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DANIEL:

From Schwartz Media, I'm Daniel James. This is 7am.

Since the election was announced just five weeks ago, at least five women have been killed by their partners in Australia.

Yet this crisis barely rated a mention in either of the two major parties' campaigns.

Dr Tracy Westerman is a Niama woman from the Pilbara region of Western Australia. She's been working as a psychologist in remote communities for 25 years. And she says where she works, the silence from politicians has been especially deafening.

For Aboriginal women, the threat of domestic violence is significantly higher, and yet the conclusions our political leaders draw about why that is, are all wrong.

Today, Dr Tracey Westerman and what's really fueling intimate partner violence in Aboriginal communities and what needs to change to stop women being killed.

It's Friday, May 2.

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DANIEL:

You've been working as a psychologist in Indigenous communities your entire career. Can you tell us about your experience working with women who have been victims of domestic violence?

TRACY:

Yeah, I mean, I think it's one of those things that Aboriginal women are, obviously we know by the data, the most overrepresented in the intimate partner violence statistics. And so, I think there's a statistic that says 35 times more likely to be victims of intimate partner violence, and that certainly hasn't decreased over time. In fact, it's actually gotten worse. The thing that I know, obviously, is that Indigenous women feel consistently let down by the system. So I think, you know, what we're actually seeing a lot is Indigenous women often, when they go into systems like police and welfare, for example, they are often responded to in a way that increases the likelihood that they will not go back to those systems, because often, for example with police, we know that there's significant evidence that tells us that when Indigenous women go to the police for help, they are more likely, significantly more likely, to be erroneously labelled as the perpetrator rather than the victim. The other thing we know, of course, with child protection systems is that a massively growing cohort of Indigenous child removals is based on Indigenous women who are actually victims of intimate partner violence, having children removed as a result of exposing their children to violence. And so the big concern that we have here is that if you go to the systems that are supposed to protect and help you and they perpetuate the abuse, then who do you go to for help?

Audio excerpt – Anthony Albanese:

“Thanks everyone and thanks for coming to Canberra except for Andrew who lives here.”

DANIEL:

And so given what you've just described, how did you feel when the Prime Minister committed the Labor Party to end gender-based violence within a generation?

Audio excerpt – Anthony Albanese:

“We know that ending gender-based violence is a priority for the Commonwealth and for every single jurisdiction.”

TRACY:

Oh, look, I think this sort of rhetoric, it's like the zero suicide rhetoric, right? You can set a goal, but unless you actually understand that you need to, one, identify the most highest risk communities and, like, those families that are generationally carrying risk are actually identified. And the second thing is that, the government literally are not funding prevention.

So we need to get the data right. The Australian Bureau of Statistics did the biggest research into intimate partner violence in 2023 in the country and Indigenous women were excluded from that research. How do you forget Indigenous women, right? What we know from that research was that most women stay with violent partners because they don't have the financial means to leave. Now that's common because if there's emotional abuse, physical abuse, there's also financial abuse because it's about control. So you've actually got the most vulnerable people in terms of the lowest socio-economic category in this country and then you've got cashless welfare cards, right? That actually limits their ability to leave even more and they have the gall to call cashless welfare cards violence prevention. There is no programme in this country that's going into high risk communities and actually addressing the causal pathways to why someone is one, vulnerable as a victim and two, why someone becomes a perpetrator of violence. So what I'm talking about here is programmes that are on the complex treatment side of the equation and things that I spend pretty much all day, every day training people to be able to do. Governments, for example, have never mobilised an Indigenous, you know, intimate partner violence programme into the Northern Territory, for example.

DANIEL:

So are Aboriginal stakeholders being worked with, spoken to, in the development of, say, the Labor Party strategy? Do you feel like you've been listened to?

