Is it cynical to interview a politician and expect they won’t have a deep understanding of the issue you’re there to discuss? Or to expect that the issue itself doesn’t matter to them, beyond being a topic on which to score points and push opinion polls?
Is it not being cynical enough, if by the end of the interview, you believe all your expectations were wrong?
Perhaps cynicism comes too easily to those of us who consume too much political media. Either way it was jarring to talk to Bill Shorten about Labor’s domestic violence policy and see in him a very well-informed, carefully considered approach, and an absolute determination to effect real change.
Neither was I expecting the difference in how he is in person to how he comes across in the media. I can see why he’s having trouble cutting through on TV. He has an air of restraint that, face to face, comes across as thoughtful attentiveness. On camera that gets washed out and he seems passionless.
When we are looking for a politician to stand up and fight for the things we believe in, passionless restraint doesn’t cut the mustard. But the person I saw in my interview was very different to the one I’ve been seeing on TV over the last few years.
On the wider spectrum, Labor has lost credibility on some of the issues that matter to progressive voters; and it would be too easy to disappear down all those rabbit holes in an interview. Asylum seekers. Housing affordability. Tax reform. Health care. Education. Giving the state the power and money to do what they need to do. Politics. Opinion polls. Leadership battles. The rabbit holes just become a connecting series of sinkholes. A conga line of sinkholes, if you will.
So before anyone jumps into the comments to ask why I didn’t challenge him on any of those issues, I was there only to discuss Labor’s policy on family violence, and to do it in detail. So that’s all I did. This time.
Shorten has a strong record on domestic violence, and he talks about it with a genuine understanding of its complexities, not just as someone who’s been well briefed on the talking points.
Long before Rosie Batty brought it to the forefront of public consciousness, he was saying it should be a national issue; and it was the first policy he announced after he won the leadership
He explained the reason for this:
“Family violence is one I deliberately started off with, because when I was running for the leadership I said we needed to be a braver party and we need to talk about some of the taboos.”
“Ken Lay helped educate me about it, and I have some understanding of some of these issues through friends and personal engagements, seeing the cost of family violence.”
“We’re not doing this to win votes – although we’re happy to challenge the liberals to have better policies on family violence – it’s a priority.”
“I think if you want women to be treated equally in society you have to recognise there can be no clearer form of unequal treatment than the abuse and murder of women.”
He is unequivocal in saying, as he has before, that Gillard’s changes to the sole parent pension went too far, and that he is working with Jenny Macklin to wind that back those cuts and give sole parents a basic level of safety without overwhelming the welfare system.
He also didn’t equivocate on talking about family violence as a gendered issue. While we all know that men also suffer in family violence, it is overwhelmingly women who the victims and Shorten fully recognised that.
“Fundamentally, for me, domestic violence is a gender inequality issue, it’s a gender issue, it’s about power.”
Labor’s policy promises an initial funding increase of $72million over three years, directed at targeted legal services, improving home safety and perpetrator mapping. Shorten confirmed that “Initial funding” meant there will be more, but he doesn’t know a specific figure yet.
“The cuts to legal aid in particular I think have been dreadful. The idea that women can go into the system on their own is unacceptable. So you’ve got to work out the best way to make sure there is support there. That’s got to be the challenge and it’s got to be more than $72 million”
“..but you’ve got to get your principles right and the principles start with the idea that you can’t have people coping in the domestic violence system on their own, so you’ve got to be able to guarantee a safety net of support.”
“I think community legal services are pretty amazing, that’s where I think we can reinvest with them. Legal aid is also important. This is the front line.”
“But the immediate issue is that people are already in trouble and we need to be helping them to put their lives back together again. So that goes to the issue of refuges, and also what happens after the first 4 -6 weeks, and then more long term accommodation.”
“For me they’re some of the more immediate issues, but if I believe it’s a gender inequality issue, which I do, then a holistic response is required, which is also things like changing the attitudes of kids in school, and providing workplace support.”
One of the problems for government in dealing with family violence is the disparate services it requires. There are huge complexities in combining those services for victims without streamlining to the point that expertise is lost, as it was in New South Wales when specific services for women fleeing domestic violence were folded into general services for the homeless.
“Traditionally States have had responsibility for housing, but I think we can do good work there. Governments make choices and priorities. I think sitting down with the States to work through how we help emergency and post emergency accommodation for victims of family violence would be just one of the priorities.”
“It’s got to be a person centred approach. Ideally, the person at the centre should have one entry point to the system, one person to go to who can be front of house to deal with them. Then the one person who the victim deals with undertakes the search costs, negotiates the labyrinth and the maze of the departments for them. That’s how it should work.”
“We also need to look at the family law system. Where I think more need to be done is where the child might not be the direct recipient of violence, but if they witnesses dad hurting mum, that’s violence, that’s abuse. I think that should be more articulated in family law matters. It’s one thing to protect children from direct violence, but there’s also indirect violence and that scars children, so I think that’s an important discussion to have with our family law system.”
“And that’s one of the reasons you want to keep mum at home and have dad move out. Otherwise the kids have to change schools and they all have go through so much upheaval. Kids aren’t snow domes, you can’t just flip them around and put them back and they all resettle easily.”
As the hearings at the Victorian Royal Commission into Family Violence have so clearly demonstrated, Shorten is right, there is a serious lack of communication between the various services available (or that should be available) to women in need of help.
He’s proposing a national crisis summit, to pull together not just the state and federal governments, but all the service providers across the country, armed with the information already accumulated by the taskforce in Queensland, and the Royal Commission in Victoria.
“I think a summit would, not reinvent the wheel , but hear the voices of the survivors, the states, the police, the experts, the feds, all in the same room at the same time and then it’s a matter of picking the priorities, and creating political space where both parties say yep, this is mandatory that we both have these policies.”
“It’s not a matter of replacing the states, it’s a matter of supporting the states. I don’t come from a Big Brother knows best attitude to federal/state relations. States are good at delivering programs.”
Shorten is also very clear that he has the full support of the party on this issue:
“…people will back me, no question. There’s been a lot of work done. In particular, but not exclusively, by women members of parliament. Jenny Macklin, Tanya [Plibersek], Clare Moore, Tim Watts. There’s plenty of people who are really strong here, I’ve got a lot of backing on this.”
“We need to also win the argument that what really drives family violence isn’t alcohol, it isn’t ethnicity, it isn’t poverty. They may all exacerbate problems, but the real issue is gender inequality. It’s a power thing. Money and power.”
“Equal treatment of women, to me, is not a marginal issue or a population group or a portfolio where you go through the substance of an issue or the economy, and you say ‘oh, we’ll see if it affects women too’.”
“If this country did nothing else in the next 10 years but treated women equally, well, the country would just be rich – in all senses of the word.”
“My point is not that you just view the contribution of women through economic measurements alone, but if you get equal treatment it’s a rising tide that lifts all boats. And equal treatment means respect for the caring role. Not everyone has to be an economic participant in the paid sense, but everyone’s participation has to be valued.”
“Domestic violence, to me, is the apex of inequality.”
Habitual cynicism makes it difficult to believe a politician’s promises, but I do believe Shorten’s commitment to addressing domestic violence. Time will tell whether he is able to implement any of these plans, but for those of us who want to see real action on domestic violence, Shorten is not just the only option, he’s actually a pretty good one.
Domestic violence may not be the issue that decides an election, but after Abbott, in one of the more perfidious moments of recent memory, took a photo op with Rosie Batty while defunding domestic violence services, it’s definitely an area where Labor is streets ahead of the government. And in a close election, that just might be enough to tip them over the edge.