BEASLEY, Mr Alistair, Executive Director, Community and First Nations Insights Division, Australian Institute of Health and Welfare KILLICK-MORAN, Mr Chris, Head, Suicide and Self-harm Monitoring Unit, Australian Institute of Health and Welfare MILLS, Ms Sally, Head, Family, Domestic and Sexual Violence Unit, Australian Institute of Health and Welfare [10:18] CHAIR: I now welcome representatives of the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare to give evidence. Although you're not required to give evidence under oath, this hearing is a legal proceeding of the parliament, and it has the same standing as proceedings of the House. The giving of false or misleading evidence is a serious matter and may be regarded as a contempt of parliament. The evidence given today will be recorded by Hansard and attracts parliamentary privilege. It is also being broadcast. Do you wish to make a brief opening statement before we proceed to discussion? Mr Beasley : The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare thanks the committee for the opportunity to appear today. We would also like to acknowledge the Ngunnawal people, the traditional custodians of the land that we're meeting on today, and I do pay my respect to elders past and present and extend that respect to any Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander people here with us today. As Australia's national agency for health and welfare statistics, the AIHW has almost 40 years experience collecting, analysing and reporting data to inform decision-making. Our role is to provide independent, high-quality evidence and to work collaboratively with government service providers and researchers to strengthen the national evidence base. We've dedicated teams working on suicide and self-harm, and family, domestic and sexual violence who work closely together on these issues. While our work focuses on data, we appreciate that these numbers represent people and their lives. We acknowledge those who have died or who have been affected by suicide or intentional self-harm and those with lived experience of domestic, family and sexual violence. This inquiry highlights an area where the evidence base is improving but remains incomplete. There is no single, nationally consistent dataset that identifies deaths by suicide associated with FDV. Our submission focuses on two key national data sources: the Australian burden of disease study and the family, domestic and sexual violence integrated data system to provide insights into this relationship while being clear about the limitations of the data. From these data, we know that there is an association between suicide and self-harm, and intimate partner violence; and suicide and self-harm, and child abuse and neglect. In 2024, around 26 per cent of the estimated total fatal burden of years of life lost due to suicide and self-harm was attributable to child abuse and neglect. Also, in 2024, around 19 per cent of the estimated total fatal burden of years of life lost due to suicide and self-harm among females was attributable to intimate partner violence. Analysis of linked data also showed that, between 2010 and 2024, there were a greater number of deaths and deaths by suicide among people with a recorded experience of FDSV compared to those without a recorded experience. These data sources provide important insights, but there are opportunities to strengthen national understanding. This includes improving consistent identification of FDSV in key national administrative data sources and strengthening national linkage systems to support more informed policy and service responsiveness. Thank you again for the opportunity to provide evidence, and we're very happy to answer questions and support the inquiry in any way we can. CHAIR: Thank you very much. I'm actually going to start with one of the last things that you said. You mentioned the need for better identification of family, domestic and sexual violence in key data sources. What particular data sources are we talking about? Where is it not currently being identified that would be useful to have something? Mr Beasley : The primary dataset that we have—and I might throw to Ms Mills in a minute to provide you with a bit more detail—is what we call the FDSV IDS, which is an integrated dataset. It is a dataset that we've been working on for a number of years now and have made significant progress on. It is a dataset where there is much more work to do. It does take time to improve these datasets. We have to work very carefully, particularly given the sensitivity of the data with stakeholders—with states and territories. We have to work through appropriate governance, legal and other issues. Really, when we look to those gaps, we have a framework and we have funding from the Department of Social Services to continue to work to close those gaps, but there is much more work to do. Ms Mills, do you want to add something more specific there where you see the gaps and how they might be filled? Ms Mills : Definitely, Alistair. As Alistair mentioned, there are definitely gaps. Our expertise is obviously in the administrative data in a large way. From our perspective, the services that victims-survivors are most likely to attend are where we would see the most opportunity to focus improvements. There are two in particular where we've been doing some work: emergency departments and primary care. As we know, whilst unfortunately a lot of victims-survivors do not actually seek formal services—they may choose not to, or they may not be able to—when they do, GPs and health professionals are one of the first formal supports that they come to. So we see that that is a real area of opportunity in terms of the administrative data collections. Similarly, so are emergency departments. I will add that