TRACY:

Oh look, I think what tends to happen is when I talk to government and politicians, they literally don't understand their subject matter well. People don't understand the definition of prevention. And it's really, it's frustrating for me as someone who's a subject matter expert on this, an Indigenous woman from the Pilbara, and I've spent a long time, you know, working with complex trauma and issues in communities that, you know, they're not actually consulting with me at all. And they're not, for example, the grassroots services that are, you know, providing those real important support services to communities are now also being set upon as if they're not providing, you know, the services that, critical services that community need. There is a lot of rhetoric that blames the victim a lot and so, yeah, look, it's a shame that people aren't actually being listened to that actually have really good, clear subject matter expertise on what is a really complex issue.

DANIEL:

Can you have a guess as to why the government or the bureaucrats in the government aren't coming to speak to you about what is such an appalling and pressing issue?

TRACY:

Yeah, I think, you know, if I had a dollar for every time I was asked that question by a journalist, you know. And look, I always say that's up to government to respond to. But look, I've got no answer for it. I've no answer. I think governments actually literally need to answer that question.

DANIEL:

After the break - the real reason governments keep having inquiries.

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DANIEL:

Tracy, Jacinta Price has claimed that violence is inherent in Aboriginal cultures.

Audio excerpt – Jacinta Price:

“To suggest that violence is not used in traditional culture or related to traditional culture and not impacting the rates of violence we see in communities and interpersonal violence now is to gaslight the Australian public.”

DANIEL:

So let's talk about what the Opposition's plans are when it comes to this particular field. What have you picked up from the Opposition in terms of the way they're approaching the prevalence of intimate partner violence within Indigenous communities?

TRACY:

So I say this quite a lot, that violence is not a black person issue, it's a human issue. So when you make violence about culture, then what you're doing is you're making systems racially profiling often the wrong perpetrators. So essentially what happens when you portray violence as just inherent within the Aboriginal culture, what's the solution? What's the solution? So the solution is assimilation, right? If the culture is the bad guy, if the Aboriginal culture is evil, right, it is the cause of violence, the solution is in assimilation. And I think when you link, you know, culture with violence and you're actually clearly stating that violence is inherent within the Aboriginal culture, that never ends well in terms of it doesn't provide us with any opportunities for prevention. All it does is it demonises and stereotypes and it takes what is an incredibly complex issue to such a reductionist factor that you don't actually ensure, ultimately, that victims are safe. That's actually really concerning and the other thing that's concerning is all we're hearing is really about Indigenous organisations and the need to audit Indigenous organisations as if Indigenous organisations aren't actually providing really effective, grassroots programmes. But yeah, that's the concern that's not just shared, that's just not mine, it's shared by a lot of Indigenous leaders.

DANIEL:

And we know this idea isn’t based on evidence. So if we look at the evidence, what can we learn about how and why domestic violence happens in Indigenous communities?

TRACY:

I mean it's difficult because basically people don't really understand the real complex dynamics of intimate partner violence, right? So I look, as an example, as a psychologist, the most dangerous offenders are what we refer to as opportunistic offenders, and what they're actually doing is they're trying to find the most vulnerable victim. So the victim that has the most power differential between the perpetrator and the victim. Now, there is no more vulnerable victim in this entire country than an Indigenous woman on a remote community. And so what the statistics have consistently told us is that Indigenous women have certain risk characteristics that make them significantly more vulnerable victims. We also need to understand that the data in this country, there is literally no database that actually links the ethnicity of the perpetrator with the ethnicity of the victim, right? So there's literally no database that says, hey, Aboriginal woman, who's a victim of violence, was your perpetrator an Aboriginal man? So there is literally no data in this country that actually establishes the ethnicity of the perpetrator with the ethnicity of a victim. Now we look to the ABS census, the last one tells us that 72% of Indigenous women are married to non-Indigenous men.

DANIEL:

The Coalition had 13 inquiries into abuse in Indigenous communities during its last term. What's your view on why we continue to have inquiries rather than seeing action on the evidence that we already have and things like you've just laid out for us?

