 My name is Siobhan MacDonald. I'm a lecturer in the Crawford School in the Reade team. I'm a lawyer and an anthropologist. I practice legal anthropology. I've had an ARC on gender and climate change in CAT for the last couple of years with Professor Margaret Jolly but I was also based part-time in the National Centre for Indigenous Studies. My research work is really very much about aspects of climate justice. So I have a whole range of work that I do in Oceania but also in Indigenous Australia that are really looking at these broader questions of climate justice. That's a whole wing of work that I do. In Vanuatu at the moment I have a long-term project that's looking at a large-scale resettlement issue. There was a volcanic eruption that happened on Ambi Island. 11,000 people were relocated off that island on to Santo. A lot of those people have now been flooded out on Santo Island as a result of tropical cyclone herald. So all of these are the kind of compounding factors attached to climate change in the Pacific. For me this work is not just research. I'm an activist scholar so I also do climate change negotiations on behalf of the Republic of Vanuatu. I negotiate at the Pacific Island Forum. I negotiate through UNFCCC processes particularly with my legal drafting skills. Earlier today I watched two of the leaders that I know very well give a huge virtual panel with Kevin Rudd. So the Secretary-General of the Pacific Island Forum, Dave McTayla and Ralph Regan Vanu who is now the leader of the opposition of Vanuatu. Speaking with Kevin Rudd and both of them said very clearly that yes COVID has come but really the greatest threat to the Pacific is climate change and it's not going away and so these issues of climate justice are so real and they're so palpable and for Indigenous people they mean whole loss of life worlds and ways of being. And that to me is terribly unjust so I commit myself to that work going forward. The early work that I was doing supporting the Vanuatu government was very much that thinking around closing borders. Pacific Island countries have been very quick moving in their policy decisions to close borders and it's hugely saved lives. It was not consistent with WHO advice when they made those decisions and it's come at a huge economic cost. So for countries like Vanuatu but also Fiji they are dependent in terms of revenue. 50% of their income comes from tourism. So the economy in Vanuatu is decimated. There are people without jobs and who are going hungry as a result of this decision and yet there are no COVID cases. So you're looking across the Pacific at a whole range of communities that have very poor public health infrastructure where there is no, you know, in some places you've got huge numbers of families intergenerationally living together. You're very little access even to potable water in some places. So what does the COVID solution look like? I mean in those contexts becomes a really complicated set of issues. So the response of a lot of governments across the Pacific has been to shut borders and just to keep it out and that has been very successful. There's been a limited number of COVID cases in some countries. There are a whole number of countries that have had no COVID cases whatsoever. So moving forward there's now a discussion of whether the Pacific can be included in the Trans-Pacific bubble and again it's about can that be maintained with safety? That could be a really great economic opportunity but it's very important that tourism doesn't come at the costs of COVID being unleashed in the Pacific. This of course has caused a whole second wave set of issues because Tropical Cyclone Harold happened and the relief effort has been hugely hampered by the fact that there have been all of these COVID protective measures in place. A lot of my work is around Indigenous attachments to place. So Indigenous people speak about place and belonging and attachment. What we're seeing now in this period of climate crisis and climate impacts is that increasingly people's attachment to place is being ruptured. They're being asked to leave. So the question then globally is okay well who compensates for that loss? What does that look like? And that's something we've been grappling with for years in Indigenous Australia. So in Indigenous Australia I have a project with UN nation people down the South Coast who have been hugely impacted as a result of the 2020 bushfire season and it's looking at cultural burning. It's working with some really brilliant UN scholars who are also based at the ANU, SAM, Provost and Emily Fishpool and we're working with UN elders around cultural burning as an act of research and as an act of recovery. What does it mean to have fire fronts come through? How does that rupture your sense of place and then how do you recreate using place-based ideas of caring for country? How does that then foster recovery for people and for their sense of identity? The other body of work that I do is my work as a gender scholar. So I look at aspects of how climate change impacts are gendered in particular kinds of ways. That's a long-term project with Professor Margaret Jolley. We know for example that during times of disaster women can be particularly impacted. It's very important that we start thinking around how gender informs aspects of vulnerability, if it does, in what ways, for which groups of women, thinking around intersectional approaches to all of these issues. But then the other work of gender scholarship I do is that I've just done a three-year project looking at alternative dispute resolution and whether it's useful in the context of family violence for Indigenous, refugee and migrant families. So across six locations around Australia we've conducted 120 interviews with families and then also other service providers to look at whether there are ways of mediating in the context of family violence. And as we all know, COVID-19 has brought these issues of gendered violence and family separation into really stark relief. We know that family violence and domestic violence have hugely spiked since the lockdown occurred. We know that houses are not safe spaces for a lot of women and children. We know that the rates of separation have gone through the roof. We know that the petitions before courts have escalated beyond belief. So how do we better service groups of people who have cultural needs, who have linguistic needs, who are not Anglo-Australian? What we know historically is that we have family relationship centres that operate all around Australia. They're funded by the Australian Government to offer family dispute resolution services. But when we look at the data, there are huge sections of the community that are not accessing those services. And they happen to be Indigenous families and culturally and linguistically diverse families. There's a huge set of barriers, institutional and other barriers that are reasons why