I'm talking about a national lens. Obviously, there is some work that's been done on emergency departments in states and territories or specific hospitals, where there's better data, but we come at it as a national organisation, so those comments are in terms of nationally consistent data. CHAIR: You make reference to the ICD-11, which I know—actually, I know the ICD-10—from a health perspective. One of the things we've heard from other witnesses is about particularly coroners but also health services and other services not using good language to identify family, domestic and sexual violence. Things were written down as 'difficult childhood' or 'relationship issues', making it really difficult to actually analyse what was going on there. Is the ICD-11 the solution to that? One of the other suggestions was a taxonomy for coroners, for instance, but is the ICD-11 actually the solution to that language issue? And how broadly is that applied outside the health system? Ms Mills : I think that's an excellent question. We do see great opportunities when the ICD-11 is implemented. I'll give you some examples. You've touched on the very broad phrases that we have currently in some of the psychosocial codes in the ICD-10. The ICD-11 has what they call extension codes, which are far more detailed and with far more specificity, which will give us granularity that we really need in this area to better identify experiences of family, domestic and sexual violence. That's not only for victims-survivors but also for perpetrators. For example, one of the specific codes would be 'history of spouse or partner violence'. You can see that is much more specific than something like 'relationship problems'. Mr Killick-Moran : If I might add to that, you mentioned some of the coronial processes. In terms of the morbidity data that Ms Mills is referring to in the hospital system, we have a similar issue in that the coding structures are only as good as the information that's being presented to be put into the coding. Particularly for highly stigmatised behaviours like suicidality or like family, domestic and sexual violence, there are often barriers to disclosure for people, and there may not even be evidence available for the coroner to consider. A lot of that does come from the community stigmatisation of those behaviours, so that's a bit of work that we as a community need to do, and that will improve our data flows as well. Ms Mills : To the end of your question, when you were talking about the use of the ICD-11 more broadly, obviously, there would be implementation starting at the mortality end and then probably moving to the hospitals, but another benefit of ICD-11 is the potential for it to be rolled out and implemented in the broader health services context, which, as you can imagine, has amazing opportunities for nationally consistent data and being able to link common diagnoses or situations. Of course, this is a long-term implementation that requires resources, but it offers huge opportunities. CHAIR: Some of your data looked at history of child abuse and neglect as a risk factor for suicidality. Is there work actually looking at disaggregating what child abuse and neglect means and whether that is child sexual abuse and whether there are a whole range of behaviours and actual experiences in there captured in one? Mr Killick-Moran : That's a very good question. In fact, our burden of disease team is revising their methodology as we speak. I'm not quite sure of the timeline for them publishing the revised burden of disease estimates, but, the last time I spoke to their researchers, they were looking at unpacking the child abuse and neglect component into constituent elements of that category. How far they can disaggregate that will depend on the quality of the research that they're able to identify, but they're actively looking at that. CHAIR: Could you give us an idea of when that will happen? You can take that on notice. It doesn't have to be now, but find out. Mr Killick-Moran : I can ping a message and get people to look it up. Ms Mills: And just to add to that, what they are exploring is physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse and neglect, just to get down to what you were— CHAIR: Thank you very much. Mr Smith. Mr DAVID SMITH: I'm interested in whether the data challenges are more significant for regional and, without any bias towards this region, cross-jurisdictional areas, areas where potentially you might have a perpetrator and a victim actually residing in different jurisdictions and hence there may be challenges in bringing that data together. Ms Mills: That's a really good question. I'll start and then I'll hand over to my colleague. As I mentioned, the institute's focus is very much on data analysis and collation for population level purposes. There are two elements to your question, I suppose. There is data sharing in the very real life, dynamic situation of keeping people safe across borders, which would not be something that I would feel that I have the expertise to comment on but we could provide more information in terms of how the AIHW uses administrative data that we have available to us to explore interjurisdictional activity or movement, if you would like. Mr DAVID SMITH: I'm interested in perhaps the lack of consistency in terms of that data collection in jurisdictions which might sit side by side in that interaction. You're right. I am actually interested in the other matter as well too. But I would like to know if there's a breakdown or a challenge between jurisdictions which relationships cross over. Mr Killick-Moran : I can make a comment to that. I think Ms Mills is absolutely right. There is that distinction between a person's case notes, which by necessity must be identifiable, moving between service