An Interview with Yvette Berry MLA, Minister for Women

CW: Discussions of Sexual Assault

Yvette Berry has sat in the ACT Legislative Assembly since 2012 representing the electorate of Ginninderra. Woroni sat down to discuss the ACT Government’s agenda to empower women and girls in the ACT.

Woroni: If tomorrow you became a benevolent dictator of the ACT and we did away with democracy, what single initiative would you pass instantly to empower women and girls in the ACT?

First of all, I don’t know if I’d be a dictator, I don’t know that that’s the way I’d work things. I would probably want to immediately—oh gee if I could do anything around making early childhood education more affordable and that those wages were paid, that they were paid better wages. And that whole sector could then provide for women’s participation at work which is great, but also the workforce that allows for that to be properly remunerated.

If there were something I could do in this jurisdiction to fix that I would, but I will continue to lobby the federal government in that space.

W: You have said that “we are now at a momentous time in our history to be able to take action [against sexual assault and discrimination] in a holistic way” and the government is improving support services, treatments, and prevention, but you have also said that it’s the community’s responsibility to take action. I am wondering what action we should be taking as a community.

I think we need to call it out when we see it – that’s one thing – and how we do that in a safe way needs to be understood because sometimes you can put yourself in a situation that means you yourself might not be safe. We need to listen to victim survivors most importantly and believe their stories. That is what we are all learning more about in this sexual assault space because it is generally a fairly private matter that is not disclosed often on the day or the day after, but sometimes many years after the incident has occurred because of all the shame and guilt, or questions that a survivor might feel around that. So, making it clear to everyone who is a victim survivor that we will listen and that we will believe them, and then support them. I think that is the message for the community, understanding what sexual assault is about and what it means to people.

So I guess that is our job as leaders: to keep this on the media and keep the conversation going so that people are starting to change their perceptions and learn more about how we can support each other as a community around sexual assault.

W: The federal government in their budget just released the ‘women’s budget’ which purports to rectify these types of things, and there has been a lot of criticism for it because it essentially equates to about $6.90 per woman. Can we really expect these systemic issues to be solved with basically pocket money?

No, no, but it needs to be more than just money thrown at these kinds of issues because they are pervasive, they have been happening for many, many, many years. So turning around our community’s attitudes towards women and gender equality is going to take more than just throwing money at something and making a big announcement at a moment in time. It needs careful consideration, and that it why we are working with the sector and victim survivors in the ACT to find out actually what we need to do to make change. What is it that we need to do as a government with our community partners, within our education systems, within our justice system? It all needs to work together to prevent and support people who have experienced sexual assault and family violence even.

In the gender equality space, you actually need to start doing things rather than just throwing money around. So, we’ve got some examples of how we’ve done that in the ACT and made change. The ACT Government asked all of our sports organisations to have at least 40 percent representation of women on their boards, where previously that wasn’t the case at all. Sometimes there were no women! It’s the sports space so it’s generally a male dominated area, particularly in those high roles, those board roles. When we talked with the sports organisations the general feedback to us was “we can’t find the women”, “they don’t have the expertise to do this work”, and you look around and there are all the women doing the accounts, in the canteen, doing the uniforms or volunteering. They all have all the skills and the clubs say “we won’t be able to do it” or “it will all fall apart and the world will end”. Well they did it, the world didn’t end, and there are now all these amazing women who are represented on those sports boards. So when you actually do it, it makes a difference and it works. You are just cutting out 50 percent of the community by not involving them and giving them the same opportunities as men. I just went on a bit of a rant then (laughs) anyway…

W: The federal government (again) just merged the family court and the federal court. Obviously, this move has been criticised a lot by family law experts – do you have any comment on it?

Yes, and that is what I have been hearing as well. So I wrote to Marise Payne about that and got a fairly lacklustre letter back about how the federal government thought it was going to improve things, but all of the advice that we are hearing from the experts who are on the ground is that it will not and it is going to mean that you take that expertise away from the family court and merge it into a generalist court system. It will actually lead to worse outcomes for families who are going through particularly challenging times around children, divorce, sexual assault, family and domestic violence. I can’t see from the advice and the conversations that I have had that [the merger] is going to lead to better outcomes for people. So it’s a disappointing approach from the Federal Government in that space and we will just have to keep lobbying for a change of heart on that yeah.

W: Well, on that change I read about a case in the ACT where a man attacked or threatened his wife with an axe and he was sentenced to 4 months in gaol. Shane Rattenbury said that he had asked the Justice and Community Safety Directorate to develop a legislative response immediately. Do you know anything about what that response will entail?

