Northern Territory domestic violence inquiry resumes
A warning, the next story contains details of domestic and family violence that some viewers may find distressing, as well as the name of an indigenous person who has died. The Northern Territory coroner's long running inquiry into domestic violence will enter one of its last weeks today. Kumarn Rubuntja, as she is known for cultural reasons, was a well-known anti domestic violence campaigner and advocate for survivors. She was murdered by her partner in the carpark of the Alice Springs Hospital in 2021.
Transcript
00:00 The murder of Ms. Rubunshia was perhaps one of the most highly publicised deaths in the
00:07 Northern Territory in recent years and perhaps in part because of the cruelty in the way
00:12 her life was taken. Ms. Rubunshia was killed, as you said, in the car park of the Alice
00:17 Springs Hospital in January of 2021. Her partner, Malcolm Abbott, used his car as a weapon and
00:24 Ms. Rubunshia was killed just metres from the emergency ward here in Alice Springs.
00:32 She was, as you said, well known for her advocacy in Central Australia. She was an advocate
00:38 for victim survivors. She was an anti-violence campaigner. She had recently travelled to
00:43 Canberra to highlight the issue of domestic and family violence that we're now seeing
00:48 unraveled in the coroner's court. Ms. Rubunshia's partner, Malcolm Abbott, pleaded guilty to
00:54 her murder in 2022 when he was jailed for life for taking hers. And so the coroner will
01:01 spend the next five days here in Alice Springs examining the circumstances of her death as
01:07 part of this wider inquiry into the Northern Territory's domestic violence crisis.
01:13 The coroner began the inquiry in June. What has she uncovered over the past few weeks
01:18 and months about the Territory's domestic violence crisis?
01:22 Well, I feel like we've been reporting these statistics almost every day for the last few
01:30 weeks, but the numbers really do just highlight the depth of this issue. We've heard in the
01:35 coroner's court that the rate of domestic violence related homicide in the Northern
01:40 Territory is seven times the national average. And we know that Aboriginal women are killed
01:46 at almost 13 times the rate of non-Indigenous women. The Northern Territory police have
01:53 told the coroner over the last few weeks and months that they've recorded a 117% increase
02:00 in domestic violence reports over the past decade. And they expect that in the next 10
02:05 years, that's going to continue to increase by another 73%. We've really been hearing
02:11 from all of these frontline services about how overburdened and under-resourced they
02:17 really are. Police have said that they're struggling to respond to the number of domestic
02:22 violence call-outs that they're getting each and every day. We know that women's shelters
02:27 are turning women away every single day. We've even heard from Corrections last week, who
02:36 spoke about the rehabilitation programs that are available to prisoners and that sometimes
02:41 they have to really restrict who they're able to deliver some of those programs to because
02:47 of the demand for them. The coroner has said herself that it seems that some of these rehabilitation
02:54 programs are seemingly ineffective. And she's told the court that we really can't continue
03:01 responding to the rates of domestic and family violence in the Northern Territory without
03:06 radical change to the approach.
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