providers and potentially across borders to promote continuity of care. When we talk about our linked data assets, we cannot identify the individuals, but we can with a degree of certainty—I think it's around 95 per cent certainty—say 'they're probably the same person, but we don't know who they are'. We can actually model some of those cross-jurisdictional flows. To get to that final part of your question, there are distinctions between what's coded in various jurisdictions, for example in emergency departments or even within admitted patients. But we do have national standards that are the minimum that must be collected by all jurisdictions, and so, at that national minimum dataset level, there is consistency between jurisdictions. Mr DAVID SMITH: Thank you. CHAIR: Mr Gregg. Mr GREGG: To the philosophical point of this, what is the point of it all? We're collecting data, but it's de-identified. This process of coding and things like that is good for system-wide research. But is there an opportunity for the labour involved in coding at a practice level and broader to also feed into systems that actually enable intervention, prevention strategies and things like that? Or is this purely a retrospective exercise, and the resourcing of that has to compete with opportunities for intervention? Mr Beasley : It's a very good question. As we've talked about, the data landscape's maturing. By and large, we do use the data for what I guess we'd call population-level research. But what we are looking to do as the data matures—and we're right in the middle of that maturation and the continued development of that data—is increasingly do things like person centred research, where you can follow people longitudinally, over time, and look at factors that might be protective or predictive of particular vulnerabilities and so forth. We've begun some of that work. Also, to the data that we collect—there's, of course, a range of appropriate governance around it, but that's available to researchers. For example, I think there are over 400 policymakers, academics et cetera accessing our main linked-data asset, the National Health Data Hub—under very strict governance and controls, obviously—to do a range of research. As we mature particularly that FDSV integrated dataset into that hub, it will become available to those researchers for work. The other thing, too, is we're very actively talking with, say, the Department of Social Services about how we use some of that data—again, in an appropriate way—to look at service interventions and what the right interventions might be and where there are gaps. So there are things being done, but we're really just at the point where there's a lot more that will happen over the next few years. But there are opportunities there, I think, along the lines of where your question goes. Ms Mills : Could I just add to that? I think, Mr Gregg, you're also touching on the burden issue, if I'm right, in terms of the services that are doing the frontline work and need to have as much time as possible to support victims-survivors and people who are using violence—how much of that time is taken up with data collection. I think the question is an extremely valid one. In another area of another project that I'm working on, we are liaising with NGOs working on the front line with refuges and FDV specialist services, and it is something that comes up very frequently. And, as you can imagine, there are real tensions, because some of these NGOs are not only collecting data for a specific FDV program; what we know and are hearing is that they are collecting data for a wide range of—it could be mental health related to intensive family support, especially for some of the bigger NGOs, which I'm sure you've heard from. This is a really important issue in terms of—to your question—making sure that, as a nation, the data that we ask for is useful at all levels. It has to be very useful, most importantly, for the people that are using the data—but then can be aggregated up to help inform decision-making. I think that's something that the institute really plays a strong role in—in terms of working with services to understand that. We have a role not only in analysis but in data improvement. So I think your question is a really good one, and I think that there is a lot of room for improvement, from what I'm hearing from stakeholders in Australia, in trying to harmonise and minimise the data burden on the ground in a way that improves care, first and foremost, but doesn't impair or impede the important data we need for decision-making. Mr Beasley : It's a really good point. I'll quickly add that—broader than this area—across the institute, we've identified that as a focus and we're doing work. We know that a number of NGOs will have a number of data systems that they have to fill out for a number of grants and a number of projects and so on and so forth. Obviously, that's not just for the institute's purpose; that's for a whole range of agencies' purposes. But what we are doing is starting with the institute and saying, 'Okay, how are we contributing to this problem across the various datasets we collect?' We're actively looking at that and seeking to minimise that burden. As Ms Mills said, it is something that's part of our active consideration. Also, I know that the philosophy that's applied by the teams is very much 'let's not just get gold-standard data and go and play with it; let's actually think about the practicality and the burden and weigh all that up'. So there is a practical approach that we take to the collection. Mr GREGG: Can you see opportunity for new technological innovations, around AI and things like that, to help facilitate that? Is this going to require collaboration with a whole lot of stakeholders, asking: 'How do we record and