I remember watching the news and seeing the smoke rising from a car as emergency services tried to put out the final flames that had already killed Hannah Clarke\u2019s three children, Trey, Laianah and Aaliyah. Hannah had been taken to hospital in a critical state.<\/p>\n
As I heard the details of the gruesome murder of three children, with their mother fighting for her life after the attack from her estranged husband, I wondered about everyone being on the scene now \u2013 police, ambulance and reporters were all there. The feed was live, showing the charred car\u2019s last fumes. But where was everyone one hour before? One day before?<\/p>\n
How come everybody was there so quickly but nobody was around to stop it happening?<\/p>\n
Since that day I have thought a lot about Hannah Clarke and her children. I have followed the implementation of coercive control laws and kept up with the news about domestic violence prevention strategies that followed these abhorrent murders. I was pleased to see the recognition of forms of coercive control being criminalised as a domestic violence offence. I understood these laws would have somehow helped Hannah and the children by giving the police grounds to charge and arrest Rowan Baxter at any point in the lead-up to the murders. My understanding of these deaths and the law reform was that of an outsider.<\/p>\n
Then one day a colleague passed on an inquiry from a whistleblower alleging misconduct in the Queensland<\/a> coronial system and the Queensland police. I work in the Whistleblower Project at the Human Rights Law Centre, where we help whistleblowers speak up and fight for better laws to create more transparency and accountability.<\/p>\n From our first phone call, it was clear this was not a one-off advice. This whistleblower we are calling Elsie<\/a> (not her real name) made a number of allegations of police failings at the service delivery stage and at the coronial investigation stage after Hannah and her three children died. As Guardian Australia has reported in its Broken trust investigation<\/a>, Elsie alleges that police failed to document on their QPrime system<\/a> the non-lethal strangulation, stalking and suspected child grooming Hannah reported to her domestic violence liaison officer. Non-lethal strangulation is a crime and indicates that a person is seven times more likely to die at the hands of their partner. Police officers at the coronial death review stage also acted as officers in the service delivery stage to Hannah and the children and effectively investigated themselves. Police investigating the murders were also investigating the \u201cveracity and motive\u201d<\/a> of Hannah\u2019s reports of domestic violence.<\/p>\n I say to my clients that my job isn\u2019t to understand what they are blowing the whistle about, because it is impossible to become a subject matter expert and assess whether wrongdoing has occurred. They are the expert in their role and if they believe there has been wrongdoing, my job is to help them navigate safe disclosure pathways to help inform regulators or complaints bodies of wrongdoing. When those bodies fail to take action, whistleblowers can consider protected pathways with media or parliamentarians.<\/p>\n With Elsie it was different. From our first call I immediately understood the significance of what she was saying and the weight of her allegations. It made me feel sick. I remembered the murders and the questions I had asked myself at the time. And now this whistleblower told me that there were opportunities that may have saved Hannah and her children \u2013 but police had allegedly failed each time.<\/p>\n Since the Guardian has published its Broken trust series I have seen thousands of online shares, media articles and comments from readers saying, \u201cKeep Going @guardianaustralia\u201d, because they want to know the truth. This is what was going through my head every time I had a call with Elsie. When she was exhausted, I would think, \u201cKeep going, people need to hear this, even though I know you aren\u2019t sleeping.\u201d When she was in tears, I thought that if she could just keep going it would be worth it, because I knew women and children deserve better and that, when people learned what had taken place, they would demand accountability.<\/p>\n Instead, I assured her that she could stop at any time. My job isn\u2019t to push a client into speaking up, it\u2019s to assist when and if they want to. She kept going. Despite her struggles and our broken whistleblowing laws \u2013 which make whistleblowers think speaking up is a crime \u2013 she kept going.<\/p>\n I cannot overstate the personal toll this whistleblowing journey took on Elsie. She told me that she has carried this aching heaviness around for years, and her demands for accountability were often dismissed by managers or department heads as her inability to cope with the distressing subject matter.<\/p>\n When she escalated her complaints and went to the Crime and Corruption Commission (CCC) in Queensland, it refused to investigate her allegations because they related to \u201cpolice misconduct\u201d rather than \u201ccorrupt conduct\u201d and were not serious enough to result in criminal charges or sacking.<\/p>\n Every \u201cdecision to not investigate\u201d is a blow that knocks a whistleblower to the ground. The risk is so enormous every time they speak up \u2013 they shouldn\u2019t have to do it time and time again.<\/p>\n So, as I reflect on the impact of the Broken trust series, I\u2019m asking: where was everyone? How come only Elsie, the police whistleblower Kate Pausina, the reporter Ben Smee and the Guardian stood up and demanded more from our police, support agencies and coronial systems? The burden of our institutions\u2019 integrity and women\u2019s safety cannot solely rest on the shoulders of whistleblowers and journalists.<\/p>\n Yet, were it not for them, the public would not know what really happened in the case of Hannah Clarke and her children. There would be no outrage over how police failed to protect Gail Karran<\/a> when they didn\u2019t alert her they were releasing her husband drunk from the watch house on the night she sustained 105 blows. There would be no heart-wrenching revelation that the police and government agencies failed to take seriously the 24 attempts and the note Kardell Lomas<\/a> passed to support services pleading for safety. Pleas which may have saved her, before she was murdered at six months pregnant and discarded in the boot of a car.<\/p>\n It makes you wonder what other wrongdoing may be occurring, with organisations closing ranks and entrenched cultures of acceptance. It makes you wonder what truth is lost when whistleblowers can\u2019t keep going and are worn out from the fight.<\/p>\n It has been a hugely emotional week for me reading the public\u2019s responses to the Guardian\u2019s reporting. The responses seem to fall in two camps: well-placed fury and deep sadness. I knew this information was coming out and yet to see it out in the world, to see everything my client and others fought for, has been overwhelming. I cannot imagine how it feels to be Elsie \u2013 to have been gaslit then vindicated in this way. I have carried around this information, secondhand, for only a fraction of th time she did, and it has affected me deeply.<\/p>\n Working on this case has been one of the greatest privileges of my career because I bore witness to the staunch fearlessness of Elsie. She went up against managers, police, courts and oversight agencies to demand better for the women and children we have lost. I only hope the next whistleblower is believed and doesn\u2019t go through what she did.<\/p>\n To other whistleblowers, keep going.<\/p>\n Regina Featherstone is a senior lawyer at the Human Rights Law Centre\u2019s Whistleblower Project, Australia\u2019s first specialist legal service for whistleblowers<\/p>\n In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline<\/a> is on 13 11 14 and the national family violence counselling service<\/a> is on 1800 737 732. Other international helplines can be found via www.befrienders.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I remember watching the news and seeing the smoke rising from a car as emergency services tried to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":309659,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,44,41,39,42,40],"class_list":{"0":"post-309658","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309658","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=309658"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309658\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/309659"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=309658"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=309658"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=309658"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}