Jacinta Nampijinpa Price (NT, Country Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Indigenous Australians) Share this | Hansard source

That's the really lovely way of putting it, but the honest way of putting it is that it is about presenting oneself for punishment. That needs to be fully understood as well—that there is an element of that that exists. This is where my concerns come from. We talk about truth-telling. Don't we have to be completely and utterly honest about truth-telling and what that means? With all due respect to the Yolngu, they also have written their law into a written document, the Ngarra book of law, and, within the Ngarra book of law, it stipulates the way in which women can be punished, wives can be punished, for being unruly and other various punishments. My own mother was promised to become a second wife in an arranged marriage. She lived under customary law and made decisions for herself. There are still young women that I know of—I even had a promised husband, which I didn't know about until later on in life—who live under this law. There's romanticism around culture. We have to all respect elders that we don't even know. It's forced upon us to do so. I want to understand how the vulnerable in these circumstances, in these communities that live under customary law, who are subjected to some of the elements of this customary law that deny their human rights, are going to be respected and heard and listened to for once, instead of ignored for the sake of virtuous, grandiose statements and romanticism of culture. I want to understand how what you're proposing is going to, in fact, give them the opportunity to be heard and how, through this process here, they are supposed to be empowered and have a voice.