Well students today I have with me as my special guest, Marcia Neave. As you know, Marcia Neave
headed up the Royal Commission into Family Violence in Victoria. Marcia thanks for joining
me. Thanks Rob.
You're an academic, a well-respected academic and lawyer and you were the head of the reconstituted
law reform commission. What made you get into law in the first place?
It was sheer chance really, I was going to do medicine and then I didn't do as well as
id hoped in physics and chemistry in year 11 and I thought might be pushing it a bit.
So then I thought id do an arts degree and then my mother said "Why don't you do law?"
and I did law and I actually loved the course - really enjoyed it. AT that stage, I had
no idea what I wanted to do. Well fantastic. The law reform commission,
there will be some students watching this not sure which pathway their career will take,
some will want to work in a law firm. Some will be considering law reform, the law r
e form commission gig, tell us about that? How exciting it was? And should all lawyers
be in the business of law reform? Well I think they should, at least be interested
what the law does and what it does badly and I actually got involved in law reform a long
before the law reform commission, I'd done lots of law reform activities. And I just
loved it because I loved the identification of the problem, working out what it was you
could do to make the law better. Because it's a human system, it's always flawed the law.
And there's always ways you can do it better in the future. So contributing to that was
a terrific and it was a wonderful opportunity to go to the law reform commission.
Well let's cut to the chase, you were appointed by en enlightened Attorney-General (laughs)
to the Supreme Court of Appeal. But you came from a background of academia, you're really
the first person from academia to be appointed to that position, did you get much flack for
not being part of the usually crowd and indeed being a woman?
For some time I think I'd been arguing that there should be more women on the court, so
it was great I could contribute in that capacity. As far as flak was concerned, I think my colleagues
were very supportive and the president of the Court of Appeal, Chris Maxwell, was enormously
supportive, but there were some nasty things said in the legal profession. You know, I
got a few anonymous letters. There were a few letters to the newspapers about how could
an academic possibly do something like this? But IO think over time people got used to
me and decided I was doing alright. And I think academics can make a good contribution
to a Court of Appeal,. I think it might be a bit harder for an academic to do, to be
a trial judge. But there's certainly been very successful ones. Professor Paul Finn,
who was a Professor at ANU ended up becoming a Federal Court Judge and was very highly
regarded. And he was a trial judge, so he learnt how to do it. It's not rocket science.
You can do it. What about the glass ceiling in the law? For
years people have spoken about how hard it is for women to break through of those barriers.
Times have changed a bit. But from the time you started practising law to now for instance,
are things getting better for women in the law?
Slowly. And certainly, there's lots more women graduates than when I went to law school when
we were a minority of students, now women I think are just the majority. And women do
incredibly well in law school. So I don't think trickle up works. I think what we've
got to do is make some positive decisions that you're going to appoint good women to
jobs and they will change things. You really need a critical mass because if you just have
- and this was the way it was for most of my career - if you just have a small number
of women. It doesn't change the culture. Once you start getting up around the 30-40% then
people start to think about doing things differently and some years ago there was a project done
reviewing, interviewing magistrates. They weren't asked any questions about "how do
women change things?" They were asked a whole series of other things, but ultimately they
said that women had changed things, that the conversations were different, that women brought
different perspectives. I don't think it makes a huge difference to the actual decision making
process, because the law's the law. It makes some. But tis those conversations you have
and when you're going into court or coming out of court or how you look at people's experiences
and something that might seem entirely probably to a woman, might to a man seem a little bit
strange because they wouldn't have had that experience.
