Speaker 1: Good.
Speaker 2: Just before nine o'clock last night, the jury returned guilty
Speaker 2: verdicts against all three defendants.
Speaker 3: It was absolutely shambles to day the truth just absolutely
Speaker 3: really honous.
Speaker 2: Blood on his clothing the day after the alleged a.
Speaker 1: Top on a shallow mud bank and it fits through
Speaker 1: a river. Basically, I think most of the people are
Speaker 1: used to me.
Speaker 3: Are good people.
Speaker 1: I think a really important question we need to ask
Speaker 1: is how many Indigenous prisoners in Australia are innocent.
Speaker 2: This is Curtain, a podcast where we pulled back the
Speaker 2: blinds to shine a light on the darkest parts of
Speaker 2: our justice system and ask who are the victims. I'm
Speaker 2: Amy Maguire and I'm.
Speaker 1: Martin Hodgson, a senior advocate for the Foreign Prisoner Support Service.
Speaker 1: And a warning, this series contains the names of deceased
Speaker 1: peoples and has distressing content that might upset some listeners.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Curtain the podcast. Today we're going to continue
Speaker 2: talking about a topic that has been a theme throughout
Speaker 2: the history of this podcast, and it relates to the
Speaker 2: crisis surrounding disappeared Aboriginal women. There's currently an inquiry into
Speaker 2: missing a murdered Indigenous women and Girls underway in the
Speaker 2: Australian Senate, but through conversations Martin and I have had
Speaker 2: over the past few months, we're starting to realize that
Speaker 2: there are a lot of gaps in the conversations around
Speaker 2: this issue, and we're going to discuss some of those today.
Speaker 2: One of the issues comes down to data. Currently, we
Speaker 2: just do not have a national data set that tells
Speaker 2: us the numbers of missing a murdered Indigenous women across
Speaker 2: state and territories. That's part of the terms of reference
Speaker 2: of the Senate Inquiry, and I just wanted to start
Speaker 2: by bringing up an article that had to do with
Speaker 2: the Senate Inquiry, which is published in August on The
Speaker 2: Guardian and the Inquiries. The article said the inquiry is
Speaker 2: expected to hold hearings in every state and territory, and
Speaker 2: in particular to focus on regional and remote areas where
Speaker 2: Indigenous people are missing at higher numbers. Now that's an
Speaker 2: a fact that's included in the terms of reference, but
Speaker 2: that idea that there will be a focus on regional
Speaker 2: and remote areas because Indigenous people are going missing at
Speaker 2: higher numbers in this area is sort of accepted uncritically.
Speaker 2: But what we've found as we've researched these issue is
Speaker 2: that we have to interrogate absolutely everything we know about
Speaker 2: what is currently happening in Australia around the targeting of
Speaker 2: Aboriginal women for violence, and Martin, I just wanted to
Speaker 2: start by asking you that idea that Indigenous people are
Speaker 2: going missing at higher rates in regional and remote areas,
Speaker 2: is there any evidential basis for that or what have
Speaker 2: you found when looking at this issue.
Speaker 3: I think there's been a natural assumption in reporting and
Speaker 3: conversation that that's the fact. But as we've discussed over
Speaker 3: the years of doing this podcast, so much of the
Speaker 3: information on these issues is either simply not available or
Speaker 3: it's completely inaccurate. So a few weeks ago I wanted
Speaker 3: to sit down and try and crunch the numbers and
Speaker 3: work out what the truth was as best as we
Speaker 3: can understand it with what's available. And the AFP keeps
Speaker 3: the most comprehensive list of missing and potentially murdered people
Speaker 3: in Australia. What makes it a little bit difficult is
Speaker 3: they do not have a category for Indigenous people, so
Speaker 3: you have to go through every single individual to try
Speaker 3: and get an idea of basically whether the person is
Speaker 3: Aboriginal or not in the first place, and then start
Speaker 3: to look into their circumstances. But basically what I found
Speaker 3: was that if you remove historic cases we're talking some
Speaker 3: are back to the nineteen twenties, and if you remove
Speaker 3: the data from Australians who are missing overseas, you basically
Speaker 3: find that despite Aboriginal entirestrat island to people making up
Speaker 3: three point two percent of the population, more than twenty
Speaker 3: percent of women missing in Australia are Aboriginal. Then when
Speaker 3: you start to look at the individual cases, sixty percent
Speaker 3: of all those Aboriginal women who are missing are missing
Speaker 3: from an urban area. And the way I categorized an
Speaker 3: urban area was a town or city larger than twenty
Speaker 3: five thousand people. So this is not small towns, this
Speaker 3: is not really certainly not rural and remote, that's for sure.
