Asking Questions of an Inquiry

the Australian Federal Senate. I want to begin Amy by just asking you briefly about what you think of the inquiry, and I should mention that, in our professional capacities, both Amy and I have submitted submissions to this inquiry.

state was not even considering a crisis. And yet over here in Australia the issue is still shouted in silence, even with the formation of the inquiry, and what we're seeing is that there is very limited media coverage of the inquiry, and even in the processes of an inquiry, I don't get the feeling that they understand that it is the crisis and that it deserves the attention that it needs, which is unusual for a parliamentary inquiry. You know,

usually you would have details of the hearings. Usually you would hear a lot more which is coming from the inquiry. And yet here as is the continual debate around or not debate, as the continuing conversation around the issue of murther than forcibly disappeared Aboriginal woman, there is just silence. And recently I looked into, you know, with an inquiry in Queensland which we had on going into the racist gendered violence of Queensland Police. There were over three hundred

news reports as that inquiry was ongoing. I counted the media coverage of the Missing Amodian Indigenous Women's in Girls Inquiry, which is a national federal parliamentary inquiry, and from November twenty twenty one till only recently there was just over fourteen years reports, which is shocking given what we are currently seeing in communities where there are so many families,

so we're still missing their loved ones. And this is the problem, is that the silence shrouding this issue is actually allowing an environment in which perpetrators can continue to target continue to target Aboriginal women. So it's an inquiry of huge significance, and yet we're not seeing that merit in the attention or the prominence that they're paying to

the inquiry. And I think it's really really concerning that we're not seeing that focus that you know, we're currently having a debate into the Voice to Parliament and yet there's nothing on what communities are calling for in relationship. We really need to start looking at this issue of the numbers of Aboriginal many girls and Aboriginal children and Aboriginal people who have been forcibly disappeared in this country.

There's just this devastating silence which characterizes it, and it's a silence that the inquiry should be breaking, and yet what we're seeing is that it's business as usual almost and it's really distressing to think about that, you know, the numbers of families who are out here are wanting answers, and that their concerns are not being met with any level of public outrage at all. And I think that's

what the most concerning part of it is. It's almost like they don't think it's the crisis that it is, you know what I mean? And so I think it has been really concerning to think that there is just so little public attention paid to what is a huge issue.

and data collection. You know, it's a small, very small part of it, But that shouldn't have been the start of an inquiry. I would have thought that centering the victims and their families would have been the best approach

to begin. And then secondly we saw the calling of the Deputy Commissioner of the Australian Federal Police and their colleagues from the AFP various divisions, and again the questions from all the senators across the board, from all the political parties were around data collection and where that data may or may not live up to the standards that the AFP Missing Persons Center hopes to have on hand.

And even more bizarrely was a discussion about recruitment in New South Wales with a partnership between Taife and the

AFP and New South Wales Police. I mean, this has absolutely nothing to do with the issue on hand, And when you're talking about hundreds of Aboriginal women and children who have been forcibly disappeared missing and many who are murdered, it clearly showed to me that the people who had been called had no idea what they were talking about, and reading through many of the submissions, quite frankly, they

were the same. It was very broad statements and comments about black deaths in custody, around policing and the community, around representation, but absolutely nothing that really focused in other than a handful of submissions on the actual issue at hand.

The other problem with the inquiry, of course, is that not only has there not been a lack of media, we haven't seen enough sitting days in Canberra where families can address the Senate and address the committee and share their experiences and articulate to those committee members, how they've been failed and who has failed them. I don't understand who you can possibly call the AFP on the first day without first having heard from the families to know

the appropriate questions to ask. So one thing I would say very clearly is that the committee needs to reconvene in Canberra, which they have We've been told they have no plan to do and hear from the families directly and those that assist them so that they can learn where the failures are. And I think this is something aiming you talk about a lot, is the fact that victims and their families are all too often completely silenced

and this committee seems to be perpetrating that silence. Once again, I was just wondering if you could talk to the audience about the work you do and about that issue in particular.

