all assembled at court on Monday morning, waiting to hear what our protective concerns were.
My husband Jon always says DHHS social workers are called ‘workers’ because they don’t do any work, reminiscent of his experience of some staff in the ministry of education. Certainly, I saw managers there condone a culture of cover up and then a sort of lackadaisical departmental malaise sets in. Mix that together with severe lack of funding and you get unallocated files and excuses. Too often parties are assembled at court but nothing substantive happens as court reports aren’t written in time and the “workers” are away or the file is 'unallocated.' In the meantime, parties are assembled together at court, their stress and anger rising by the minute while they often wait for nothing to happen. Bureaucracy, red tape, laziness, entrenched departmental thinking, belligerence hiding incompetence, nepotism – out comes the armour whenever I see it! And whenever I get tired, I think of how tired my clients are and where they would be without me, and then I’m not tired anymore.
I saw private lawyers rort the system, only working substantively on a matter once they’d used up the number of paid adjournments permissible under VLA guidelines. My aim to help stop further stolen generations of Aboriginal children was far from fulfilled too, to the point of near absolute failure. I know Rudd and Morrison have both said ‘Sorry’, but I don’t often see ‘Sorry’ in action in the Children’s Court despite politically correct policy like ‘Aboriginal Placement Principles.’ The shocking findings of the Royal Commission into the Detention and Protection of Children in the Northern Territory strongly supports the reality of my experience.
At times during my career I have had lies made up about me and brick walls built in front of me every time I get close to the truth of my client matters. All that does is let me know I’m on the right track. I’m not perturbed! This is what happens to injustice collectors though, we are silenced just like our clients. Apparently, my clients are attention seekers and I am a trouble-making bleeding heart. Whatever! We fight on, marching on the road to truth but at times I do see glimmers of hope. However, I am sick of seeing the investigative journalists doing the job that police do so poorly and then see the cold case reopened through media shaming or the long-criticised ‘trial by media.’ But truly, I still wonder how a 25-year-old journalist can solve a cold case that an entire police department couldn't for 40 years, and again and again? It’s ridiculously telling. Without the media there would often be no charges let alone a trial.
Over time, some of my clients trusted journalists more than they did me as their lawyer, which says a lot about the law, not me. As their lawyer I was stymied by draconian laws and procedures. The police, well that’s another story all together. Many cops don’t like me and in one high-profile case imposed great pressure and undue influence on my clients to stay away from me, their lawyer, during pre-trial court hearings in relation to a significant trial, to the detriment of the police complainants and their families. What is puzzling is that some victims and their family members still complemented the police on their work and stated that they were not upset with the police withdrawing the charges when the matter was dropped, which to me screams of self-preservation, not the truth. These responses are simply unfathomable to me and I believe are not in the victims’ best interests, nor is it a true reflection of how the majority of victims really feel when the police case fails, whether it fails in the High Court or back at the start in the Magistrates’ Court.
As discussed in Doli Incapax, I also wait for our scientists to invent the vaccine against male violence and then for the government to put this drug on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme. Surely, I’m not the only one sick of hearing about the death and mutilation of women and children by men on the news each week and sometimes each day. Surely men have worked out that there’s something wrong with many of them genetically that gives rise to the alarming code-red-alert statistics and their unfailing ability to just “snap” in an instant?
The fabricated client stories that follow certainly reveal a sad trajectory for the protective mother, the abused wife, and the gutsy girl! Legal whistle-blowers like me cannot afford to stop making noise because it’s worse than ever and there’s nothing ever “vanilla” about sexual assault, as Part 1 will reveal.
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