Speaker 3: And that's sixty percent. So this idea, that article makes
Speaker 3: this statement, it's just it's actually factually incorrect when you
Speaker 3: start to dig down into the numbers, and I think
Speaker 3: it points to a bigger issue, which is that we
Speaker 3: don't have a data set of any kind from which
Speaker 3: to work. No one has ever taken the time and
Speaker 3: I think this is a huge failing of the Australian
Speaker 3: Federal Police, who have the resources and the information to
Speaker 3: do this, to sit down and work this out, and
Speaker 3: it's simply never been done. I mean the fact that
Speaker 3: they have listed in their database everything from eye color,
Speaker 3: hair color and things like that, but they don't have
Speaker 3: it listed whether the woman who is missing or forcibly
Speaker 3: disappeared is Aboriginal. There's nothing about their ethnicity. In fact,
Speaker 3: even more disturbing was there is a category for ethnicity,
Speaker 3: but it's never used for its Aboriginal people. And it
Speaker 3: seems to me that that is pure laziness because in
Speaker 3: a lot of the descriptive text in each individual's case file,
Speaker 3: they will list that the person is Aboriginal. So they
Speaker 3: simply just haven't gone and added it to the way
Speaker 3: they categorize people now. So for anyone whether it's a journalist,
Speaker 3: a student doing PhD work, the family members trying to
Speaker 3: raise more information, anyone who might have seen the person
Speaker 3: and gone and logged on to try and find is
Speaker 3: that person missing. It might be healthcare worker, someone in
Speaker 3: a hospital, someone at a women's refuge. They're actually making
Speaker 3: it very difficult for them to find who that person
Speaker 3: is that they may have seen or encountered. So yeah,
Speaker 3: there's a huge amount of issues in first the assumption,
Speaker 3: the lack of a data set, and then the way
Speaker 3: that data is being put together.
Speaker 2: And Marnin, I just wanted you to explain to our
Speaker 2: listeners that AFP data. What does it incorporate is that
Speaker 2: all missing persons reports across states and territories or when
Speaker 2: you're looking at it, what are these cases or who
Speaker 2: are these cases?
Speaker 3: Yes, so it includes nearly one thousand men, women, and
Speaker 3: children who are missing. To find the figure I did.
Speaker 3: What I did was first narrow it down to women.
Speaker 3: Basically there is no protocol as to how they maintain
Speaker 3: the list, but the majority of the people on the list,
Speaker 3: if you remove those who are missing overseas or the
Speaker 3: historical cases, are people who have been missing for a
Speaker 3: year or more in all states and territories.
Speaker 2: Which is so it's likely something has happened to them
Speaker 2: because they haven't been found for a certain length of time.
Speaker 2: Is that the suggestion?
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, absolutely, I think there is suspicion around their disappearance.
Speaker 3: As people know, ninety percent of cases are resolved very
Speaker 3: quickly and it usually involves either family finding the person,
Speaker 3: maybe a school, local law enforcement. But these are all
Speaker 3: cases that have been elevated to a national level because
Speaker 3: there has been no resolution and generally there is an
Speaker 3: element of suspicion as to how that person disappeared.
