A big job on her hands
She’s taken out the top dog of the CLP in the party’s Red Centre heartland and is being called the giant slayer as a result. But Dale Wakefield is firmly focused on the job ahead, and it’s not something to be taken lightly
ARELATIVE’S wisdom can have a habit of returning into relevance right when you need it most.
One of the Territory’s newly minted ministers, Dale Wakefield, recalls a snippet of advice from her grandmother; “If you can’t change it, don’t worry about it. If you can change it, do it.”
These words may never have been more potent for the one-time Alice Springs Hospital social worker than now, as she embarks on the most challenging and prestigious post of a long community-sector career.
Ms Wakefield has been sworn in as Minister for Territory Families in the new Michael Gunner Government — a distant, seemingly improbable, cry from days spent rolling down red dirt roads in a troopy as a mental health worker, hunting with old ladies in dusty desert communities, 12 years ago.
Sitting on the leather couch in her newly acquired office on the fifth floor of Parliament House, Ms Wakefield muses on her new reality.
“It’s kind of like the icing on the cake of a 27-year career,” she says. “It brings all my best skills, and I can make a meaningful change, I think, in this role.”
With the NT Police responding to around 21,000 incidents of domestic violence every year, Ms Wakefield has an uphill struggle to achieve such gains on the frontline for families — and her grandmother’s advice may still prove handy.
THE freshly anointed minister was this month given the newspaper nickname of “giant slayer”.
The lady who took a tilt for Labor in the seat of a sitting Chief Minister — in the Country Liberal Party’s birthplace of Alice Springs — and won.
It marked Labor’s first victory in the Red Centre township since 1965. Giant slayer — the former chief executive of one of the country’s busiest women’s shelters who, day after day, dealt with violent atrocities and acts of domestic abuse.
The mother of a young son, a 47-year-old married woman from Melbourne, who found her calling in the outback driving troopies packed high with passengers and dead perenties for an Aboriginal women’s council.
“My goal for running was always to be running in Braitling because I live in Braitling, not because the Chief Minister was the former Braitling member,” she says.
“(So the nickname) feels a little odd because my focus was on Braitling and Central Australia … and giving people a good, meaningful choice in the election.”
The people of the electorate evidently agreed with her. After a long period of waiting for final postal votes to trickle in, former MLA Adam Giles was, as of September 9, officially toast.
Preference flows delivered to Labor by a gaggle of leftleaning independents saw the former chief lose on the postpreference count of 2287 votes compared with Ms Wakefield’s 2314. Despite owning a considerable lead on primary votes, legislative changes to preference swings implemented by his CLP government had come back to bite. The first Chief Minister to rule from Alice Springs was sunk by 27 votes.
Even the never-say-die former leader had to admit it was over. On Monday, the ousted member released a long, vaguely concessional post on social media.
“Together we have made Alice Springs a safer and more prosperous city,” Mr Giles wrote to his constituents.
“It is now much safer to walk down the streets, tourists have returned, and the economy and jobs have rebounded to the best level I can recall since living in Alice.
“We are no longer the stabbing capital of Australia.”
Giant slayer or not, in winning the battle for Braitling, Ms Wakefield inherits some of the most difficult social problems in the western world.
THE past eight years of Ms Wakefield’s life, up until January, have been spent on the frontline trying to save the lives of Territory women.
Through turbulent seas, she steered from the helm of the Alice Springs Women’s Shelter, where gruelling daily rituals included calming victims of violence and being dragged out of sleep to answer dramatic phone calls in the dead of night.
“It’s one of the largest women’s services in Australia (and) I was running a very complicated service, with a small staff,” she reflects.
“It taught me a lot about how amazing people are … the women who came through who had survived horrendous experiences that were almost unbelievable.
“And that resilience and strength, (for the women) to still sit in the office and have a bit of a laugh, after something like that, is extraordinary.
“What it taught me was that no matter what … there’s always hope.”
But however hopeful, figures indicate the pace of change is stagnating. The past year alone saw 4000 offenders charged with domestic violence in the NT. Statistics tendered in a recent coronial inquest in Alice Springs Supreme Court revealed the rate of DV incidents had risen.
In a statement by Acting Assistant Police Commissioner Kate Vanderlaan, the court heard that of all assaults in the NT, 60 per cent were associated with family violence.
“It is also clear that of those assaults associated with DV, 82 per cent of the victims are women, with 72 per cent of such victims being indigenous,” her statement read. Of all homicides in the NT, 56 per cent were domestic related. Despite the stats, this state of affairs is by no means a hopeless case, Ms Wakefield says.
“I am absolutely optimistic about the future … I am someone who has never experienced domestic violence, so it’s possible. We all know it’s possible.
“I have a father who is immensely respectful and supportive of women. We know that it’s possible.”
The fledgling pollie is also acutely aware nothing is going to happen overnight.
“I think one of the things we need to bring to this early period of government is a sense of absolute calm and long-term planning,” she says.
“One of the risks is you can come in and want to change everything … what we need to do is take a calm and steady approach that’s evidencebased, and be really putting our sights into 10-year plans.
“And making sure those plans are as bipartisan as possible, so they can actually be delivered.”
SOMETIMES political change can start in the toughest of places. Amid the chaos and human carnage of Alice Springs Hospital emergency department in the mid-noughties, Dale Wakefield was a 30-something social worker.
The Red Centre town had earned the unenviable title of stabbing capital of the world, and the hospital was bearing the brunt of it.
Extreme examples of lacerations were showing at the department; much of it was domestic violence at its most hardcore, with alcohol abuse a common catalyst. It couldn’t continue. Difficult decisions had to be made from up high. Ms Wakefield, who was forging the department’s DV policy at the time, remembers a watershed political decision after which she believes things started to change.
“The biggest thing that happened was when (former Labor Chief Minister) Clare Martin brought in the ban on longneck bottles,” she says. The tall glass bottles, known in some regions as king browns, were being smashed and the shards used to cause harm.
“That was the single thing that reduced stab wounds,” Ms Wakefield says. “There was a strong evidence base on the longnecks because we knew in the ED what was happening.”
This was perhaps proof politics in the Territory was making progress, however small the steps.
“Social change can happen, does happen, and will continue to happen. And we know we can do better than what we’re doing now, and we will,” Ms Wakefield says. “One of the things my family taught me, my mother and my father in particular were very strong on, is if you don’t like it, change it.
“Actually my grandmother was big on that … that was her theme in life.”
In running for Braitling, and winning, Ms Wakefield and her grandmother appear to share a common thread.
“I wasn’t liking what I was seeing, I wasn’t liking the direction (the government was headed) … I think there was a lot of people being excluded from the conversation,” she says. “Some of the entrenched issues we’ve got around indigenous health and education are not improving, so you’ve got to say, ‘Well, what are you going to do?’
“‘Are you going to sit on the sidelines and throw rocks about it, or are you going to get in there and try and make a change?’ And that’s what I want to do.”
It’s poised to be an enormous battle — but a giant slayer may just be the right person for the job.