which we know is totally false. But I think that's part of the problem is that a police version of events are being given prominence when we know that often it's the police who are failing to investigate the deaths and disappearances, and yet they they're shielded by this fake benevolence as if they're continually searching, and we know that's not true as well, but prioritizing the views of police and these sort of authorities who have no understanding and

no honestly, I don't think they even care about black women in order to search for them, because that's what I'm seeing currently in a lot of the cases I'm looking at. That further silences the voices of families because if you have families coming and then speaking again about their lived experience, that ultimately is downgraded below the version of events put forward by police. So that's all example of this the way aberage and women and families are

being silenced in this country. Because silence is not just about an absence of speaking, because we know Aboriginal families have never stopped advocating for their loved ones. They're always the ones there. They're the ones who go to the police first trying to get information. They're the ones in the courtroom, they're the ones always contacting the media. They're

the ones always there. And yet the issue is that this overwhelming discourse, or the overwhelming ways that these stories are spoken of, effectively silences them and invalidates their version of events. And I think that's what we're seeing in the inquiry as well, is that I think we've spoken about it before. I don't think that they are fully understanding the level of the crisis and what the crisis actually is, because they're not going to the people who

can speak to that. They're not going to the families, as you say, they're not. It's not an open process.

It doesn't seem to be. As you said before, we're finding it hard to get information about the process, finding it hard to get information about any future public hearings, which is unconscious conscionable in you know, other inquiries of this importance, this level of importance, she wouldn't have that happened, and so this is very I think the inquiry as a whole is another example of how this issue is

being silenced. And also the terms of reference are very focused towards castoral responses, so they're focused towards police reform. And if I can just bring up the example of the recent case of Monique Club whose inquest was held in late twenty twenty two, and it ended with Minique, no answers for m Nique's family, no pressure on police to continue to search for her. She has still disappeared, but the only recommendations that came out of that coronial

process was more investment in police technology. So you saw how the coronial process was always orientated not towards finding Monique, but instead further criminalizing her and claiming she was responsible for her own disapearance, but also allowing police to advocate for investments in certain technologies that would not have help Monique or may not help other cases of Aboriginal women

who've been disappeared at all. And so that's the problem with having hearings based on the word of the AFP or the anti police without actually going first to the voices of family, because if you don't know what is happening, you don't know their experiences, you aren't going to ask the right question. But what we're seeing out in QUO is it doesn't seem to be any care for those

questions at all, you know what I mean. There's no interrogation of police accounts, and it's you know, these solutions that are being brought forward are literally just band aid solutions. We're not going to have, you know, investment in police resources and investment in things that are ultimately going to end up surveiling and overincarcerating, particularly Aboriginal women more are not the answer at all, you know what I mean.

So the failure to prioritize the voices of families and the failure to prioritize the lived experiences of the Aboriginal women who have died or disappeared is a real failure and an exother example of this silence, which has stating consequences for Aboriginal women across this country. Martin, I know that you have also been working on a lot of these cases, and you're not seeing those questions replicated in

the Acquirer or even asked of the inquiry. What do you think of the other gaps that are missing in the inquiry's focus.

And again we've seen a focus as I mentioned that and as Amy discussed of first listening to the Australian Federal Police, then speaking to criminologists who work truly in the university space and don't work directly with families. And then the third group who were called by the inquiry to give evidence was employees, high ranking employees of the Department of Social Services, the National Policy Branch, the Deputy

Secretary of Families and Communities. And immediately my years prick up and I didn't have to wait long to see the victim blaming. And what you saw in some of their testimony was a lot of discussion around Aboriginal communities. Well, that's not what we're talking about. There was this real seems to be either deliberate or uninformed. It's the old stupid or lawyar. It can only be one or the other.

From one of the witnesses, in particular from the Department of Social Services that seemed to be pushing the blame back on Aboriginal communities. I mean, this is absolutely absurd. We've said it before and I'll say it again that the inquest held last year in Queensland into three missing Aboriginal women presumed murdered, the suspects, by police's owned admission,

are all middle aged white men. So none of this data that they're supposedly coming up with, none of this sort of liaising with Aboriginal communities about safety within the community, and it was a particular focus on I think smearing young Aboriginal men actually has anything to do with addressing

where the crisis stems from. And again, I think a lot of this goes to the fact that the committee has simply not done their research, which is unforgivable, and has not spoken to the families and their communities to understand where there might be some commonality between many of the cases of women and children being murdered or forcibly disappeared, and then they could have honed in on these things, and there's some very clear areas where this could happen.