Speaker 2: And I just wanted to bring up for our listeners
Speaker 2: and many many people might notice that, you know, counting
Speaker 2: the numbers of disappeared Aboriginal women was central to understanding
Speaker 2: the severity of the crisis over in Canada when in
Speaker 2: twenty ten the Native Women's Association of Canada found five
Speaker 2: hundred and eighty two cases and that continued to rise
Speaker 2: through PhD research by Maryanne Pierce, and then the Royal
Speaker 2: Canadian Mountain Police had done a report and found one
Speaker 2: one hundred and eighty one cases. And I also wanted
Speaker 2: to raise the example of this was also the case
Speaker 2: in the Mexican border city of Sudad Jurez, where they
Speaker 2: began counting in nine ninety three, and so actually finding
Speaker 2: the numbers can illustrate the severity of the crisis. And
Speaker 2: yet we've started a national inquiry where we have no
Speaker 2: understanding of the data set. What does that mean for
Speaker 2: you know, the future of this inquiry mardinal or what
Speaker 2: sort of stepbacks does it pose for us when we
Speaker 2: just sort of I really feel we're in the initial
Speaker 2: stages of really understanding what is happening in this country
Speaker 2: around the active disappearing of Aboriginal women.
Speaker 3: I think there's one clear stand I mean, there's a
Speaker 3: lot of problems I think that stem when you start
Speaker 3: without knowing the basic facts and figures. But to me,
Speaker 3: a lot of it goes to that quote where it
Speaker 3: says that the majority are missing from rural and remote areas. Now,
Speaker 3: from my initial investigation, that's wrong, and so we start
Speaker 3: looking in the wrong areas. We are going to spend
Speaker 3: this whole inquiry and all this effort looking in the
Speaker 3: wrong place. Now, sure some benefit will come from it,
Speaker 3: but if we are not focusing on where the worst
Speaker 3: part of the problem is and understanding why if the
Speaker 3: assumption is wrong, what is making that assumption wrong? And
Speaker 3: also there is a disappearing of these Aboriginal women in
Speaker 3: the process. So if we already know that sixty percent
Speaker 3: are missing from urban areas, but the focus is on
Speaker 3: rural and remote, once again we are missing them in
Speaker 3: the work that is being done at a national level,
Speaker 3: and we are missing they are being forcibly disappeared and
Speaker 3: going missing the circumstances, and also, I think the commonality
Speaker 3: of what is going on here and if we miss that,
Speaker 3: then we will revisit this issue in a generation. Having
Speaker 3: watched the figures climb, And again, I think it's really
Speaker 3: important when we talk about all this that when we
Speaker 3: talk about facts and figures, we're talking about human beings,
Speaker 3: and we're talking about Aboriginal women who are missing, most
Speaker 3: likely deceased, and their families have absolutely no answers. There's
Speaker 3: never been any justice, and I don't think it's acceptable
Speaker 3: that we head down a path where we are potentially
Speaker 3: getting it so wrong and we are failing these women
Speaker 3: and we're failing their families because we haven't done the
Speaker 3: initial work and it's hard work to do, but it
Speaker 3: has to be done or we're just going to end
Speaker 3: up in the same place in thirty years time. And
Speaker 3: I think one thing we know from looking at a
Speaker 3: lot of these cases, speaking to the families is where
Speaker 3: and how they've been failed. And there's a lot of commonalities.
Speaker 3: And one of those commonalities starts at the very beginning
Speaker 3: of this podcast, when a solicitor in Rockhampton over the
Speaker 3: murder of Linda approached the police and the police officer replied,
Speaker 3: And this solicitor approached the police because someone had confessed
Speaker 3: to them, And the police officer replied, we've got a
Speaker 3: black for a black and that was in a town
Speaker 3: larger than twenty five thousand people. This is not rural
Speaker 3: and remote. This is the cops showing what they always do,
Speaker 3: no care about the truth, no care about getting justice.
Speaker 3: And from that we saw a family never get answers,
Speaker 3: never get justice, and the wrong man spend thirty year
Speaker 3: in prison for a crime he didn't commit. And that
Speaker 3: is the risk we take if we don't know what
Speaker 3: we're looking at when we begin.
