A brave NT Judge

The ABC reports:

One of the Northern Territory’s most senior judicial officers has told a legal networking event there is a “significant cultural component” to domestic violence against Aboriginal women and “difficulty” in talking about it, for fear of “inaccurately” being “labelled as a racist”.

Justice Kelly’s full speech has also been published on the Northern Territory Supreme Court’s website.

Read the full speech. It is coherent and well referenced.

Talking about domestic violence in Aboriginal communities was “difficult” according to the judge, due to “an ideology of supposed ‘anti-racism'”.

“[Anti-racism] is beginning to assume the dimensions of a religion or a cult under the influence of which people and institutions are casually and inaccurately labelled as “racist” without any evidentiary basis for the charge,” Justice Kelly said. …

A useful extract from the full speech:

Between 2000 and 2022, two Aboriginal men were shot by police both times followed by massive press coverage, calls for enquiries etc. In that same period, 65 Aboriginal women were killed by their partners (I am quoting from Libby Armitage’s report in a recent coronial inquiry) and in each case you would have been flat out seeing a small report on page 5 or 7 of a local newspaper – nothing nationally.

Indigenous women are approximately 10 times more likely to be the victim of an assault than non–indigenous women, and 32 times more likely to end up in hospital than a non–indigenous woman victim.

I don’t think anyone suggests that the media shouldn’t focus on stories when someone is shot by the police. But it would be good to not treats the deaths of so many women from domestic violence as minor stories.