I haven’t seen where that work is up to. I think with these things it is easy to report on and implement a justice response to these things, but it needs more than that. These are often complex issues that need more than just a change to the legislation. Sometimes it is looking at what our legislation and laws are doing right now and whether they are being implemented to the best that they possibly can be, and that is certainly the advice that I am hearing from legal services like Legal Aid and Women’s Legal in the ACT —that our laws are actually okay, it’s just whether they are being implemented appropriately. They are not perfect and they can be improved, but the law is just one part of the approach and it needs to be much more holistic than that.

What you will often see when the media reports on this is “you need to change the law” or you need to do this, or you need to do that as a justice response, but when we talk to victim survivors of sexual assault or domestic and family violence, in fact the justice approach isn’t necessarily the path they want to go on. In domestic and family violence they want the violence to stop and in the sexual assault space well we need to change attitudes towards women. A law is not going to do that – we need to do that as a community.

W: As Minister for Women have you begun any legislative work on this?

I have set up the Sexual Assault Response and Prevention group. That is a steering group, and then three work groups to consider those three different areas around how we approach sexual assault. It needs a multifaceted approach, so we have a prevention approach, a response approach and a justice approach. So having working groups to actually consider all of those different areas and then reporting back to a steering group regularly about what then needs to happen as opposed to just doing bits and pieces at a time. So actually, coordinating that approach in a much more considered way.

W: When I spoke to Nicole Lawder she brought up the ACT Liberals introducing legislation against stealthing. Will ACT Labor be supporting that?

Of course we will. I am not opposed to any legislative change, but that on its own is not going to solve this. We need a much more comprehensive approach lead by the sector who are experts in this space, and by listening to victim survivors and their experiences and what they are seeing as gaps in the system. I don’t think an outcome which is just being led by responding to media, or an idea that you can quickly fix this stuff, will work, and that is not the advice that I am hearing from the sector. I pay very close attention to what the experts tell me. I definitely support any legislative change that is going to make a difference, but as part of a holistic approach.

W: So in that vein, your women’s caucus – what is that designed to address in the legislative assembly?

So, there are three groups that have been set up since the election so I will go through those. Because we have a majority of women in the assembly but also in the Government, the women’s caucus is made up of government members of the Assembly – so that is Labor and Green members. The caucus is to discuss this work we are doing on sexual assault but also work on the implementation of the women’s plan in the ACT and any other issues that might arise as a result of just women in parliament and supporting each other in that space. The second group that has been set up is the parliamentary women’s group – it doesn’t have a name really – and that is for all women of the Legislative Assembly to come together to discuss these things and form better relationships with each other and just a bit of a networking, kind of ‘what’s happening in these areas’ and ‘how we can support each other better as women parliamentarians’.

The third group that I have set up through the staff is a staff network. We had talked about that before Christmas and then all the Brittany Higgins issues arose and so that has been really important for us to set that group up. That group is set up separate to ministers so that staff feel that they have somebody, or a group, or a network, that they can talk to who does not have any kind of power imbalance. If they don’t have to feel uncomfortable going to a minister or a chief of staff about something, they can talk with each other and be supported and be put on to support services if they need it, should an issue arise.

So those three groups were set up pretty easily and pretty quickly while the federal government was still denying anything had happened. [Our initiatives] happened really fast and then I guess the fourth thing that I have done is this tripartisan approach to how we are going to deal with all of this from the ACT Government’s perspective. Having the Liberal party, the Greens party and the Labor party working together on this; understanding that at the end of the day the Government will make these decisions through our conversations with the sector. We are making sure we include all political parties on the approach that we are wanting to take based on the advice of the sector and victim survivors. So that is what we have done in a very short period of time actually and we are just getting on with the job of doing the work.

W: Final question: I am sure you can imagine that many women would see what has happened with Brittany Higgins and other instances – and of course you just mentioned you set up the staffer support system – what would you say to a woman who is looking at the news and feeling really discouraged to get into politics?

(Laughs) I can relate to that. Look, I guess this has been the time where there has been a lot of change and because there has been a lot of focus on these environments and workplaces for women, and in lots of different places they have not been good workplaces for women. Because of the political nature of it – as unacceptable as it is – these things have been allowed to occur. I think what we have done in the ACT is show that you can actually make change in a really good and meaningful way to give people supports and that by doing that will lead hopefully to change across a whole range of different governments across the country. What we need is more women, so we are going to break down our responsibility in the ACT to make sure our environment here is not a toxic environment for women, for anyone, but particularly for women. So we have set up everything to make sure that that is not the case but I just don’t think this should be something that should put women off entering politics. The more women we have in this place, the more change we can make. That is the same in the Federal Parliament or any Parliament across the country.

This interview has been edited for clarity.