Speaker 2: And I just wanted to draw more into that, Martin,
Speaker 2: because I know that we had You know, you and
Speaker 2: I both have been sort of working on individual cases
Speaker 2: and listening and understanding these stories before you began looking
Speaker 2: at the data set. And one of the things we
Speaker 2: sort of looked at and began I thought hypothesizing, was
Speaker 2: that a lot of Aboriginal women were being disappeared away
Speaker 2: from their home communities, and that was something we were
Speaker 2: just thinking through looking at the stories of the women.
Speaker 2: And I know you talked about this a lot. What
Speaker 2: did you find when you looked at that data set?
Speaker 2: Was that's something else that emerged through numbers?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Absolutely, I mean, and it's a very scary statistic,
Speaker 3: which is that so we have sixty percent of Aboriginal
Speaker 3: women going missing in urban areas in populations twenty five
Speaker 3: thousand people or more, but the vast, vast majority in
Speaker 3: excess of eighty percent. And I don't want to put
Speaker 3: a specific figure on it because the information that the
Speaker 3: AFP is limited in quite a number of cases, making
Speaker 3: determinations impossible. But at the minimum, we're talking about eighty
Speaker 3: percent of women disappearing from a community, a town, a
Speaker 3: city other than their own, and I think that is
Speaker 3: something far more illustrative of what's going on than whether
Speaker 3: they are been missing or forcibly disappeared from a rural
Speaker 3: and remote area, from a small town, a large town,
Speaker 3: or a city. Is that the women are away from home,
Speaker 3: away from their community. And I think this also goes
Speaker 3: to a lot of the reporting, and this is where
Speaker 3: we have to be super critical of the media, which
Speaker 3: is that the Four Corners report that came out relied
Speaker 3: very heavily on media reports. Well, that presupposes that the
Speaker 3: media even bothered to care about reports of a missing
Speaker 3: or murdered Aboriginal woman in their area now, particularly in
Speaker 3: anywhere outside of probably Sydney or Melbourne. But even then,
Speaker 3: the media ignore these examples all the time. So much
Speaker 3: of the media is just a copy and paste job
Speaker 3: of a police press release where the police barely speak
Speaker 3: to the families. So we're missing a huge amount of
Speaker 3: what's going on. And the reaction to that report by
Speaker 3: four corners from and you know, there's no point mincing
Speaker 3: around the right wing media. A number of well known
Speaker 3: racists like Andrew Bolt in the media was to shift
Speaker 3: the focus and start talking about dysfunction in Aboriginal communities. Well,
Speaker 3: the facts just don't bear it out. I mean, he
Speaker 3: was successfully sued over getting facts wrong and he's doing
Speaker 3: it once again, which is that you can't blame small
Speaker 3: Aboriginal communities when the facts very clearly show that sixty
Speaker 3: percent of the women who are missing or forcibly disappeared
Speaker 3: are going missing from large towns and cities, not Aboriginal communities,
Speaker 3: and at least eighty percent are going missing from a
Speaker 3: place that is not their community or their home. So
Speaker 3: once again we're seeing this the focus being directed by
Speaker 3: people with often ulterior motives and or ignorance, and it's
Speaker 3: shifting us to places where it's not that the facts
Speaker 3: just don't back it up. And again that means we
Speaker 3: run the risk of getting this very wrong if we
Speaker 3: listen to those people.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I would just like to add as well,
Speaker 2: like when we're talking about this AFP data, it's this
Speaker 2: police categorization of missing persons, So we're not looking even
Speaker 2: at the stories of Aboriginal women who have been found
Speaker 2: and who have been killed or whose deaths might not
Speaker 2: have even been investigated as potential commicides as well. So
Speaker 2: we're actually even just at the tip of the iceberg
