00:00 The murder of Ms. Rubunshia was perhaps one of the most highly publicised deaths in the
00:07 Northern Territory in recent years and perhaps in part because of the cruelty in the way
00:12 her life was taken. Ms. Rubunshia was killed, as you said, in the car park of the Alice
00:17 Springs Hospital in January of 2021. Her partner, Malcolm Abbott, used his car as a weapon and
00:24 Ms. Rubunshia was killed just metres from the emergency ward here in Alice Springs.
00:32 She was, as you said, well known for her advocacy in Central Australia. She was an advocate
00:38 for victim survivors. She was an anti-violence campaigner. She had recently travelled to
00:43 Canberra to highlight the issue of domestic and family violence that we're now seeing
00:48 unraveled in the coroner's court. Ms. Rubunshia's partner, Malcolm Abbott, pleaded guilty to
00:54 her murder in 2022 when he was jailed for life for taking hers. And so the coroner will
01:01 spend the next five days here in Alice Springs examining the circumstances of her death as
01:07 part of this wider inquiry into the Northern Territory's domestic violence crisis.
01:13 The coroner began the inquiry in June. What has she uncovered over the past few weeks
01:18 and months about the Territory's domestic violence crisis?
01:22 Well, I feel like we've been reporting these statistics almost every day for the last few
01:30 weeks, but the numbers really do just highlight the depth of this issue. We've heard in the
01:35 coroner's court that the rate of domestic violence related homicide in the Northern
01:40 Territory is seven times the national average. And we know that Aboriginal women are killed
01:46 at almost 13 times the rate of non-Indigenous women. The Northern Territory police have
01:53 told the coroner over the last few weeks and months that they've recorded a 117% increase
02:00 in domestic violence reports over the past decade. And they expect that in the next 10
02:05 years, that's going to continue to increase by another 73%. We've really been hearing
02:11 from all of these frontline services about how overburdened and under-resourced they
02:17 really are. Police have said that they're struggling to respond to the number of domestic
02:22 violence call-outs that they're getting each and every day. We know that women's shelters
02:27 are turning women away every single day. We've even heard from Corrections last week, who
02:36 spoke about the rehabilitation programs that are available to prisoners and that sometimes
02:41 they have to really restrict who they're able to deliver some of those programs to because
02:47 of the demand for them. The coroner has said herself that it seems that some of these rehabilitation
02:54 programs are seemingly ineffective. And she's told the court that we really can't continue
03:01 responding to the rates of domestic and family violence in the Northern Territory without
03:06 radical change to the approach.
03:08 [BLANK_AUDIO]
