Chief Justice Michael Grant, speaking to lawyers at a Darwin conference this month, referenced an Indigenous commentator who noted that drunk Indigenous men abuse their partners for “illegitimate reasons” before explaining away the attacks as “some sort of traditional right”.
He also said commonwealth legislation introduced in 2006 was intended to protect Aboriginal women by ensuring traditional practices could not be taken into account when sentencing domestic violence offenders.
However, he said that, if anything, violence against Aboriginal women in the Territory had increased since those laws were introduced.
The NT is grappling with an extreme epidemic of violence against Aboriginal women laid bare at a recent inquest for four Aboriginal women killed by their partners, and in recent crime data.
The Chief Justice said alcohol was a significant risk factor in cases in which an Aboriginal woman had been attacked by her partner. Statistics demonstrated 90 per cent of attacks on Aboriginal women were alcohol-related.
“In my experience at least, it’s undeniable in the Northern Territory that we have many, many people still living on the same land their ancestors have occupied since time immemorial, still living in a traditional or a semi-traditional context and still practising various laws and customs vastly at odds with contemporary gender politics and legal norms,” the Chief Justice said.
However, he added that customary law may change over time, and the respected Yolngu leader James Gaykamangu – who died in 2023 – had condemned domestic violence.
“Many of the cases in the Northern Territory have as their cause something which is described compendiously here as ‘jealousing’,” he said.
He said jealousing most commonly manifested as sexual jealousy.
“Most significantly – and unfairly, I would have thought – the violence is invariably inflicted on the partner rather than on any other participant in the real or the imagined transgression giving rise to the jealousy.”
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