Speaker 2: in understanding this. But already you've shown that where we're
Speaker 2: going or the common assumptions and how it's being reported
Speaker 2: is drastically different to what the reality actually is on
Speaker 2: the ground where you're having Aboriginal women vulnerable, particularly when
Speaker 2: they're away from their communities in urban centers. And I
Speaker 2: also wanted to ask about, you know, this link between
Speaker 2: criminalization and the victimization of Aboriginal women, like I see
Speaker 2: a direct continuum and often Aboriginal women are away from
Speaker 2: their communities because they have been criminalized, they've been incarcerated,
Speaker 2: and maybe they've just gotten out. So even though we've
Speaker 2: got this early data looking at the AFP, we've also
Speaker 2: got all of these other subsets we have to look
Speaker 2: at in what's happening, And it feels almost overwhelming because
Speaker 2: there is nothing at all in which to start interrogating
Speaker 2: what we're starting to see emerge from inquests and emerge
Speaker 2: from cases in their mind, and like, there's just you know,
Speaker 2: to me, it shows that Aberiginal women are incredibly vulnerable
Speaker 2: to perpetrators when they're away, you know. But we're just
Speaker 2: really at the beginning. And when you talk about four corners,
Speaker 2: and you know, you talk about the way that this
Speaker 2: issue is being reported on, focusing on family violence, the
Speaker 2: way that viting media are looking at it at three
Speaker 2: prisms of pathologization and dysfunction, it's taking us further and
Speaker 2: further and further away from actually understanding the core issues
Speaker 2: and what is making Aboriginal women vulnerable and what are
Speaker 2: these conditions of impunity and how are the police supporting
Speaker 2: those conditions and the state. So it just feels, you know,
Speaker 2: When you see that and you consider all the other
Speaker 2: factors that come into play, it feels really overwhelming, doesn't it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely, And I think it must be particularly overwhelming
Speaker 3: for the families watching this happen knowing that the discussion
Speaker 3: is taking place in a way that is completely different
Speaker 3: to what their experience is. And their experience is the experience.
Speaker 3: There isn't any other one that's it. They're the victims
Speaker 3: of all of this. They're the ones left behind without
Speaker 3: answers and everything you just said we can back up
Speaker 3: with facts. So this morning, to explain to our listeners,
Speaker 3: I shared a photo with Amy that was taken from
Speaker 3: a database of all missing women in the state of
Speaker 3: Queensland in a ten year period, and all the photos
Speaker 3: of the non Indigenous women are happy family photos, the
Speaker 3: sort of photos you would expect to be shared when
Speaker 3: a person goes missing. The photos shared by the police
Speaker 3: of the Aboriginal women, all of them in prison uniform. Now,
Speaker 3: I think immediately that tells you where the police attitude is.
Speaker 3: It also tells me, having worked on hundreds of missing
Speaker 3: persons cases, that they never asked the family for a
Speaker 3: photo because they didn't care. And so it goes to
Speaker 3: the dehumanization. It also shows us something very clear which
Speaker 3: goes to the fact that we're talking about Aboriginal women
Speaker 3: going missing from urban centers, which is that these three women,
Speaker 3: we know their cases quite well, we've spoken to i
Speaker 3: think between us all their families, that they had been
Speaker 3: heavily criminalized and not thought we're not talking about any
Speaker 3: serious crime, and the fact that they are still being
Speaker 3: criminalized in their disappearance and potential murder is really sick.
Speaker 3: And that dehumanization, I think goes into how the media
Speaker 3: reported how much effort the police go to, but also
Speaker 3: what it shows to us is how much danger they
Speaker 3: were put in by the state and by the police.
Speaker 3: So to give an example is that obviously if you've
Speaker 3: been in prison, and that's the photo they're going to use.