I mean, one thing we know about this approach where they were focusing on Aboriginal communities is the potential for this to cause and for the committee to hand down

recommendations that would see further over policing of Aboriginal communities. Now, one thing we know for sure, and that the senators would have known if they'd listened to those of us who do the work or the families, is that many of the women, and clearly some of the most vulnerable women, are those who are exiting the justice system, who were leaving prison, usually for ridiculously small problems they should ever

have gone to prison for in the first place. So that's something I would have liked to addressed, because if they want to take on broader issues, then over incarceration directly leads into this issue. But you know, when you call the police and do what too many in the media do, which is take whatever the police say as being the uncontested facts of the situation, then you're going to walk away with the no answers or the wrong

answers being suggested. And there was definitely a pattern of that in the opening days of the inquiry, and it seems to have been formed that The other thing I want to go back to is this issue around data collection. I mean, for the purposes of the podcast. I'll keep

my language polite, but it is absolutely ridiculous. Who cares whether the number is five hundred and fifty or five hundred and fifty one, and the one is being excluded because the police can't decide yet whether they categorize that woman as missing. Her family doesn't know where she is, She's at grave risk. Do your freaking job.

And I do not understand why every single senator involved spend hours upon hours wasting everybody's time about each state's stats, how they collected it. The qualitative and quantitative disaster, I mean data, which is a disaster given that you've got the Northern Territory Police saying there is not a single Aboriginal woman or child missing in the NT. Are they joking?

I mean, does anyone seriously believe that You only have to look at the AFP's Missing Persons Center website to see that they categorize a number of Aboriginal women and children in the NT as missing presumed murdered. So why wasn't that put to the Northern Territory police? How can you be so obsessed by data that you call in criminologists to discuss all of this and then failed to say to the police sitting before you, how can you possibly claim that in the Northern Territory there's not a

single missing or murdered, unsolved Aboriginal woman or child. And that is insulting to the families. It is insulting to those women and children. And that's partly why this issue will continue to occur, because for the communities around the country and the families impacted, it is an epidemic. For the people in Canberra and the senators in particular, who, let's not forget we pay their wages, very damn good wages.

It's just about going through the process, punching the clock, talking about data, data collection and really not annoying anyone. I mean, there were comments by some of the senators about directly to the AFP Deputy Commissioner about the great work the AFP does and could we see that replicated across the country. I'm sorry, which case can they possibly name where the AFP has done great work in this area. All they were referencing was the fact that the AFP

had slightly prooved their data gathering. Again, it's got nothing to do with assisting families, supporting families, getting justice and most of all, finding preventative measures so that this doesn't happen again and continue to happen. You know, one of the things I find infuriating when people are talking about looking at reviews of the data in three years time, knowing that that number that it currently sits at will go up. Well, that's someone's family member, that's a mother,

that's a daughter, forget any of that. That is an Aboriginal woman who is dead, and they worried about whether that number will be recorded in a database that they can access. Who cares whether you can access the number. How about doing the work now to ensure that she is safe and she never comes to the harm that

is going to occur by this lack of inaction. So I think one of the problems too, that, as you said, Amy, about the silencing is that the silencing leads to this problem continuing and ensures that more Aboriginal women and children will die at the hands of you know, terrible, bloody individuals that the police know all too well who they

are and are not doing anything about it. And I just cannot, for the life of me understand how the senators don't care about that, how the mainstream media isn't pushing them to care about that, and why the media themselves don't care enough to even bother. If this was an inquiry as we saw a few weeks ago into interest rates, you best believe there would be a lot more fuss, a lot more media coverage, and a lot more impassioned police from politicians on behalf of their constituents.

