Jess Hill

So royal commissions are called when you have sustained institutional failure to respond to a really serious social crisis.

And that petition is really highlighting things around police and the courts particularly.

Obviously, that would just be the tip of the iceberg.

It would summon decision makers and officials to give evidence.

It would galvanise public attention.

it would create a momentum that can be hard to sustain in this area.

Often the only time we have kind of a bubble of media interest in domestic and family violence is when there's either like a trial happening with a sort of big media personality or there's a cluster of homicides or there's just some sort of strange angle that's come out of nowhere, like a petition for a royal commission, and particularly if the Prime Minister makes a good response to it.

So if we look at particularly this call for a royal commission, which is specifically into femicide, the institution that comes to the top of the list is police.

They are totally inconsistent in terms of their response.

There is a toxic masculinist culture across the police force where you see some exceptions in some local area commands and amongst some police, but that is the overarching culture.

You have really persistent levels of racism and low levels of understanding of the crime that they are spending the vast majority of their time policing.

Police spend on average about 40% to 60% of their time in some areas that percentage is much higher.

We have a domestic violence call out every minute in Australia.

That's gone up from every two minutes 10 years ago.

So one example that really comes to mind out of the research that I'm currently doing on the family law system, which of course crosses over with police and child protection, is

is a woman who went into a police station and she spoke to several officers at the same police station.

The first three officers that she spoke to basically just looked at her blankly.

The fourth officer, when she told him what had happened, and he was a junior officer, he went white in the face, got her to give a statement and they ended up pressing several charges.

If you had across the health system, surgeons that like may or may not really know how to do the operation that you're being wheeled into the operating room to have, and you're not quite sure whether you might bleed out on the table or whether you'll come out and you'll be all better.

Just a bit of a potluck when you go into that operating room.