This has cultivated a toxic virus in our hearts called apathy.
Anger catalyses action and apathy freezes, protects the status quo and halts systemic progress.
Australia, the final colony. One of the wealthiest Country’s in the world and the only Western liberal democracy without a national treaty or recognition of first nations people written into the constitution or a Federal Human Rights Act.
Our Australian democracy is performative only. Laws written and re-written to uphold the entitled rights of men. Women and children treated as second class citizens since British Westminster colonisation of Australia. Systems and processes that appear on paper as providing a pathway that ensures our basic human rights. What’s the point? What can you do? Shit happens. Look after yourself first. As long as my families alright. Head down, bum up…keep working and lay low.
I absorbed the emotional fallout of repeated breaches to my daughter’s rights under the Charter of Human Rights and Responsibilities Act 2006 in her short life. She was 2 weeks off turning 20.
The administrative burden of attempting to uphold our pretend rights requires you to keep a paper trail and engage in a hierarchical chain to eventually reach the Ombudsman or Commissioner. This takes hours of work and is still my part time job even in Isla’s death.
The backlog of complaints so long that people no longer have the capacity to engage due to trauma symptoms or choose to disengage to protect there health.
If you make it to the Commissioners and Ombudsman, you’re told they have no power or any agency be it the OPP, Police, educational and health institutions to adopt any recommendations anyway. Traumatised adults, let alone children, are further traumatised by the lack of care and accountability; often feeling so defeated and worthless that they give up on living.
A wealthy, first world country in 2026 that has citizens begging for dignity, respect, health and safety. We have a National Plan to end gendered violence by 2032 yet the Federal Government put the Centrelink payment back down to $400 a week, well below poverty line after covid. I had never had more money in my life and worked less than during the Vic pandemic lockdowns. I had breathing space to be more a Mum and not my daughter’s case manager. This was the first time that a DV payment was even introduced, only 6 years ago!
How about permanently raising the payment to above poverty line to afford us our basic human right to health, safety and housing, to give us our autonomy to try to get ourselves to safety?
Back then the systems had hearts of compassion and housed the homeless, only to turf them back out onto the streets post pandemic.
– Justine Spokes
