, to do the work. So I think actually Our Watch and lots of other clever people have done quite a lot of good thinking in the last 10 or 12 years about what kinds of measurements would be useful and we're in a much better position to track progress now if we have the will to do so.
I guess the final point I would just make is that I really believe that external accountability for governments is critical. We have seen how powerful it is when stakeholders like Rosie Batty, like Chanel Kontos, like Grace Tame, Brittany Higgins, raise their voice and those survivor advocates have been immensely important in changing the national conversation. Those people and survivor advocates in general need to be at the table in holding governments to account over time. They are not the only people who need a seat at the table, but it is to me incredibly important that they are recognised in a governance framework that is set up around the next national plan.
VERITY FIRTH: Which is the next question I was going to ask you around has the process, do you think, been inclusive enough of diverse communities, of the experience of victim survivors, community organisations? I suppose it's also speaking a bit to June's point too. What do you think ‑ has the consultation been inclusive enough? What do you think?
SENATOR JENNY McALLISTER: I think it's been a bit of a mixed bag. It was incredibly disappointing and, frankly, odd that victim survivors weren't a more prominent part of the Women's Safety Summit. Groups like End Rape on Campus weren't even invited, despite actively seeking an invitation. And the knowledge and insights of those people, those survivors, was really ‑ should have been more prominent in the summit I think.
There's a more I guess bureaucratic rather than political process of consultation being led by some of the personnel at Monash University and I think that's really welcome. I think there is an effort there to reach more broadly, but at the end of the day, it's really about whether governments are willing to listen. It's not as though these insights haven't been presented in the past. There are plenty of amazing people working on the frontline, amazing researchers, powerful victim survivors who are advocating. None of that seems to have cut through over the last eight years and so the big test for me for the Government now is whether they're going to listen and act on any of the information that's before them.
VERITY FIRTH: So I'm wary of the time, so we've got about another 13 minutes and I just want to have an opportunity to ask some of our audience questions. The one that's sitting up the top, because it's got the most votes, is from Karen Iles. It's specifically to you, Jenny, but I'll also open it up for the other panellists as well. Karen says "Jenny ‑ you spoke of DFV and the priorities for the new national plan. What about sexual assault and sexual harassment ‑ on the continuum of violence against women? What priorities do you see are needed there?", and she's particularly referencing the Respect at Work report and criminal and other civil/administrative actions for sexual assault.
SENATOR JENNY McALLISTER: This must be a part of the national plan of course. We were talking earlier about the disappointing failure to shift any of the key statistics in terms of intimate partner violence. I think we could say the same about sexual assault from a non‑intimate partner. Those rates really haven't shifted either. There is a continuum, you know, between sort of sexual discrimination, sexual harassment and sexual assault. They are not the same thing, but they are also not unrelated.
The Government was given an incredible opportunity in the form of Kate Jenkins' report on sexual harassment in Australian workplaces. It is gobsmacking to me that in the week before the Women's Safety Summit they declined to implement the majority of the recommendations when it was debated in the Senate. There's a handful of the legislative reforms that they have accepted, but there is so much more work to do and the key part of that report that was groundbreaking in my view was putting the responsibility for creating a safe workplace on to employers, moving away from a situation where the obligation was on a woman or a person who'd been sexually harassed to make a complaint and advance their issue that way and actually saying, "No, an employer has an obligation to establish a workplace that's safe for everyone." That positive duty was not legislated in the Government's legislative response and I really don't think we've yet had an adequate explanation why because it was at the heart of the report that Kate Jenkins offered and I think it is immensely important in terms of tackling this issue in Australian workplaces.
VERITY FIRTH: June, do you have any comments on sexual assault and sexual harassment in relation to that question? Oh, are you muted still?
JUNE OSCAR AO: Sorry. Sorry, Verity, can you just repeat that? I was a bit distracted. The air con is not working and it's getting a bit warm.
VERITY FIRTH: You poor thing. Sorry about that. It was just a question from the audience about sexual assault and sexual harassment and the continuum, I suppose, in terms of violence against women, but also any comments you have in relation to Kate Jenkins' report around respect at work.
JUNE OSCAR AO: Look, you know, I commend Kate and her team in the Commission and the partners involved in that process and really hope that, you know, a vital piece of work for all of our women in our country, all of our families, is responded to in the way that it should be, it has to be, so that we are all collectively ensuring that all of our women and girls and our families are living within safe, caring, protective environments and have systems in place that are capable of responding to situations that create vulnerabilities and risks and threats to the lives of every Australian woman and girl and children and the elderly.
So, look, you know, here is an opportunity for all of us to work beyond our political groups. This is about humanity and surely we are capable, all capable, of stepping up and truly exercising the spaces in which we move to influence the change that needs to be in place to support our right to healthy lives in our country ‑ safe lives in our country, access to the supports that are required by survivors, by potential victims, by victims, and by perpetrators and our families. So that's another aspect of the conversation that we haven't had in the public space in the way that I think we should be having.
VERITY FIRTH: Anne, have you been following the Women at Work report and the various ‑ I thought your point about 30 years ago this wasn't on the agenda and now it is so prominently on the agenda was a really interesting one. In relation to sexual assault and sexual violence, the understanding of the continuum of violence, do you have any comments on that?