collect data? Why do we do it? What's the purpose?' Mr Killick-Moran : I think there are some really, really interesting opportunities coming out technologically. The two I emphasise are AI, as you've mentioned, but also some of the advantages that we can get from linking datasets, which means that we can actually identify aspects of a person's presentation or situation without needing to ask them multiple times. In that way, we can find things. Frequently people will come to me and say, 'Why don't you ask this in the emergency department?' And you go, 'Well, it's not really strictly relevant to clinical care.' If someone were to ask me that question when I was seeking to get my arm sutured, I'd probably go, 'Can you just get on with it and fix my arm?' In terms of AI, we do have a project at the moment that's being run out of our injury surveillance area in collaboration with researchers at the University of New South Wales and other academics, which is looking at a national project to use artificial intelligence and large language models to run over the clinical notes of the clinicians who have been working in the ED, and to use that to abstract some of the data that we would otherwise not have access to. It's particularly important in emergency departments because they don't have clinical coders; it's the clinicians themselves who do the coding. They tend to really focus on the primary diagnosis because, as we just mentioned, they're in a very critical care situation. Ms Mills : Another advantage of what Chris has just outlined is this technique is also being tested in a way that preserves the data within the original environment. As you can imagine, there are privacy implications with free text. This is running models off data that's actually still within the systems where the data is held, so it has a lot of privacy preserving advantages, if you like. That work, to get back to the question about ICD-11, is also actually looking at how these languages can then take the free text information and then code it. So they're actually doing some testing to see whether it can be coded to ICD-11 and looking at how we can validate that. There are huge opportunities. That gets to your point about burden—being able to have the people in the ED filling out their notes as they need to fill out their notes, and then secondary users of data playing safely and ethically in the background to then be able to use that for more population-level reporting so that we can compare, like in your question, one state and another state in a way that's comparable and meaningful. Mr Killick-Moran : Chair, if I might, I have an answer to your earlier question. Our burden-of-disease area has informed me that they're expecting to publish the next study, the 2026 study, by December. They will have developed those disaggregations that Ms Mills referred to in her earlier answer, but they're uncertain at the moment whether they'll be sufficiently robust to be published. They will have actually derived them and have been testing them. CHAIR: Thank you very much. Ms Clutterham. Ms CLUTTERHAM: I just wondered if there's any insight and data available about, I suppose, perpetrators and victims regarding whether they participated in any programs during their educational years. I meet with a lot of groups that do work in schools about bullying and harassment, violence, consent and all of these sorts of things, and I think they're growing in their reach. Do we know whether children who've been through those programs are less likely to become victims and perpetrators, or is it still too early to measure the success of those programs? Ms Mills : It's an excellent question and it is one that many people are asking. It's not an area of specific expertise for me, so my comment will be broader in that those data are really going to rely on some longitudinal analysis. You've got some time period between when you might have attendance at a program and changes in knowledge or awareness as a result of that program, and then you need to see whether that has equated to a change in behaviour. There are quite a few steps there, and time, in terms of the data that you would need to have. At the moment I'm not aware of any longitudinal studies, but there have been evaluations for some programs that are run—Respectful Relationships, for example—that may be able to provide at least some initial results of how those programs are changing children's understanding and knowledge. Ms CLUTTERHAM: What about in the prison system, in programs run for people who are incarcerated? Do we know whether you're less likely to re-offend if you do a program or if there's no difference? Or is it the same answer as in relation to the school side of things? Ms Mills : Again, that's something that I'm not an expert on. I will say, broadly, that the evidence from men's behaviour-change programs does suggest—I think it gets related to the previous witness, actually, in terms of their willingness to engage—that whether it is mandatory or not mandatory does really impact the effectiveness of those programs. Ms CLUTTERHAM: Thank you. CHAIR: Your submission included reference to the Australian burden of disease study 2024 and said that they were looking at both protective and risk factors. Is that data mature enough to say, 'These are the protective factors and these are the risk factors.'