Joint Standing Committee on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs - Brisbane, QLD (part 2 of 2)
28 July 2026
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Joint Standing Committee on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs Australian Parliament
00:00 - 03:49
Speaker 9
The acronym is a very proud aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community controlled organization, and importantly, in the context through which I speak today, a family violence prevention and legal service provider, an FEPLS. Our mission and goal within the ambit of being an ACCO and an FEPLS is to provide culturally safe legal assistance and holistic support to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander victim survivors of domestic, family, and sexual violence across our regions here in Queensland. What we see, in our work, and it was remiss of me to start by ignoring the fact that I sit here as a visitor, through my Torres Strait Islander heritage on the beautiful lands of the Yugger and Turrbal peoples. It's important to note that. It's important not to forget because part of what you have been tasked to do through the terms of reference is to examine truth and identity.
And these are uncomfortable things when we talk about race and the place of aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in this country in 2026 and beyond. It is an important segue that you are all tasked to examine and penultimately report on. In the context of what our ACCO does, domestic and family violence is often the point at which Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people come into contact with systems. They being policing, child protection, housing health, and penultimately the justice system. Through our work, we see how racism compounds the impacts of domestic and family violence and creates additional barriers to safety, legal protection, and ultimately justice in whatever form justice takes to meet the needs of victim survivors.
For our clients, racism is rarely experienced as a single incident. It is often cumulative, occurring across multiple institutions and influencing whether they feel safe to seek help, whether they are believed or whether they receive the protection they require. We encourage and I should add before jumping across into my key messaging. The overarching tenor of our submissions, which you have before you is this, racism is not merely a social harm to be managed at the margins of policy. For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, it is structural, intersectional, and cumulative.
It shapes who discloses domestic and family violence, who is believed, who is protected, And who bears the cost penultimately when systems fail? It determines the conditions in which Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children grow up. The likelihood that they will come into contact with the child safety system or the youth justice system and inevitably the criminal justice system and the probability that they will face those systems without the culturally safe support that could change their trajectory and life outcomes. We urge the committee to approach this inquiry as an opportunity to name what the evidence already shows. That racism, overt, structural and institutional, is a driver domestic and family violence, a barrier to justice and a mechanism by which the disadvantage of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples is reproduced across generations.
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