But so far on this issue, we just haven't seen that.

police have not done anything to search for them, or they've closed their investigations far too early. And it also suggests that these women may just suddenly turn up, you know, it may be their own responsibility. And there's this continual myth and I saw it perpetrated even by the Australian Crime Commission a report I read where they were speaking about the high rates of missing Aboriginal people maybe due

to transience, and we know that this issue around transience. Sure, Aboriginal women travel around the country, but they are always connected to someone, They're always connected to their communities, a lot of them always have children. Aboriginal families know when someone is missing that it is if it's a high risk disappearance, and various concerns from Aboriginal witnesses on the ground are never taken seriously by police and obscured by

these police categorizations. And then you have all of these deaths where bodies are found when they're not even considered soul play or suspicious deaths or murders, which is another

problem as well. So relying on the police to collect that data, relying on police categorization, I think would be another example of a second disappearance of a lot of these women, and you'll find with the numbers that they'll never have a full database because what we're seeing is that a lot of averagin and women who have died or disappeared are not even counted at all, and so there needs to be a lot If they are looking at data, they have to interrogate it a lot more

than they're currently doing, in which they've shown they are inable to do, because they can barely start collecting the numbers now because they are so focused on the police. So I think there's a real problem with that focus on data in the way that it's been presented in the terms of reference, you know what I mean, and the lack of information about what's happening in the majority

of these cases as well. So I think there's a clear example of a failure of the inquiry and as you say, a lack of care in actually understanding what is actually happening.

their family. And yet the families had presented really clear, precise evidence and guidance to the police as to why it was so out of character for that Aboriginal woman or child to be out of contact, and yet the police never follow on. We've also seen right across the board that this issue of supposed transience and that the

person will just show up rarely eventuates. One after another, we find that Aboriginal women and children who are reported missing and then the search is called off very quickly, if it's ever even done, are then later found deceased and clearly murdered and no investigation has ever taken place. Now it's even more sinister than that. There's also clear evidence around this country where pathologists are getting the cause

of death flat out wrong. Now that might sound like a big statement, but you only need to look at South Australia where Colin Manner, who wasn't even a proper pathologist, was the chief pathologist for the entire state and bungled one case after another. We see in Queensland where their own DNA lab have made horrendous errors. And just recently I was reading about the death of an Aboriginal woman many many decades ago, where the wound was considered self inflicted.

And yet that pathologist was years later struck off because they found that a white man had committed suicide when clearly he had not. And yet there is no attempt to go back and look if this same pathologist got it wrong when it came to the Aboriginal woman. Now to just give an idea, because I want people to understand how bad this is in terms of the white

man who allegedly committed suicide according to this pathologist. The pathologist told the court that he shot himself in the chest and that the barrel of the gun, the very end of the gun was at least a meter from the man's chest and it was a long rifle. Now, quick calculation, just looking at the man's height and working out roughly even ten centimeters plus or minus the length of his arms, the man was a meter off being

able to pull the trigger. And it took this sort of incompetence for a pathologist before that pathologist was pulled up and struck off. And yet this same pathologist had ruled endless Aboriginal women and children had died at their own hand, and I simply do not believe that that

was ever the case. And again, this is an enormous, enormous silencing when that victim is crying out from the grave for justice, their family knows and knew they didn't take their own life, and yet they are being let down, not only by the police, but by forensic scientists who really should face the full consequences of the law if they are going to treat the lives of Aboriginal women and children with such disregard, they can't even be bothered to pulling out a measuring tape.

case it's an aberration. It's actually something that we're seeing as a pattern, and it feeds into a lot of what we're seeing in relation to death and custody as well, in cases of you know, where we have to really question a lot of the pathologists' reports in relation to death and custody, but also the cases around the country where we see the deaths of Aboriginal women and Aboriginal people being seen as suicide and we don't you know,

families don't have the capacity to ask for independent forensic reports, We don't have that infrastructure to properly investigate at the very early point when these deaths or disappearances are happening. I mean, it's a huge issue and it's one of the issues that should be brought up in the inquiry. And yet it's another example of silence, because it's that example of because they don't know enough about the issue, or they don't care about enough about the issue, they