? Is there an answer there? Mr Killick-Moran : I would say, at a general level, I think the answer to that is yes. But, again, it depends on the strength of the literature and the evidence that they use to develop those attributable fractions, whether they be risk factors or protective factors. It's certainly possible within the architecture of the methodology. It depends on the level of information that can be input to that methodology. CHAIR: Is that information published? Are we able to get that information? Mr Killick-Moran : Most certainly. We'd be very happy to provide you with a summary of the burden-of-disease methodology. It's an international and very well-established methodology. Mr Beasley : It's publicly reported, but we can follow that up and provide it to you. CHAIR: I'm particularly interested to know: what are the protective factors and what are the risk factors? That would be great. I'm coming back to that whole terminology thing. For the data that you're looking at for people who, for instance, are turning up to an emergency department and don't necessarily disclose that this is the result of family and domestic violence, is there any way of looking at that pattern of repeat presentations? If somebody is turning up repeatedly with a broken arm, a broken leg or a head injury, is there any way that we can say, 'It looks like something's going on here'? Ms Mills : I think it's an excellent question. I can start and then maybe hand over to Chris. I think it's definitely an area of interest that we would like to do more work on. Linked data does provide us with huge opportunities, as does some of the more sophisticated modelling looking at predictive patterns, for example. We have done some preliminary analysis, but we've used the linked data that the AIHW has, the National Health Data Hub, to look at repeat visits. That's a slightly more basic analysis than what you're really asking for, but it shows that the foundations are there. Linked data will give us the foundations to do this, and, of course, there has been research on a smaller scale that looks at that. In particular, we have looked specifically at people who have been hospitalised for FDV and the number of repeat hospitalisations that occur, because, obviously, that is something of interest. It's definitely something that we want to look more at as we have more de-identified data coming into the system; to start to really see—not only in one hospital context—whether there are other broader service-use patterns that you could also look at, at a systems level, to really see where we might be having possible points of intervention. Mr Killick-Moran : I think that's a very good answer, Ms Mills. I would just add that—not looking at family, domestic and sexual violence specifically but looking at suicide death as an outcome—we have done and published some analyses around service use in the period leading up to death by suicide in the year preceding. It's quite detailed analysis looking at MBS and PBS usage and emergency department usage. It's quite detailed. Now that Ms Mills's team has developed the FDSV Integrated Data System, we'll be able to actually stratify some of that analysis by people who are in that cohort versus people who are outside of that cohort, and we'll be able to examine if there are differences in the way that people who are experiencing family, domestic and sexual violence are or are not interacting with the service system. Ms Mills : I think that it'll be very interesting work. I will just add a whole caveat there, because I think it's really important, that we are talking about people that are visible to the system here. I know you know that, but I just think it's really important in the context of this topic. These are people that are visible to the system. They're still very important because they obviously have clear support needs that need to be addressed, but— Mr Killick-Moran : Yes, again, particularly for some of the service systems where victims-survivors are going outside the health system, for example. We're doing some research looking at people's experiences of all-cause mortality around people who are using specialist homelessness services, for example. In many cases, family, domestic and sexual violence victims-survivors are grossly overrepresented in those data, although we haven't done that stratification as yet. Some of the figures that we're pulling out around the number of people who die of particular causes who are in contact with that service system are truly staggering. When people look at them, there's a sharp intake of breath and I say, 'And they're the people who got through the door of a capped service system.' We're also looking at people who are using specialist alcohol and other drug treatment services—another capped service sector. Whenever we show these quite sobering statistics, we have to always caveat them, because we don't know how much of an underestimate it is, but it's a big underestimate. CHAIR: Is that data on service use by people who die from suicide published? Is that something we can get as well? Mr Killick-Moran : Absolutely, yes. We can bundle that up for you. CHAIR: That would be great. Thank you. You mentioned linked data. It's a long time since I worked in the health sector, but we didn't have linked data within our entire actual health system. Is it better now? Can you actually get this data? Mr Killick-Moran : Yes. CHAIR: Oh, good. I recall actually phoning around and getting paper stuff sent to me, so it's good to know that it's improved. Mr Killick-Moran : It has improved a great deal. I'm actually the principal investigator on a project at the AIHW—we call it 'NACS'; we don't need to understand what the acronym stands for—that brings together alcohol and other drug treatment services data, specialist homelessness services data, health systems data and mortality data. We linked that about three years ago and have to date pulled, I think, about nine publications in our foundational series out of that. I use that as an illustration to say, yes, the data is available and it is accessible but it's a very complex environment for analysis. Sometimes people will say, 'Oh, well, you've got the linked data, why don't you just'—I