DR ANNE SUMMERS AO: I do, actually, Verity, and it might be slightly heretical. When it comes to sexual harassment, Australia in fact led the world, Susan Ryan's Sex Discrimination Act was the first piece of legislation in the world to outlaw sexual harassment, so we were very well aware of sexual harassment back in the early 80s. This is during the Hawke Government, when I was running the Office of the Status of Women.
My point before was we weren't so aware of domestic violence. It was only really when I was working for Paul Keating about 10 years later that it became a big political issue, a bit of a side bar, and the reason it did was because we did focus groups with women and asked them what their concerns were and we were absolutely shocked to our core to find out with every single group we did all around Australia, whatever the women or their circumstances, the number one issue they all said was domestic violence. So that meant that suddenly it was on the Government's radar and on the opposition's radar because they were learning the same thing. But back in '83, when sexual harassment was outlawed, I mean, it was sort of early days and we perhaps didn't understand enough about the issue and certainly our knowledge of it has evolved.
I haven't read Kate's report, but obviously very glad that she did it, but I would make a separate point which if I understand the original question correctly I thought the questioner was asking whether or not we thought that sexual assault ought to be included in the discussions of domestic violence and I very much ‑ they're completely inseparable because when you look at the figures, as I've been doing, you can see that they mostly occur side by side. There are very few women who experience physical violence from their partners who don't also experience sexual violence and it's very unusual for there to be one, not the other. They usually go together.
So I don't think we can possibly talk about domestic violence or family violence or intimate partner violence without recognising there is a spectrum of behaviour or, sorry, there is physical abuse of varying degrees ranging from, you know, everything up to murder, there is sexual abuse ranging in severity across the spectrum, and there's also emotional abuse and those three types of abuse go together and they're often interchangeable and they are often ‑ there's a bit of a myth around that the blokes who practice coercive control aren't also physically violent. That is simply not true. That is simply not true for a very large ‑ I think it's something like 60% of perpetrators.
So I think we need to understand and I think this is a separate issue from the workplace issue, not to say that some people ‑ men who practice violence at home don't practice harassment at work, but I think it's a separate type of behaviour and I think we would do ourselves a disservice if we lumped them together because I think they are differently expressed, they have different causes, different manifestations and certainly what happens in the home is much, much harder to get to, understand and prevent than whatever happens in the workplace.
VERITY FIRTH: Yes, that's interesting. All right, so we've only got 4 minutes left, so I'm sorry I didn't get to all the wonderful audience questions. I apologise for that. I am going to have a final question to all of you and that question is at the end of this decade, what must have changed to be able to say the new plan was a success? Maybe I'll go to you first on that, Anne.
DR ANNE SUMMERS AO: It's quite simple. We have to have reduced violence against women and children in this country.
VERITY FIRTH: Short and sweet and to the point. Thank you, Anne. June, at the end of this decade, what must have changed to be able to see success?
JUNE OSCAR AO: There has to be more than just this plan. We can't keep confining issues to isolated sectors. I want us to progress real inclusive gender justice and equality in this nation. This plan must change the narrative. The public understanding of what is required to end violence and this plan without that must lead to action urgently and a very different way of working. At the end of the decade I want to see that we have driven violence right down and that we are talking about a whole range of empowering initiatives where women are leading the way in social and economic change.
VERITY FIRTH: Wonderful. Thanks, June. And Senator?
SENATOR JENNY McALLISTER: Well, like June and Anne, violence must go down and I think the pathway to that lies in a plan that really thinks about the relationship between prevention, early intervention, crisis response and recovery. We can't have any more piecemeal initiatives that don't actually try and knit all of those things together if we're thinking about both the perpetrators and the victims of violence. So I really want to see violence rates come down, but I think it's really dependent on some serious structured thinking about the points at which we're intervening in people's lives to make things better.
VERITY FIRTH: Thank you very much. That panel was wonderful. Thank you so much for your time today. I found that a really interesting, informed and passionate discussion, so thank you all for your advocacy in this space. And thank you everyone who joined us. I'm sorry I didn't get to ask many of the audience questions, but we do appreciate you taking the time out of your busy days to join us all for this discussion. And keep looking after yourselves and we'll see you for the next one. Thank you.
If you are interested in hearing about future events, please contact events.socialjustice@uts.edu.au.
A national plan without national leadership will struggle to achieve national progress. – Senator Jenny McAllister
So much of the violence we experience is driven by external structural forces. – June Oscar AO
A plan is not just a good intention, it's not a strategy, it's not a set of great ideas. A plan is something that has a set of objectives, it has measurable targets that have to be achieved. – Dr Anne Summers AO
Speakers
Senator Jenny McAllister has served as a Senator for New South Wales since 2015, representing the Australian Labor Party. She is the Shadow Assistant Minister for Communities and the Prevention of Family Violence, and is committed to addressing the challenges that lead to many Australians facing poverty and disadvantage as well as being a strong advocate for women and children fleeing family violence.
June Oscar AO is the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner. She is a strong advocate for Indigenous Australian languages, social justice, women’s issues, and has worked tirelessly to reduce Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder. June has held a raft of influential positions including at the Kimberley Land Council, the Kimberley Language Resource Centre and the Kimberley Interpreting Service and with WA’s Lililwan Project.
Dr Anne Summers AO is employed under a Paul Ramsay Foundation Fellowship at UTS to research innovative solutions to domestic and family violence in Australia. Anne is a journalist and the author of nine books. She has a long history of involvement in the women’s movement in Australia.