Speaker 3: What we also know is that many of these women
Speaker 3: are going missing relatively soon after they're being released. Because
Speaker 3: they're being released with no support, they're not able to
Speaker 3: return to their community. Many people from regional and remote
Speaker 3: areas are simply dumped in the city where they were
Speaker 3: serving their time, and this makes someone incredibly vulnerable. They've
Speaker 3: just gone through a very traumatic experience having been in prison,
Speaker 3: been away from their family, are now potentially in a
Speaker 3: city where they know nobody, They have no access to
Speaker 3: financial resources, they have no access to any support, and
Speaker 3: this is when predators swoop in. And I think this
Speaker 3: is the other thing that we have to address absolutely
Speaker 3: immediately that counters the narrative of both the ignorant and
Speaker 3: much of the right wing, which is that these murders
Speaker 3: are being carried out by other Aboriginal people. Well, in
Speaker 3: the three cases we're speaking about in Queensland, prime suspects
Speaker 3: have been identified. In all three, not a single one
Speaker 3: of those prime suspects is Aboriginal. They're all white. So
Speaker 3: this criminalization, the dehumanizing and then the making the person
Speaker 3: so vulnerable is putting them right into the clutches of
Speaker 3: violent criminals, white men. Let's be honest, in the cities
Speaker 3: of Australia, and that is an issue we're going to
Speaker 3: have to address and it's a hard one for a
Speaker 3: lot of people to face up to because suddenly city
Speaker 3: people are going to have to start taking responsibility for
Speaker 3: the murder of women that come from the bush and
Speaker 3: that sits very uncomfortably with a lot of people. But
Speaker 3: it also goes to something I think that's much deeper,
Speaker 3: which is what if these women had never been criminalized
Speaker 3: in the first place and removed from their families? How
Speaker 3: much consideration is a judge taking. You know, if we
Speaker 3: had a data set and as lawyers, we could stand
Speaker 3: there and say, your honor, are you really going to
Speaker 3: send an Aboriginal woman a thousand kilometers away from her
Speaker 3: family and her support because she stole something of value
Speaker 3: of less than fifty bucks? I mean, who cares? And
Speaker 3: not only are you sending them to prison where we
Speaker 3: know Aboriginal people die and are harmed constantly, but then
Speaker 3: upon their release into this city where they know nobody
Speaker 3: and have no support, they are at an enormous risk.
Speaker 3: And here's the data to show it. Are you willing
Speaker 3: to make that decision? Are you willing to risk their
Speaker 3: life both in custody and out over something so trivial.
Speaker 3: Maybe that's where the answer is. Maybe it lies with
Speaker 3: the police who made the charges in the first place
Speaker 3: over something so ridiculous. When we know the over policing
Speaker 3: of Aboriginal people ensures that Aboriginal people end up in
Speaker 3: courts on these stupid charges at percentages much higher than
Speaker 3: any other community in this country. And that begins the process.
Speaker 3: The police make the charge, the judge sends the woman
Speaker 3: to prison, and from there the data backs up the
Speaker 3: fact that with every act that the state, the police,
Speaker 3: and the courts take, that woman is increasingly vulnerable to predators.
Speaker 3: And this may just be the key fact that we
Speaker 3: have to begin to look at, and it's one that
Speaker 3: has been born out overseas, and it's one we might
Speaker 3: have to be willing to face because simply blaming dysfunctional
Speaker 3: Aboriginal communities is not going to cut it in twenty
Speaker 3: twenty two. You will not get away with it. The
Speaker 3: data doesn't support it, the facts don't support it, and
Speaker 3: lives will continue to be lost if that's the narrative
Speaker 3: that gets pushed.
Speaker 2: But I just wonder as you talk about that might
Speaker 2: and because I've seen that operate so clearly in some
Speaker 2: of the cases I've looked at which police are looking
Speaker 2: at Aboriginal women as wanted persons and failing to search
Speaker 2: for them when they're missing persons, failing, not even failing,
Speaker 2: refusing to. But as you talk about that, I just
Speaker 2: think of how data is so often used against Aboriginal people,
Speaker 2: because even in the coronial process, you see that in
Speaker 2: cases where Aboriginal women have been disappeared, there is a
Speaker 2: keen focus still on dysfunction, so they will focus in
Speaker 2: on addiction or they're focusing on the criminalization and not
Speaker 2: look at in ways that obscure the very idea or
Speaker 2: presence of a perpetrator. And in all of these cases,
Speaker 2: no one has been charged as well, which people have
Speaker 2: to know. No one has been charged in relation to
Speaker 2: these disappearances or when Aboriginal women are found murdered, no
Speaker 2: one has been charged in the cases we've looked at.