don't like the word 'just' because, as I mentioned, it took about three years for my analysts to pull those foundational reports out. So it's there. It's hard work, but the insights that we're getting are really, really valuable, and we would not have been able to get them without that linked data environment. CHAIR: With the not-for-profits that you're getting, is that because they're government funded and they're having to put data into a government system, or are they— Ms Mills : The data that the institute does hold, the specialist homelessness services data collection, is a national minimum dataset, and there are data coming from NGOs direct to the AIHW under those arrangements. Mr Beasley : Across government, there are a few linked data assets. The ABS has PLIDA. We have the National Health Data Hub and some other bespoke linked assets, but essentially what we're working to do is put everything that we hold into the National Health Data Hub. There are a range of sophisticated governance processes and so forth and, as I mentioned earlier, about 400-plus researchers and others accessing that. As well as the hospital data and other data that was mentioned by colleagues, it has aged-care data, NDIS data, broader disability data, homelessness data, so you really can follow people through their life course, be person centric, look at movements between systems. It really is quite a change, and it's rapidly advancing. One thing I would say is that researchers and policymakers still need to pay to access that service, so it remains subject to short-term funding and project based arrangements. We do really think that this is the sort of strategic data infrastructure that Australia should invest more in—and invest in a more sustainable and long-term way. We do think the benefits of doing that are huge. Ms Mills : Just to add to that, we can send you—there is quite a lot of information on our website in terms of the accessibility of this more broadly. Obviously, we do a lot of work within the AIHW, but, as Alistair has said, there are definitely ways that researchers can access the hub now, and that is extremely useful for the research community. CHAIR: Mr Gregg? Mr GREGG: This is another broad one. Who decides what your organisation collects and why? Is it a feedback loop between researchers and the institute? How do you go, 'This is going to be a worthwhile pursuit for us—to focus on this bit of data and expand to this area.' How are those decisions made? Mr Beasley : Broadly, I'd probably start with our purpose in our act, which is to improve the health and wellbeing of Australians. Over many decades now, we've had a think about what the relevant collections for us to collect are. There are still important gaps, and we've talked about some of those today, but we think we've got a pretty comprehensive set of data across health and wellbeing services. I mentioned disability, aged care and others. In terms of the practical process, we have annual planning initiatives. From the ground up, as you've seen today, we have absolutely excellent in-depth knowledge by sector, where they're listening to people and organisations on the ground about what they need and what they want. So there are a number of channels by which we'll think about how to prioritise our work program. We also will receive—in fact, a large proportion of our funding is specific funding from, say, the Department of Health or whoever else, who, through government, will have particular priorities that we'll work on and advance. To take one example that comes to mind, dementia, which is now a very significant health issue across the country—the government's investing in data infrastructure behind that, for example. Mr GREGG: Is there an area, as an example, where you know you're collecting data but are kind of frustrated that no-one's analysing it or researching it? Mr Beasley : It's a good question! Mr Killick-Moran : If the committee might indulge an anecdote—I did have a researcher approach me at a conference recently and go, 'I'm reviewing this paper from one of my PhD students, and they've made this claim here and they've referenced your research.' And I said, 'Well, we've published nothing in the last seven years that would actually justify that comment.' Mr Beasley : We're a bunch of data people and researchers, and we'd always love to see more research and more evidence based policy on everything. One of the things we've done in the last couple of years is establish an evaluation function to actually look a little bit more at the 'so what?' We're looking at that. I'm having discussions with colleagues in relation to, say, analysis on disability, which is obviously a very important topic at the moment. That's one that comes to my mind. Again, this linked data is really something that's just maturing as we speak, so I'm very hopeful and optimistic—as long as funding for various players remains sustainable and so forth—that, for the next few years, the research out there is going to balloon. Mr GREGG: Thank you. CHAIR: Thank you very much—we might leave it there. Thank you for your attendance today. You'll be sent a copy of the transcript of your evidence to assist you with answering questions taken on notice today, and you'll have the opportunity to request corrections to transcription errors. Once you've received the transcript—which may be a little while—you are asked to provide responses to questions on notice within two weeks. Please forward these and any additional information that's been requested today to the secretariat. The secretariat will confirm these arrangements when distributing the transcript. Please note that responses to questions on notice will be published on the committee's website as submissions to the inquiry. Proceedings suspended from 11:00 to 11:16 .