Over the past year ABC News has been investigating the complex relationship between religion and domestic violence, and asking: Are religious attitudes or teachings ever used by abusers to justify intimate partner violence? 

Do particular scriptures or religious cultures encourage or allow women in faith communities to remain in abusive relationships? What is the role of faith leaders — the priest, imam or rabbi? 

And, given no group is immune from the existence of domestic abuse, and one in four Australian women experience intimate partner violence in their lifetime, with at least one woman killed by a current or former partner every week, how are faith communities in Australia responding to evidence of intimate partner violence in their midst? 

In part one of this series, on Islam, we found confusion about whether the Koran allows Muslim men to physically discipline their wives, and that many Australian Imams are risking women's lives by counselling them to remain in abusive marriages.

In part two, we have been examining the Christian Church, which nominally includes 52 per cent of the Australian population. 

Having conducted more than 200 interviews with domestic violence survivors, social workers, clergy, church staff and theologians, we found many women have been told to submit to — and forgive — abusive husbands and endure violent behaviour. 

Counsellors and survivors report that biblical verses, particularly in many Protestant churches, are often misused to justify abuse. 

In response, the Anglican Church of Australia formally apologised to domestic violence victims who it acknowledged had been let down by church leaders and teachings, while the Uniting Church Synod of Victoria and Tasmania pledged to redouble its efforts to address family violence — including by promoting gender equality — in church communities. 

The Anglican Diocese of Sydney also voted unanimously to apologise for times it had failed victims of domestic abuse, as well as to adopt a comprehensive policy for responding well to violence among church members and leaders. 

But what about the Catholic Church, the largest Christian denomination in Australia, to which almost a quarter of Australians say they belong? 

Of course, for most Catholics, marriage is a positive and fulfilling union that brings couples intimacy, joy and a sense of wellbeing. 

It should be, but even the Pope has called on his Church to eliminate the "shameful ill-treatment" of women. And these questions remain: Do certain Catholic conventions or cultures exacerbate domestic violence, or stymie the Church's response to it? 

Do any diminish women, or protect them? Are women being heard?

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-11-04/cross-to-bear-catholic-church-domestic-abuse/8680158?nw=0&r=HtmlFragment

The PM set the tone once again by prioritising his personal needs ahead of lockdown regulations and above people with dying relatives or ill children by taking an unannounced taxpayer-funded VIP flight home for Father’s Day.

Morrison also decided to use the hastily cobbled together National Summit on Women’s Safety to promote himself – again – taking on the role of first keynote speaker to give an unsurprisingly underwhelming speech.

And, for the pièce de résistance, as the PM and prominent misogynist David Koch addressed the Summit, arguably the least qualified woman in the country to head up a role dedicated to equality, Lorraine Finlay, was appointed Human Rights Commissioner.

But hey, at least it’s a woman, right?

All in all, several small PR steps for the Morrison Government, numerous giant leaps backwards for women everywhere.

Like most things championed by this Prime Minister, the Women’s Safety Summit was hastily cobbled together following criticism of the Morrison Government’s misogyny and mishandling of, well, all things to do with women.

As sexual assault survivor and Australian of the Year Grace Tame put it:

What we’ve seen in this Government is a clear pattern of denial, minimisation, ultimately dismissal of women’s issues.

You’ve got Brittany Higgins, Christine Holgate, Julia Banks; clouds of mystery and immorality around Christian Porter.

Really, this Summit is an extension of that. It’s been so poorly organised, it’s incredibly secretive, it’s also very exclusionary. It has a comically narrow remit – focusing on what are the little band-aids we can put on this situation – to make it hopefully go away.

The Summit descended into a tokenistic exercise in the marketing and promotion of empty slogans. 

Morrison snaffling the role of keynote speaker was just plain inappropriate, if not an outright insult, and is just the icing on the cake of his litany of transgressions towards women.

The PM feigned ignorance when the alleged workplace assault of Brittany Higgins in Parliament House became public knowledge and then announced an in-house investigation, which has dragged on behind closed doors and is yet to be finalised.

Morrison blatantly refused to address rape allegations against former Attorney-General Christian Porter, didn’t even bother to read the dossier sent to him by the alleged (now-deceased) victim and declared Porter innocent without an inquiry of any kind.

And then there’s the matter of the Sex Discrimination Commissioner Kate Jenkins' Respect@Work: Sexual Harassment National Inquiry Report (2020) report which sat idle on Morrison's desk for over a year before his Government finally agreed to adopt just six of the 55 recommendations.

