From Schwartz Media. I'm Daniel James. This is seven am. 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 to mention in either of the two major parties campaigns. Doctor Tracy Westerman is a Nyama woman from the Pilber region of Western Australia. She's been working as a psychologist in remote communities for twenty five 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, Doctor Tracy Westerman, and what's really fueling intimate partner violence in Aboriginal communities are what needs to change to stop women being killed. It's Friday May too. You've been working as a psychologist set indigenous communities your
entire career. Can you tell us about your experience working with women who have been victims of domestic violence?
Yeah, I mean, I think it's one of those things that the Aboriginal women are obviously we know by the data the most overrepresented in the intimate partner violence statistics, and so I think as a statistic that says thirty five 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 saying a lot is Indigenous women often when they go into systems like police and welfare, for example, they often responded to in a way that increase 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 polace for help, they are more likely significally more likely to be erroneously
labeled as to 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 into a 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? Thanks everyone, and thanks for coming to Cambridge.
So for Andrew who lives here, 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.
We know that ending gender based violence is a priority for the common Wealth and for every single jurisdiction. Oh look, I think they're sort of retric It's like the zero suicide rhetory right in constet of goal. But unless you actually understand that, you need to one identify the most highest risk communities and those families that are generation 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 australne Via Statistics did the biggest research into intimate partner violence in twenty twenty three 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 needs to leave. Now, that's common because if there's emotional abuse, physical abuse is 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 cashleist welfare cards right that actually limits their ability to leave even more. Have the goal to call caciist welfare cards violence prevention. There is no program in this country that's going into high risk communities and actually addressing the causal pathways to why someone is one vulnerable is a victim, and two why someone becomes a
perpetrator of violence. So what I'm talking about here is programs that are on the complex treatments 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 mobilized an Indigenous intimate partner violence program into the Northern Territory, for example.
So our Aboriginal stakeholders being worked with spoken to the development of, say the Labor Party strategy. Do you feel like you've been listened to?
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 prevention. And it's really it's frustrating for me as someone who's a subject matter expertter on, there's an Indigenous woman from
the Pilgram. 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 grass for its services that are providing those real important support services to communities are now also being set upon as if they're not providing the
services that critical services that community need. There is a lot of rhetoric that blames the victim a lot, and so yeah, it looks it's a shame that people aren't actually being listened to that actually have really good, clear subject matter expertise and what is a really complex issue.
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.
Yeah, I think you know, if I had a dollar for every time I ask that question Blande journalist, you know, and look that's I always say this up to government to respond to but look, I've got no answer for it. I've got no answer. Well, I think governments actually literally need to answer that question.
After the break. The real reason governments keep having.
Inquiries, Hi Ruby Jones. Here, seven Am tells stories that need to be told. Our journalism is founded on trust and independence and now we're increasing our coverage. Every Saturday until the election will bring you an extra episode to break down the biggest political moments of the week. If you enjoy seven Am, the best way you can support us is by making a contribution at seven am podcast dot com dot are you forward slash support. Thanks for listening and supporting our work.
Tracy just senter Price has claimed that violence is inherent in Aboriginal cultures.
Suggests that violence is not used in traditional culture. Related to traditional culture and not impacting the rates of violence we see in communities and interpersonal violence now is to gas light the Australian public.
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.
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 it's sexually what happens when you portray violence as just inherently in 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 an assimilation. And I think when you link, you know, culture with violence, and you actually are really clearly, you're actually cruly clearly stating that violence is an enter 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 demonizes 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 organizations and the need to order indigenous organizations as if indigenous organizations aren't actually providing really effective grassroots programs. But yeah, that's the concern that's not just shared, that's just not mine. Its shared by a lot of Indigenous leaders.
And we know the 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?
I mean it's difficult because based if people don't really understand the real complex dynamics of intimate partner violence. Right, So I look, as example, as a psychologist, the most dangerous offenders or 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 the 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, ay, our 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 the victim. Now we look to the abs sense. The last one tells us that seventy two percent of Indigenous women are married to non Indigenous men.
The coalition had thirteen inquiries into abuse in Indigenous communities during its last term. What's your view and 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.
Well, look, you know government's love inquiries, right, let's have another inquiry and you look at you know, my area of expertise predominantly a suicide prevention. We've had four government inquiries into the suicides in Wa, my own home state that has four times the child suicide right of the rest of the country. The latest data tells us that the Kimberly continues to have the highest rates of Indigenous suicide in the country by country mile. So that's what
inquiries give us. You give us nothing. What actually happens is government love it because they feel you buy some 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.
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.
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 overrepresented. And we've got about ten communities that we know in the Northern Territory that are consistently overrepresented. 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 found in terms of nearly thirty years of working in high risk communities you go into any region, So look at out of springs, you'd find that about ten to fifteen families at best for 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, you know, mobilize 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 our springs are violent. You're probably looking at a couple of dozen Indigenous people that are making up the bulk of the intimate partner violent 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, an outcome based response to these issues.
So Finally, doctor Westerman, given the rates of women dying in this country, why do you think that it is that this crisis barely rates and mention during the election campaign.
The fact is that Indigenous women get no attention when it comes to being victims of violence. And I think the thing that I get a little bit frustrated around is sometimes there's this retoric that there's this silence around Indigenous violence and 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, violence prevention organizations 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 screening.
Doctor Westerman, thank you so much for your time. Thank you. Also in the news, the Coalition has revealed their costings just two days before the federal election, which they say shows the budget would be ten billion dollars better off under their government. The costings revealed that the savings mostly come from cutting forty one thousand Canberra based public service jobs.
On the other side of the budget line, the coalition pledges twenty one billion dollars in defense, spending eight point five billion on Medicare, and just over one billion allowing first home buyers to claim mortgage interest on their tax returns. And former Vice President Kamala Harris is given a defiant public speech just as President Trump celebrates his first one
hundred days in office. In her first major address in front of a crowd of Democrats in San Francisco, Harris criticized Trump's policies, urging Americans not to be fooling to 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 seven am. Thanks for listening, and we'll be providing you with election coverage over the weekend, including from the heart of Anthony Alberanese's election night function. So tune in and tell your friends