As an Aboriginal woman, I can tell you that our community hears a lot of bad news.
It was 25 November, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. The Morrison government decided the best way to honour that important day on the international calendar was to cut funding to the National Family Violence Prevention and Legal Services Forum, our national voice for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women who are survivors of family violence. It represents 13 services across this country. It provides a shield, a force, for those who have neither.
It’s important to let the Australian public know exactly what our force for good does. It’s true, we speak up and we speak out. But we do more, much more, than that.
Our forum builds a national community to strengthen family violence prevention. We work together to build our community’s capacity to confront – and then deal with - all the challenges we face. Our biggest challenge is the limited funding we receive; our services must find new and innovative ways to fund our work. The national forum develops strategies and then templates to apply for that funding. It’s a waste of time for each service to have to start from the ground up. Together we build the ground and raise us all up.
We explain how to engage with – and lobby – our local members of parliament. Just a few months ago we supported our three members in Western Australia to meet with Legal Aid WA and state government ministers. It was a perfect opportunity to explain to our state politicians exactly what our specialist Aboriginal community-controlled family violence prevention and legal services do to support Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander survivors of family violence, especially our women and children. These conversations are about our visibility within the bureaucracies of states and territories so we have a place at the table when it comes to family violence and so we are front-of-mind when funding becomes available for family violence prevention and safety of women and children.
We also helped our members to be able to talk to the media. It’s one thing to tell politicians but the broader Australian community should also understand the work we do. That’s why we develop social media skills among all those who work in our services. Our women must be visible.
Every year we hold our face-to-face meeting for members as an opportunity to bring politicians in. Ken Wyatt, who is now minister for Indigenous Australians, attended in 2015, as did the then minister for Indigenous affairs, Nigel Scullion, in 2017. Our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander social justice commissioner, June Oscar, has attended to share the work of the Australian Human Rights Commission. And each year representatives of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet have attended to share their knowledge and understandings. We have also hosted the Department of Social Services in the government’s development of the third and fourth national action plans to reduce violence against women and their children.
This is vital for relationship building and for funding opportunities. We can’t do our work without funding.
We organise training for members – in the past we have done some financial training, provided templates for strategic planning for members. Not one of our members receives any funding to build strategic plans but this is the only way forward to build strong violence-prevention strategies. As a national peak body, this gathering also provides us with the opportunity to forward plan for the next 12 months. It’s not only our chief executives and coordinators that benefit from these gatherings – our principal legal officers and other lawyers often attend and this provides an opportunity for sharing of casework practices and arranging continuing professional development training.
In a climate where our work has seen no funding increase in six years, not even in line with the consumer price index, it’s vital to share what we know. That helps keep costs down, even as demand for our work increases.
Our member QIFVLS in Cairns shared its “evidence pack” for the difficult community legal centre accreditation process. It’s a step-by-step process to help services understand the mandatory system and it includes all the policies and procedures. Djirra in Victoria developed a legal practice guide. These resources are all shared through the member-only resources portal.
We develop all these resources to make it possible for our services to concentrate on doing their core work – working with victim/survivors of family violence. We work with members to develop capacity, to have excellent governance, to develop our professional expertise. We do training. And above all we collect data and evaluate so we know we are on the right track. We get a lot of external coverage but we have even bigger internal impact.
This is why, when we meet with the minister for Indigenous Australians on 6 February, we will call on him to support our national voice with additional resourcing. We all work better together. We call upon the minister to recognise our united voice, to honour our efforts to speak together, not separately.
We punch way above our weight. And we want to keep going, not just for us, but for every single Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander victim of family violence.
Every woman. Every child. For our families, for our communities, for just $244,000. But we need more. #saveFVPLS
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