But back to the Summit.

If Morrison’s keynote address wasn’t enough of an insult, Brittany Higgins, the woman who inspired the Summit, wasn’t even invited. Neither was Rosie Batty.

Sunrise host David Koch was invited, though – and even asked to give an address – most likely due to his many previous “helpful” attitudes towards women such as:

• telling breastfeeding women to be “classy” and “more discreet”;
• organising a stripper pole for his co-host on national television as he stared at her shoes and announced they were “reflective”;
• alleging “men work harder than women”; and
• claiming “…man flu is real … because women go to bed and get over it and men just keep moving and going on and working”, before concluding this deep insight with ‘men “rarely whinge and moan” about being sick’.

Greens Senator Larissa Waters described the Women's Safety Summit (in a media release) as:

'...yet another exercise in political theatre for a Government that remains completely out of touch with Australian women.'

Senator Waters said:

'An evidence-based, properly funded, comprehensive National Plan is crucial to stopping violence against women. But it’s clear from today that the Morrison Government just wants a showpiece summit and a National Plan for Trying to Win Back Women Voters.'

Labor Senator Penny Wong said:

'The Women’s Safety Summit can’t just be another exercise in political management from the Morrison Government. Mr Morrison has to take responsibility for turning talk into action - and if he wanted to, he could start right now.'

Senator Wong also listed the following items as a starting point for action:

• housing for women escaping violence; 
• paid domestic violence leave; 
• legal services for victim-survivors;
• support for female temporary visa holders fleeing violence; and
• proper implementation of the Respect@Work report.

Finally, the appointment of Lorraine Finlay as Human Rights Commissioner – a move labelled by abuse survivor Grace Tame as “grave, grave mistake” – once again underpins the lack of regard by this Government for the hard-fought small steps towards women’s safety and the prevention of sexual violence.

Finlay has publicly opposed affirmative consent laws, which require that consent before sex be actively sought and communicated — a position that simply beggars belief.

Finlay has also aligned herself with men’s rights activist Bettina Ardnt, who has openly and publicly sympathised with the twice-convicted paedophile who repeatedly raped Grace Tame when she was just 15 years old.

In his perfunctory keynote Summit address, Morrison called the epidemic of violence against women “a national shame”, which is absolutely true, of course, but no one is buying his confected sudden interest.

Read more:

https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/morrison-finlay-and-a-tame--but-not-tame-enough-womens-summit,15495

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The PM set the tone once again by prioritising his personal needs ahead of lockdown regulations and above people with dying relatives or ill children by taking an unannounced taxpayer-funded VIP flight home for Father’s Day.

Morrison also decided to use the hastily cobbled together National Summit on Women’s Safety to promote himself – again – taking on the role of first keynote speaker to give an unsurprisingly underwhelming speech.

And, for the pièce de résistance, as the PM and prominent misogynist David Koch addressed the Summit, arguably the least qualified woman in the country to head up a role dedicated to equality, Lorraine Finlay, was appointed Human Rights Commissioner.

But hey, at least it’s a woman, right?

All in all, several small PR steps for the Morrison Government, numerous giant leaps backwards for women everywhere.

Like most things championed by this Prime Minister, the Women’s Safety Summit was hastily cobbled together following criticism of the Morrison Government’s misogyny and mishandling of, well, all things to do with women.

As sexual assault survivor and Australian of the Year Grace Tame put it:

What we’ve seen in this Government is a clear pattern of denial, minimisation, ultimately dismissal of women’s issues.

You’ve got Brittany Higgins, Christine Holgate, Julia Banks; clouds of mystery and immorality around Christian Porter.

Really, this Summit is an extension of that. It’s been so poorly organised, it’s incredibly secretive, it’s also very exclusionary. It has a comically narrow remit – focusing on what are the little band-aids we can put on this situation – to make it hopefully go away.

The Summit descended into a tokenistic exercise in the marketing and promotion of empty slogans. 

Read more: https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/morrison-finlay-and-a-tame--but-not-tame-enough-womens-summit,15495

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Katharine Murphy

I know there have been abundant outrages this week, and we’ll get to them. But let me start with something electrifying before we pilot towards dispiriting.

Political reporting can be like battling chronic low-level tinnitus. In my job white noise is deployed so people lose their bearings. But Thelma Schwartz, the principal legal officer at the Queensland Indigenous Family Violence Legal Service, burned through the fog. Schwartz began her contribution to this week’s National Women’s Safety Summit by acknowledging her ancestors, the “women who came before me, who laid the foundations for me to be here as an Indigenous woman, as an Indigenous lawyer”. The preamble was about more than referencing country and kinship. Summoning the past surfaced an intergenerational struggle to get a seat at the table. “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and children have not been seen – they have been silenced”.