are not asking the right questions. And an inquiry like this, the right questions are so important, are so critical, and yet we're seeing they're going to go un answered. Because there is no care to actually look into what's happening in each individual case. And I think that goes back to what you say about the data and the overwhelming

focus on data. Where we're currently at in relation to the cases and forcibly disappeared Aboriginal women, is that we're so far we have such a lack of information that the data is not going to open up any new avenue when we don't know what's happening. We actually have to look at every individual case and see the patterns between the cases, and we see how the police are operating, we see how the forensic anding, the health services are operating,

we see how the media operating. That's where you're going to see the real patterns of what is happening, why we're seeing such numbers of disappearing disappearance as Aboriginal women, and how that's connected as well to the overincarceration of our population and issues like long for conviction, Like what we were originally interrogating with Kevin Henry, because I think our listeners will understand is that you know, we began this story looking at Kevin Henry's one for conviction, but

we've gradually realized or we realized over that course, is that this entire story is actually the story of the extreme dehumanization of Aboriginal women. How Aboriginal women are targeted for violence and a scene as unworthy of mourning and unworthy of justice. And that's the central issue of this podcast. I think it comes down to the fact that Aboriginal women and the lives of Aboriginal women are not valued.

There are no there's no justice in this country Aboriginal women, and that's what we want to change.

by her family in Sherberg. But one thing that I think it goes full circle and reinforces exactly what Amy was just saying, is that the man suspected and charged with the murder of Queeny Heart, who was then through an absurd trial that barely got off the ground, never faced consequences that man who in my opinion undoubtedly murdered Queenie Heart, would go on to commit horrific crimes around the state of Queensland, and only in recent years passed

away having never done any real time for the murders and violence he committed against women and adolescent girls. And so this is the very real consequence. This is why everyone has to buy in a why everyone has to care. Because some of his victims were not just Aboriginal women, they were white women too. So you know, you might think that you can get away with this because you're

not Aboriginal, that this won't come and affect you. But because the police took this guy's side, because they didn't care about Queenie, because they made accusations about Queenie that were just not true, because they stuffed up her trial, because a judge didn't care. You know, people were not supposed to criticize processes, were not allowed to say are crooked because they didn't care about getting justice for Queenie.

This scumbag, this vile human being, was allowed to continue continue to monster and harm women and children around Queensland. And he went to jail for bits and pieces, but never for these serious crimes. And this is what happens. You know, people are getting murdered, women and children are being murdered, and because they're Aboriginal, nothing is being done.

And then this inquiry is called largely because of the pressure of families and what we've seen the work of families like the Barraville families, you know, their extraordinary commitment. And again the very first murder in that case, the police accused the young girl of going walk about. Where have we heard that before? It is just the same nonsense over and over again. And yet decades later, senators elected to do the job to work for us don't even know the basics to put the police on notice

and ask them the tough questions. So it really comes down to whether people are going to care or not. And you know, finally prioritize the lives and the humanity of Aboriginal women and children and demand that the police do the same.

not there. And I've always thought, you know, central to any movement around eradicating gender violence has to be Aboriginal women because the very beginning of this colony, sexual violence against Aberiginal women, the targeting of Aboriginal women, the targeting of Aboriginal bodies, the taking away of children for sterilization, that was all gendered and racialized, and it had a

it was foundational to the birthplace of this colony. And I think that's where you see the overwhelming silence towards violence against Aboriginal women, because it's not a new phenomenon, it's a continuing phenomenon in the Setlar colony. And we know that white women on the frontier were complicit in the sexual violence, in the rape of Aboriginal women and girls, and in forced servitude, the slavery of Aboriginal people, and that's where you see this complicity, and that's where you

see this silence. There's no nationwide visuals for murdered Aboriginal women or forcibly disappeared Aboriginal women. There is no waves of mourning, there's no waves of protests. There's only silence,

and we're only included as afterthoughts. And I think that's the huge point we have to make as well in this current silence that we're seeing around this inquiry, is that we're not seeing that same level of the concern from what should be this sisterhood around eradicating gender violence, you know what I mean, unless they only speak of it, unless it's this limited framework in which Aboriginal men acing as the perpetrators, and it was seen in so many