Speaker 2: So as well as acknowledging that the data SOT hasn't
Speaker 2: been collected, I also worry about the way data will
Speaker 2: be collected and is the AFP or the police authorities
Speaker 2: the right people to do it given that they failed
Speaker 2: to do it or refuse to do it now, Because
Speaker 2: when you look at the structure of Australia, like it's
Speaker 2: all set up on disappearance, you know what I mean,
Speaker 2: it's all set up on explaining this and fusing to
Speaker 2: understand what's actually happening. So I wonder in collecting data
Speaker 2: how that can be done in a way that doesn't
Speaker 2: further reperpetrate or further silence what's actually happening, because I
Speaker 2: see the justices and the way the courts are working
Speaker 2: with the way the police are working, they don't want
Speaker 2: this to come out, you know, Like in all of
Speaker 2: the inquiries I've looked at, you know, when the issue
Speaker 2: of whether any of the police officers knew about the
Speaker 2: Canadian Inquiry, for an example, only one knew who was
Speaker 2: an expert in search and rescue. None of the police
Speaker 2: officers are actually known or seemed confused when the issue
Speaker 2: of specifically racism and sexual racism and how Aboriginal women
Speaker 2: are target are brought up, you know. So I just
Speaker 2: wonder how there's a way that data can be collected
Speaker 2: that actually exposes a lot of what we are seeing
Speaker 2: right now.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think this goes to the broader issue that
Speaker 3: the culprits are not going to provide us with many answers,
Speaker 3: and because the police are in part the culprits, then
Speaker 3: really they're not best place to give us any answers,
Speaker 3: even answers on data. So I think one thing the
Speaker 3: inquiry really has to look at is impaneling an Aboriginal
Speaker 3: expert group that can take the lead on this because
Speaker 3: as you mentioned before. When an Aboriginal woman is wanted
Speaker 3: on a warrant, the police will bend over backwards and
Speaker 3: put all their resources into finding that woman. When the
Speaker 3: Aboriginal woman goes missing, they do absolutely nothing. Just from
Speaker 3: my experience working with Foreign Prisoner Support Service finding Australians
Speaker 3: missing overseas, there is an enormous effort you go to
Speaker 3: in understanding the person that's missing, everything from who they are,
Speaker 3: their vulnerabilities, perhaps any illnesses they may have, people who
Speaker 3: might have threatened the been abusive to them in the past.
Speaker 3: You spend a huge amount of time with the families
Speaker 3: and then there is these protocols that you go through
Speaker 3: with Interpol with local police and it's a very well
Speaker 3: mapped oubt process and it's quite a successful one, given
Speaker 3: that a person is often missing in a country where
Speaker 3: they don't speak the language, where we as those people
Speaker 3: looking for them, don't speak the language of the local authorities,
Speaker 3: and yet we are able to overcome a lot of
Speaker 3: that because there is a genuine care to find this
Speaker 3: person that's missing. Well, clearly in Australia that's not the
Speaker 3: case when it comes to missing and murdered Aboriginal women
Speaker 3: and tasked with that job is the police, and they've
Speaker 3: failed and looking at the cases we have and speaking
Speaker 3: to the families, the police never sit down with the
Speaker 3: families and ask them the questions that we would ask,
Speaker 3: because there's things about someone that might tell you where
Speaker 3: they go, where they would most likely go for help,
Speaker 3: where if they'd been assaulted and they were confused and disorientated.
Speaker 3: What are the sort of questions you could ask that
Speaker 3: person to properly and positively identify them and immediately get
Speaker 3: the family to them to get decent photos of someone,
Speaker 3: not rely on criminalized images. None of that is ever done.
Speaker 3: In fact, simple things like just checking the local hospitals
Speaker 3: is never done. So if police officers don't care enough
Speaker 3: to even check a hospital to see if a person
Speaker 3: has been assaulted or had an accident prior in the
Speaker 3: immediate time after they've gone missing, then I don't think
Speaker 3: we can rely on them for anything. And quite frankly,
Speaker 3: this is where perhaps the Inquiry has to be willing
Speaker 3: to push them aside and come up with the funding
Speaker 3: to impanel aboriginal experts who can look at this, because
Speaker 3: we know the institutions that exist don't care about the
Speaker 3: humanity of Aboriginal people, and if you don't care about
Speaker 3: their humanity, you'll never put in the work to find
Speaker 3: the solutions