those particular cohorts are not accessing those services. So for Indigenous families, this is one pathway to how you get a parenting agreement. So I started this project when I was at the National Centre for Indigenous Studies and Professor Mick Dodson said to me, we have to do this and we have to do this because if Aboriginal families get a parenting agreement, their children are less likely to be taken away from them. Right? This is a really critical need. And what I've found through the course of this research is that that fear of child removal is palpable and real still for so many Indigenous families. And that's because the rates of removal have escalated so much over the last decade. Another major finding of the research is that there's a cohort of refugee and migrant women who live incredibly precarious existences whose partners are terribly abusive and who use their short-term visa status as a way of controlling and coercing them. So the kinds of accounts of violence that I've heard have been completely horrific. So what you had in the task force was a series of epidemiologists and then a series of people who had extremely deep expertise in working with communities, for example in Indigenous Australia. It's very rare that you have people so closely in conversation with each other across that space. And it means that you're able to pull from the top kind of epidemiology down to grass roots, Indigenous communities and back up again in a really meaningful way. So I really appreciate that aspect of the task force and what went forward. I think one of the things I would say is that these aspects of social disadvantage that I've been talking about are profoundly important in terms of thinking around a policy fix. And I think the work that was done in trying to integrate some of those perspectives becomes incredibly important in terms of ground-true thing, what the makeup of your policy solution is. So it's very easy and I, you know, one of my degrees is economics. It's very easy to kind of think through pure modelling and to create a set of assumptions that has a deeply embedded set of kind of mathematical modelling that is underneath it. We do it in economics, you do it in all kinds of modelling arrangements but you need people on the other side to truth test it for you. You need people who are grounded enough in the communities or in the experience that they are academically representing that they can come and say you know what, actually Indigenous organisations privilege self-determination above everything else. The reason that this works so well in remote Indigenous Australia is because it's been led by land councils for example. Land councils have been messaging these very difficult messages for people like don't attend funerals even though that is so heartbreaking for people. Nobody else could have messaged that if the Australian government had come out and said to Indigenous communities don't attend funerals, there's no way that would have been met with the same kind of respect. So part of what I wanted to do when I was working through the report is really bring an intersectional approach to the report and say okay not all women are equally at risk of violence right? There are some women, there are some people in general who are positioned differently so let's bring some of that complexity into the report. Let's start looking at different cohorts of the community and how they're differently placed. Let's look at the LGBTQI community, let's look at their particular sets of needs, let's look at women with disabilities and the kinds of needs that they might face when they're encountering issues of violence. Let's look at Indigenous women and some of what the peak Indigenous organisations are saying. And what's happened with COVID is that because the response was so fast and so quick there were no specialised services involved in the rollout of that. A lot of the domestic violence services have described a really desperate underfunding of service provision relative to need but the other issue has been how do you get in touch with people, particularly those people who are really critically at risk. We know that home environments are not safe for a lot of people, it's not only women but it is mostly women and so when you stop women from going to schools to drop off their kids there are all kinds of flow-on implications for certain cohorts of people. So it's just about saying okay there's COVID, the impacts of COVID are gendered, it's not just about violence, we know that women overwhelmingly are carers, they're overwhelmingly at the front line of these positions, they're overwhelmingly the front line of our health care profession, they're overwhelmingly the front line of our teaching profession, they're overwhelmingly the front line of our child care profession. So the implications from COVID are hugely gendered in all kinds of ways. When we're designing epidemiological responses, we can't just imagine that the population are homogenous, we actually have to start differentiating and recognizing that the implications of these policies are different. If you're locking down a single mother with four children, the implications of that are completely different because you're actually limiting that person's support network in all kinds of ways. So we've seen that there've been exponential increases in mental health problems and there's a whole set of professionals who were involved in the task force with me who were identifying all of those problems the whole way along. We know that for elderly people who've become incredibly isolated and who are less able to use the technology to do that kind of outreach, it's been a really difficult time. So we have to really complicate these blanket statements that come from government and say, you know, everyone has a house, not everyone has a house, right? Not everyone's family looks like a nuclear family. Not everyone feels safe in that home environment and create these much more nuanced understandings of people's circumstance in order to make sure that our policy settings are equitable. So that kind of ground-truthing of the policy matrix bringing it together in conversation, that's what very well-designed academic spaces can bring. I think we will come out of this experience hugely transformed. I don't think Australians have understood the scale of transformation that is coming. I don't think they have understood the scale of global recession that is coming. What makes me hopeful is that in the climate change negotiation space for a long time, we've met with this incredible resistance about the capacity to create transformative change. In response to COVID-19, governments across the world have engaged in mass transformations to entire economic systems, entire ways of living and working overnight. So it is possible. That scale of transformative change is possible. And I think even people knowing that changes everything.