ANZSOG Proud Partnerships in Place, First Peoples Conference

Yaningi warangira ngindaji yuwa muwayi ingirranggu, Bunuba yani U.

 

I acknowledge all the traditional countries that we gather on today, and pay my respects to our elders everywhere, past, present and emerging. In particular in this session on Gender Equality, and what we can do to achieve it, I acknowledge all the women of the world, and our Indigenous women—the First Mothers of the earth.

 

Thank you Taryn and thank you for being here this morning Janine—our trusted community partner. I’ve got to say that it’s good to be up here on this virtual platform with Kimberley women!

 

I want to say thank you to Sophie Arnold and your team at the United Nations Association of Australia for pulling this fantastic forum together. I know you’re a small organisation, so you must certainly know the meaning of engaging in sustainable partnerships—when you bring the right people together, the right partners, you can certainly make things happen.

 

So, we have all gathered in this breakout session to think about achieving gender equality as a major priority of the Sustainable Development Goals. And today, we are thinking about it through the eyes of First Nations women—which is a necessary position to take if we are truly going to achieve gender equality for all women, for the benefit of all of society, and might I add, for our earth.

 

To set the tone and context—over the last few months Australia has been in the grips of a reckoning with patriarchy and an institutional and systemic culture of misogyny. The brave women who have stepped forward, some victims of very public alleged assault, have called for us all to make noise, to take to the streets and demand gender justice and equality. I believe with enough noise and energy, we can achieve an intersectional gender equality in Australia that unites not just a few women, but all women from every background.

 

When there is a collective anger, when thousands have had enough, a movement begins to develop, and a movement always looks for an agenda, and goals to set that we can strive to achieve. Within these movements I believe are the seeds of dreams. They begin to sprout as enough of us shout—what is it that we want instead of what currently exists?

 

It goes without saying, but I will state it, the Sustainable Development Goals are quite an incredible agenda for global humanity and for the earth. They are interlinked goals capturing almost every aspect of life, recognising that we must take a holistic approach to eradicate poverty, alleviate all socio-economic and environmental deprivations including combatting climate change. And ‘gender equality’ has a standalone goal within this agenda, while also appearing across many of the other goals as a cross-cutting priority, critical to driving success in health, education and economic growth. What this is saying, is that we won’t be able to bring into being the sustainable society we want, our sprouting dreams won’t grow, without gender equality.

 

So how do we do this? Well, there is much international expert advice stating that nations need strong implementation plans and measurement and accountability frameworks to commit to achieving gender equality and any form of sustainable development.

 

Australia does not have this—it does not have the architecture, nor a nationally consistent and coherent approach to achieving the many dimensions of intersectional gender equality.

 

Without frameworks and mechanisms to enhance the voices of women to occupy decision-making roles to design policies and legislation, the structures in Australia and nations everywhere are blind to the needs of women and girls.

 

It is for this reason—that our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and girls have been marginalised and made invisible to broader Australian structures for too long—that I designed and led, with my team at the Australian Human Rights Commission, the extensive Wiyi Yani U Thangani (Women’s Voices) national engagements. We met with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and girls in every part of Australia, from the urban to the remote. I told our First Nations women and girls that they have a right to their voice, and what they say should have consequence in Australia. This sense of determination with consequence, is for me at the heart of achieving equality, not shouting into a vacuum with nothing changing for decades.

 

And of course, our women and girls are not invisible or quiet. They definitely spoke up, as they always do, but this time we captured it, so their voices, in their entirety, would be on the public record. And that is where they are, the Wiyi Yani U Thangani report was tabled in Parliament by the Commonwealth Government in December 2020 and is now public.

 

I understand that for everyone watching at this forum, you can access the report in the resource library on this platform. I encourage you to do that. To download it and share it and make a public statement of support for the report.

 

So let me provide you with a summary of the agenda you will find and that I want you to all feel committed to supporting.

 

Wiyi Yani U Thangani puts on the table, for all to see and read, a First Nations female-led plan for structural change.

 

Across a number of thematic sections and ‘pathways forward’ that deal with everything from health to justice, housing and the economy women and girls describe how to flip the system—away from one that generates inequality and poverty through punitive and top-down approaches, toward a system grounded in our culture that is interconnected reflecting and strengthening our holistic realities.

 

In particular, Wiyi Yani U Thangani, threads together four cross-cutting priorities, captured in the reports overarching recommendations. These priorities are broadly related to women and girls’ self-determination and enhanced decision-making so they can design policies and legislation that impact their lives; and they are related to their culture and knowledge systems—all of which is foundational to the development of responsive systems and economic and social empowerment.

 

These priorities are related to diverse solutions described throughout the report.

 

Women spoke of how their knowledges can combat climate change, develop better caring infrastructures for children and our elders, help families and children heal from trauma and embed truth-telling and languages within education. Women spoke of how all these approaches can stimulate economic growth and the emergence of new industries, country and culture-based businesses, and different forms of exchange and production. As a part of this they saw the possibility of real job creation, viable employment and wide-spread income security and intergenerational wealth formation. They also saw how policies and laws need to alter to support these approaches, such as developing standards to procure Indigenous women’s businesses, or creating large-scale justice reinvestment models to change government funding arrangements and ensuring that there is universal access to early childhood education and care.

 

The one overarching call for action, sung by all our women and girls across Australia, to drive this agenda, is the need for our self-determination to be guaranteed and backed up by structures of accountability and responsiveness.

 

That is why the major recommendations of the report is to establish a First Nations women and girls National Action Plan and a First Nations women and girls’ Advisory Body, and to hold a National Summit that brings us all together so we can ensure that everything laid out in Wiyi Yani U Thangani is responded to and implemented.

 

This year, I am determined to make what our women and girls have said count. This is not a report for the shelf. It is a report designed to change the shape of our systems, to shift and move structures. Throughout this year my team and I are embarking on pursuing the implementation of these findings and recommendations—we are calling it Stage Two. A key part of implementation is to bring everyone on the journey with us.

 

We are building momentum for change, by talking to everyone about Wiyi Yani U Thangani, but also through actively engaging with partners to show that it is possible to use a report to take action and shift how systems are functioning right now. Systems are complex, there are many different people at different levels often working on the same issues but from different perspectives. Our aim is to work with these different groups, so they can come together and be far more effective in how they address the same issues. So, we are engaging with jurisdictions and governments to explore how we can develop mechanisms for our women to be co-designing policy with government, and for government to embed First Nations gender justice and equality across all policy domains. We are talking to cooperates, thought leaders and experts, and, I believe, one of the most important areas of partnership is with our women on the ground, so they can use Wiyi Yani U Thangani as a tool to advance their own priorities and set the agenda for change from the ground up. And that is what we will hear about from Janine, who is doing just that in the Kimberley.

 

I just want to finish by saying, that we also see you, audiences and the public who engage with this work, as our trusted partners. We want all of you to come on the journey with us, to make noise, and keep Wiyi Yani U Thangani—our women’s voices—on everyone’s agenda.

 

I know that now is the time to do it. When so many of us are questioning why our institutions and structures act as a barrier to all women’s success and consequently too often harm us all, a report like Wiyi Yani U Thangani has to be thrust into the spotlight. I said in opening that movements are looking for agendas—goals that we can all strive for—Wiyi Yani U Thangani contains so much of the future that we all want. It can and should be our agenda and blueprint for change.

 

It is time to unleash the power and potential of Wiyi Yani U Thangani to unite us all and make that change a reality.

 

Thank you

Yaninyja