WARNING: Violence against Indigenous women and children As parliament resumes this week, a key focus for Aboriginal senators is the inquiry taking place into missing and murdered First Nations women and children. If this story has raises any issues, you can get help by calling the national sexual assault and family violence counselling helpline on 1800-respect, which is 1800 737 732.
Category
📺
TVTranscript
00:00 We've heard about the responses from police, the lack of data that's being compiled, the
00:08 coronial responses, and so our committee's remit is to look right across the whole system
00:14 to make sure that we are improving that.
00:17 What we see commonly are oversight bodies in states and territories that compile the
00:21 majority of this data, but at the federal level there's a real lack of concentration
00:27 around what that picture actually looks like for our communities.
00:31 We know anecdotally that no one's actually looking for some of these missing women and
00:36 children across these jurisdictions.
00:39 It's our responsibility, both as a parliament, but also as a committee, to look more intensively
00:45 about how that can be done better from a grassroots perspective and lifting it right up to the
00:50 national level so that we can make sure that we are targeting the responses and the prevention
00:55 approaches to actually tackle this issue.
00:58 I triggered this inquiry back in my first speech and as a consequence of that started
01:04 this inquiry and we've had a few extensions to that.
01:07 What I do think is there needs to be a more intensive look at that and possibly a royal
01:11 commission.
01:12 What we haven't had is the cooperation from particular jurisdictions in my home state
01:17 of Western Australia that we would have liked to have seen the police and other people come
01:22 to the table and have more conversations about their responses in particular and not just
01:28 about historical cases, but also more recent ones.
01:32 We need to be able to look at this in greater detail.
01:35 We also need to have much more time for our families to talk about how they would like
01:41 their loved ones to be honoured as part of the missing and murdered women across Australia.
01:46 [BLANK_AUDIO]