Schwartz noted that summits like the one she was participating in carried the risk of co-option. “I refuse to be used as a tick and flick measure,” she said – not when Aboriginal women were 32 times more likely to be hospitalised due to family violence, 10 times more likely to die due to assault, and 45 times more likely to be victims of violence. Not when she was aware of cases in remote communities where young children, victims of sexual assault, had to “wait, untouched, unshowered, because there was no paediatric specialist to undertake the forensic intimate service”.

“So for those politicians who speak and say we’ve got this great spread [of services], it covers all of this and that, with respect, it doesn’t,” she said. “You cannot ever excuse to me children who have been victims of sexual assault waiting for specialist service providers to be flown in to conduct those assessments”.

Schwartz referenced Scott Morrison’s keynote address when he’d foreshadowed the necessity of change, asking if not now, then when?

Schwartz asked everyone present: when are we going to stand up?

When is this going to change?

Her righteous shirt-fronting pointed to a deeper inquiry about intention. Are political leaders capable of change? Do they want to change? Those kinds of human conversions, from being deficient to being present, from avoidance to leadership, are substantive, soulful, searching. They are not tick and flick. They require deep reflection, humility and listening.

So this was a powerful intervention. It rang like a bell.

But when the summit got choppy, when women used the microphones they had been given, or spoke their truth without waiting for an invitation, the government’s tolerance for introspection looked thin.

Irritation bubbled to the surface.

Morrison counselled that more would be achieved if everyone could acknowledge everyone was “trying to do our best” – and the minister for women, Marise Payne, was thin-lipped by the end of proceedings.

Now I felt a bit sorry for Payne, because some of the Blokes Who Know Best that she works with, even in the Age of Brittany, would have taken some persuading that women’s safety needed a summit.

Perhaps she was imagining the I told you so’s – the retributive post-summit huddle in the cabinet anteroom. Women: who can please them?

So uncomfortable, I get it.

But people who have seen the worst of humanity and have not been broken by it; people who have glued themselves back together and found the fierceness and the clarity that comes from suffering and surviving aren’t afraid of the paper tigers of politics.

It’s safe to say that people with real problems have a very low tolerance for politicians feigning helplessness while battling varying degrees of Stockholm Syndrome. Sadly for Payne, trying to navigate busted ecosystems, working politely within the rules of engagement, isn’t likely to draw rapturous applause when what’s needed is a revolution that puts the basic human rights of women and children at the centre of the enterprise.

To be fair, there were some hints of progress out of the summit. The government accepted First Nations people would need their own plan to improve women’s safety, and the government will continue to march towards new initiatives.

But we also got a shovel-load of passive aggression and self-pity – and not just on women’s safety. Morrison wasn’t happy about having to explain why it was OK for him to take a Father’s Day trip to Sydney at a time when Australians in the locked down states haven’t seen their fathers for months. He thought there had been low blows and cheap shots.

Then there was Pfizer. A freedom of information request from Labor suggested the government had hastened slowly in locking in vaccine supplies. This was very obviously a cock-up. But Morrison was inclined to forgive himself while nudging health minister Greg Hunt ever so gently in the direction of a passing bus.

When the prime minister was called to account for his actions on Thursday he said the government pursued a strategy of “sovereign manufacturing vaccine options for Australia” rather than relying on big pharma executives in the northern hemisphere. Morrison said even if the government had sent a decision-maker rather than a public servant to the meeting referenced in the FoI documents, Australia still wouldn’t have got any doses before about now.

When asked what he had done, as opposed to Hunt, Morrison said “you’d have to speak to the health minister about that”. When pressed about when he met Pfizer representatives, Morrison used indirect language. “I would have been talking in the second half of last year”. Pressed again: “What efforts did you make to get more than those 10m [doses]?” Morrison reverted to the general: “Every effort that we could”. Pressed again, “In what way?” Morrison then brought the inquisition to a halt. “No, I’ve answered the question”.

Morrison then declared anyone who insisted the government had a case to answer was a “hindsight hero”.

The main problem with Morrison’s rationalisation, apart from the blatant self-interest, was the sheer abundance of foresight heroes.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/sep/11/trying-to-do-our-best-is-just-not-good-enough-from-our-leaders

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