TRACY:

Oh, look, you know, governments love inquiries, right? Let's have another inquiry and you look at, you know, my area of expertise predominantly is suicide prevention. We've had four government inquiries into the suicides in WA, my own home state, that has four times the child suicide rate of the rest of the country. The latest data tells us that the Kimberley continues to have the highest rates of Indigenous suicide in the country by a country mile. So that's what inquiries give us. They give us nothing. What actually happens is government love it because they feel it buys them time. They'll say, we'd love to be able to respond, but however, we have to wait for that inquiry to finish. Meanwhile, two years later, the violence is getting worse, the suicides are getting worse and everything ultimately stays the same

DANIEL:

If we were to look into a world where politicians were actually going to follow the evidence and do something about these unacceptably high rates of First Nations women being killed by their partners, what needs to change?

TRACY:

So what needs to change first is we need to geomap the data. And that's pretty simple to do, right? We’ve sort of almost got that. So we need to actually understand where the communities are that are most over-represented. And we've got about 10 communities that we know in the Northern Territory that are consistently over-represented. Then what you need to do is you need to go into those communities and geomap the highest risk families. So what you'll find, this is what I've found in terms of, you know, nearly 30 years of working in high-risk communities, you go into any region. Say you look at Alice Springs. You'd find that about 10 to 15 families at best were making up the bulk of the service provision, right? Then what you'll find is if you work in this industry for long enough, you'll have a client and that client will have children and one of those children will become your client. And so that's what I mean in terms of actually addressing the generational transmission of trauma and risk is that trauma feeds trauma. And so people like me know that, and we're going there to actually mobilise resources into those really identifiable families that are actually passing one generational risk. Because what's actually happening is they are making up the bulk of the statistics. So it's not all Aboriginal people in Alice Springs are violent. You're probably looking at a couple of dozen Indigenous people that are making up the bulk of the intimate partner violence statistics, as you are with suicide prevention, as you are with child removals and that's the thing in terms of why governments are frustrating because they don't take a clear scientific data based and outcome based response to these issues.

DANIEL:

So finally, Dr. Westerman, given the rates of women dying in this country, why do you think that it is that this crisis barely rates a mention during the election campaign?

TRACY:

The fact is that Indigenous women get no attention when it comes to, you know, being victims of violence. And I think the thing that I get a little bit frustrated around is sometimes there's this rhetoric that there's this silence around Indigenous, violence in Indigenous communities, and people say that quite a lot. But Indigenous people have been screaming about this for decades, marching in the streets. There are incredible women who are CEOs of, you know, violence prevention organisations and shelters and all those sorts of things and men as well, Indigenous men as well, who have for decades said we need to do something about the violence.

It's not about the silence, it's about indifference to the screaming.

DANIEL:

Dr. Westerman, thank you so much for your time.

TRACY:

Thank you.

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DANIEL:

Also in the news…

The Coalition has revealed their costings just two days before the federal election which they say shows how the budget would be $10 billion better off under their government.

The costings reveal that the savings mostly come from cutting 41,000 Canberra based public service jobs.

On the other side of the budget line, the Coalition pledges $21 billion in defence spending, $8.5 billion on Medicare, just over $1 billion allowing first home buyers to claim mortgage interest on their tax returns.

And,

Former Vice president Kamala Harris has given a defiant public speech just as president Trump celebrates his first 100 days in office.

In her first major address in front of a crowd of Democrats in San Francisco, Harris criticised Trump’s policies, urging Americans to not be fooled into thinking Trump is “chaotic” but rather, “enacting an agenda that has been decades in the making”.

She also urged Americans to keep standing up for democracy.

Harris is reportedly considering a return to politics.

This has been 7am. Thanks for listening, and we’ll be providing you with election coverage over the weekend including from the heart of Anthony Albanese’s election night function. So tune in and tell your friends.

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