So, the Royal Commission into Family Violence - a huge gig really - and you completed it
on time and indeed under budget, you would have heard some harrowing stories during that
commission. Were there one or two things that came out of that that despite all your experience
rocked you? I think the pervasiveness, I think one of
the things that people said that struck me a lot, a lot of women said was, "I wish I'd
been hit because then people might have understood." So it was women who were subjected to psychological
and financial abuse, often as well as physical abuse, they found that people just did not
understand it. I mean women who were not allowed to have a mobile phone. One woman whose husband
used to put her in the truck with the children and make her wait outside all night while
he was doing night shift to control her behaviour. That was horrendous and the other thing I
think that shocked me was how slow we've been in understanding it and getting the community
to understand it and really doing something about it. This is a really major life blighting
event for many people in our community and we've been slow really to recognise that.
The law has been really slow and also the law doesn't fit very well together with all
the other systems, so what we need is systems that respond to all the needs of a person
who's a victim of that and we also need to support people who use violence. Because some
of them want to change but haven't been able to.
Sure. A Royal Commission like this must have taken a huge personal toll on you. How did
you deal with a lot of the trauma you were hearing about on a day by day basis and did
you have support around you in relation to the commission?
Well, I had a wonderful staff who did a lot of the work and were very supportive, we were
all supportive of each other. We had a regular opportunity for people to talk to a psychologist,
which I used on one or two occasions and we also we provided psychological support to
the people that gave evidence to us or participated in consultations. So if you came to a public
consultation and you needed to, you could go and immediately and talk to someone and
that made me feel confident that we weren't doing more harm to people by them participating
in this process and that's really important. I have to say, I have had experience of course
at the court dealing with horrible things, and one of the things that people often say
is "well judges aren't in touch with the real world" and I like to say to people who say
that to me "Well how many incest cases have you encountered? How many cases of really
truly horrendous things have you had to deal with in your life?" That's unfortunately a
part of the real world, and we have to deal with all those issues, so I don't think it's
true that as a judge I wasn't in touch with the real world. I was in touch with awful
aspects of it, in some cases, and of course with the Royal Commission we were also in
touch with something that is pervasive, horrible and affects many [people's lives, yet many
people don't understand unfortunately that that is part of the real world.
And the way the Royal Commission was set up, you had a specific reporting timelines, you
had a budget and you came in under budget. Do you think that model is a good model for
other Royal Commissions for instance the one that's just been announced in the Northern
Territory? There are a couple of things I would say about
that. My Royal Commission was a policy based Royal Commission, so we didn't have to find
facts in the way that if you're trying to work out what caused a bush fire or what happened
in those terrible events in the Northern Territory, so it is a different process. But I think
the notion that it's a sort of license to spend as much money as you can is something
that governments should be very careful about and government should think about how these
budgets are done. Before they set up the Royal Commission they should think carefully about
what really is needed and fortunately we were able to. And I was very keen to come under
budget, in fact every law reform thing I've done we've come under budget. So I was very
keen to do that because it's public money and if you're using it on a Royal Commission,
you can't use it on other things. We did make a suggestion to the government that the money
we saved could perhaps be used for some of the service provision and that's really important.
So Marcia, you're delivering the Higinbotham lecture at RMIT on the 25th of August. What
can people expect when they turn up? Well I'm going to be talking about the Royal
Commission and our recommendations but one of the arguments in the lecture is we think
about human rights in the context of family violence. I mean people have a right to be
free from being abused obviously, but I would like to go a bit further than that, that this
is something that can happen to anyone, it can happen to a child, it can happen to an
adult. And, as a society, we need to think about how we deal with people who have that
particular vulnerability and how we help them recover. So that's going to be part of the
lecture. Fantastic. And last question, if you had one
or two bits of advice for students watching this now, not sure where their career path
might take them, bit nervous about the upcoming cause? What would those bits of advice be?
I think, have an open mind about where you want to go. Look at all the possibilities,
don't think you've got to go into a law firm and do mergers and acquisitions. There's lots
of other things you can do,. Enjoy it, have fun but also keep your critical mind, keep
questioning, keep asking questions. Keep saying, why is it so? Is the law working well? How
does it need to change? Well there you go students, some great advice.
The law is always evolving, get into the business of law reform - that's the business we should
all be in and enjoy your course. Thanks for watching.