inquests in Queensland and around the country. It's white men who have been given impunity to target Aboriginal women. And I just find it very interesting that it's white men who are being questioned in the inquiry but given the

benefit of doubt. So white men at the AFP, the white men and the police, they're given priority to speak, you know, at the absence of Aboriginal women who have been targeted not just by the violence of you know, white men outside the police force, but by the police and by prison officers inside these institutions, inside the health systems and everything like that. I think people have to realize that it's all interconnected. We're not just talking about

interpersonal violence. We're talking about state sanctioned violence, and that that's the underlying reason why it has been silenced. And when we see no care, no waves of outrage, no large expressions of mourning, it all comes down to that fact, is that, you know, the targeting of Abiginal women for violence is foundation to this country. You couldn't they couldn't have done that without targeting aboritional women as the centers of community, as the reproducers of life, as holding important

responsibilities and roles. And it's the continuation of culture. And that's why Aboriginal women in particular are targeted and Aboriginal men are in turn seen as the violent ones. When you know, I've sat in it on inquests, I've start with families. Aboriginal men are the ones they're advocating. Aboriginal men are the ones they're sitting down to give voice to the elders, the women in their community. It's always

Aboriginal men who are there as well. Against all of that, those those horrendous stereotypes that say they're the violent ones. Is that atually a low of aberage on men who are always there on the front lines, and he gives space to Aboriginal women to speak in cern to them.

the count Why does their death not matter? You know? Again, to reinforce what Amy just said about Aboriginal men, just this week we saw Lex Wooden travel to just outside of cans to support a family of who have suffered a death in custody, a murderer at the hands of police. An Aboriginal man who has always stood up for justice and supported the community, and he's supporting aunties up there to try and get justice.

with private investigators. We're doing the work, and these Aboriginal women in their families are doing the work that the police should be doing. And the toll it takes on them to be doing this when they're grieving, when they're wanting to know where their loved one is, what happened, How do we get them home? And we just get silence from the police. You get nothing back. And to explain just one last detail about the absurdity of all of this is that when mon eight Club went missing,

her mother immediately reported her missing to the Harvey Bay Police. Now, despite that being ours outside of Brisbane where she went missing and she was last seen in Brisbane, the Harvey Bay Police maintained control of that investigation. They don't know anything about the South side of Brisbane, it's not their jurisdiction.

In an even more absurd example of a case I'm working on, at the moment is an Aboriginal young man missing, presumed murdered on the border of Queensland and New South Wales. His case is being run by the police in Broome, thousands of kilometers away, because that's where his family had to report the missing persons, because that was the nearest

police station that had a missing person's unit. Now, the police in Broom don't care about black people to begin with, let alone care about investigating a case that is thousands and thousands of kilometers away and outside of their jurisdiction. And again, this is something we've said many times and it is something we would say if this committee would

give us a chance to give evidence. We need a national body in Canberra that has the power to force police around the country, whether it be at the federal level through the AFP or state police wherever they may be, in metropolitan areas or in the remotest communities, to do the work as instructed by that instructed by that national body in Canbra that is able to collect evidence, that can hear directly from families, that is guided by families, and that is evidence based and is not run by

the same people who have just murdered a young Aboriginal man in Queensland. How can you expect Aboriginal families to ever think they'll get justice and they don't when the same police who are supposedly looking for their loved ones and not doing it are the same cops who just pulled the trigger and killed one of their own. This is the absurdity of this situation. And to then have a committee talk about qualitative data and the value of

it is a joke. And it is on those committee members to ensure that this inquiry doesn't simply pass in the quiet of the night and slip off and this issue just continues for decades on. They've been given the responsibility by the Legal and Constitutional Affairs Reference Committee. They're being paid very good money to do the work. They have the full power that a parliamentarian gets in this country with parliamentary privilege, and everything goes along with it.

It's time they did the work that has far too long been done by Aboriginal men, women and children to bring their own loved ones home.