STILL SHIRKING THEIR DUTY
HEARTS of Purple, a charity set up to support frightened people trying to escape a violent partner and to lobby for reforms, is highly critical of the apparent impotence of the State Government.
We’re not surprised.
Its CEO, Michelle Beattie, says she wishes she could confront the Premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, with crime scene photographs to shake the Government into doing more than penning the limp letter it sent to a terrified woman who wrote to the Premier pleading for protection.
A court had allowed bail for the woman’s former partner. The woman told of violence, abuse, threats and intimidation. She feared she would become “the next Teresa Bradford’’, who was stabbed to death by her former husband in early 2017.
The Premier’s office has responded that the matter is before the courts and therefore it cannot interfere. That is true – that it cannot interfere in the court process. But this is a wider problem.
For starters, whereas the Domestic Violence Court at Southport sets the bar high when it comes to granting bail for people accused of DV offences, this does not appear to be the case in other jurisdictions despite legislation that was brought in to make it harder for an accused to be back on the streets quickly.
There is also the matter of court orders for people to be made to wear GPS tracking devices. Despite the frustration of local police and, presumably, court officials at long delays in having them delivered to the Gold Coast from Brisbane, and this newspaper’s frequent reports of those delays, the problem persists and the Government says nothing.
These matters have been aired this week, but the Premier’s office did not address them when responding to our report about the terrified woman’s dilemma. Instead, it claimed her pleas were not ignored and were acted on “immediately’’. An arrest warrant was issued for her husband. But the response then concedes he was bailed.
The Bulletin agrees with calls for magistrates in other areas to be cycled through the specialist Domestic Violence Court. We also agree that an Opposition call for a onestop shop approach to handling victims, so that police, lawyers, shelters and counselling can be accessed at once, has merit.
Victims are in no proper state to be traipsing across the city, waiting in line to talk to each of these services over a week or two, especially if a violent partner is hunting them. That raises another issue this Government has yet to fix.
Victims are not being warned when their tormentor is released, unless they are on a register. Forcing them to comply with that bureaucratic demand reflects badly on officialdom’s poor grasp of what should have priority. Alerts must be automatic.