Sharman Stone (Murray, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Immigration and Citizenship) Share this | Hansard source

I too rise to speak on the motion on the national apology to the forgotten Australians and former child migrants. On Monday some of the nation stopped to listen and acknowledge the terrible damage done to wards of the state and child migrants who were raised in institutions run by churches and charities, at so-called homes, farms and other places. The only crime of the children who were sent was that their parents were poor, their mothers unmarried or they were orphaned. Over much of the 20th century more than half a million children suffered terribly, many damaged permanently, as the state, federal and local governments looked the other way.

Organisations and churches were paid to exercise a duty of care, to nurture, nourish and educate these wards of the state. Preparing them for a happy and productive life as adults in Australia was their charge. Clearly these agencies failed to exercise humanity, kindness or care for the most precious and vulnerable of the nation’s children, and they stand condemned for that. Too often, children were physically and sexually abused, poorly nourished and not educated. They were forced to work for the agencies, who profited hugely from the whole business. The boards, the elders, the trustees, the priests, the nuns and the neighbours in places like Hay, Ballarat and Box Hill simply looked away.

The institutionalised children with living parents or siblings were often lied to about the existence of their families or cruelly denied access to brothers and sisters also made wards of the state. Surviving parents were also often lied to about the fate of their children or even their whereabouts. This is a most shameful part of our history and a part of our history which we must acknowledge and understand. It is also a shameful part of the history of Britain and other countries who also agreed to send or take migrant children in an extraordinary effort to breed their country white.

This era echoes the abuse of Indigenous children in Australia referred to as the ‘stolen generations’. For the non-Indigenous children, their experience was no less damaging in the lifetime consequences. Many of those children talk, as adults, of the denial of their country and their identity, of having no experience of love or intimacy, of finding it impossible to form long-term, trusting, meaningful relationships, and of suffering long-term debilitating health problems associated with their early neglect and abuse, the hard physical work at too young an age and the poor nutrition, hygiene and shelter. The wonder is that so many children did survive to become proud, competent adults able to form families and independence in a country that for too long failed to believe their childhood neglect and suffering.

Often it is through coming to know the stories of individuals that the true cruelty of the experience and exploitation of these children becomes more deeply understood. That has certainly been my experience. I have been privileged to come to know Daryl Sloan, a constituent of mine in the Murray electorate. His life is an extraordinary example of human endurance and triumph through adversity. Not only is he a survivor of these institutions in the true sense of the word, but he and his wife now foster and love at-risk children who in the past would have been subjected to neglect and abuse in institutions like the one he was placed in.

At the age of 25 months, on 12 November 1963, Daryl and his two brothers aged four and six were charged in a court with having ‘no settled place of abode and no visible means of support’. The little boys’ punishment for this crime was immediate commitment to institutions as wards of the state. Daryl was the youngest of 13 children—some his father’s children, some his mother’s. His mother had endured and then ended an abusive marriage, but because her husband was a returned serviceman she was required to leave the war veteran provided family home, making her and her children homeless. Daryl’s mother was able to accommodate some of her children, her older children, with grandparents. She worked, but without any extra welfare support she had to give up some of her family into so-called care so she and they could survive.

Toddler Daryl was moved between Allambie, Turana and Ballarat children’s homes. The three brothers were separated according to their age in the three sections of Ballarat Children’s Home, so they were denied any access to family, or support for one another. When their mother tried to see them, she had a near impossible task. She had to travel by train from Shepparton to Melbourne, then back down to Ballarat, and try to see the three boys in three different places all in half an hour or so. You can only imagine the distress of that mother trying to stay in contact with her boys.

Daryl recalls the big plates of stale sandwiches regularly fed to the boys, apparently leftovers from a charitable nearby pub and taken carefully to Ballarat Children’s Home. He soon learned to reach for a sandwich from the middle of the plate because it was not so dry and curled, and there was more cigarette ash and beer spills on sandwiches at the edges of the plates. They had no pillows on their beds and the poorest of clothing. On reflection now Daryl can see that the people rushing franticly between cots trying to silence the babies were mere girls themselves, older wards of the state, with the far too heavy responsibility of looking after the rows of babies and toddlers. Daryl remembers wondering why so many cried, because he thought, ‘What is the use of crying.’ Daryl knows of others, little boys in the dormitories, who waited in fear each night, rolled tightly into a foetal position, dreading that the footsteps would stop at their bed, because it would be their turn again to endure violation at the hands of the paedophiles in charge of those young lives.

I agree with Daryl and so many others that the perpetrators of these and other crimes should now be identified wherever possible and prosecuted. No less than a royal commission in Victoria may be needed to ensure that these vile men and women, so far protected by the institutions that hired them, are flushed out and their deeds made public. Their victims deserve nothing less than to see them successfully prosecuted, along with others who so comprehensively failed in their duty of care to the most vulnerable and defenceless.

Daryl’s mother eventually formed a new relationship and the children in care were released back to her. But a life of great instability continued for Daryl. In all, he attended 17 schools and he left home as soon as he possibly could, at 15. You would expect Daryl’s life to then conform to a pattern that often follows poor education, poverty and a disjointed and dysfunctional family. And for a while it did. By his late 20s, however, Daryl had taken control of his life and was determined to make his mark in a fairer, kinder Australia. Daryl has now fostered in his own home with his family and their own children a succession of wards of the state—children like him who had been dealt an unlucky hand in life. He is now offering these children the continuity of care and love that he missed out on.

But Daryl, a highly intelligent, caring man, is not content to simply observe that the system of care for neglected or at-risk children today remains a serious and ongoing problem. With others, he is acutely aware that the system of foster care and carers is being driven into the ground, in particular in Victoria. The statistics speak for themselves. There were 5,500 foster carers in Victoria in 2002. By 2007, five years later, there were fewer than 1,000. The supply is in free fall and the Victorian government needs to ask why. The answers are self-evident. They do not take very long to discover.

There is a serious lack of support for foster carers, who, classified as volunteers, are expected to provide the additional, intensive support for their fostered children with very little financial or other assistance. Clearly, if you have several children of your own and are fostering others, often with very high needs, the ideal is for one of the parents to be able to offer that parenting full-time. In fact, however, in order to make ends meet, both parents usually need to work outside the home to pay the mortgage. How many good, loving, potential foster carers simply cannot afford to offer their services? Alternatively, how many of the 4,500 foster carers who used to help raise some of the country’s most troubled and needy children have simply been forced to cease fostering because they cannot afford to continue to do it—because they cannot make ends meet?

This is a disgraceful and shameful situation in our country, when we know that the alternative—institutional care in places sometimes called ‘cottages’—will continue to be less than ideal for a young child needing a nuclear family, some continuity of care and a lifetime of relationships with caring significant others. This is a hopeless situation now given that institutions are paid very substantial recompense to offer group care for wards, and I have to worry that this is potentially creating a new generation of forgotten children. Children who leave institutional care with no ongoing relationship with a caring, parent-like figure and no sense of family have diminished feelings of self-worth and a shattered identity. We see the consequences of such institutional care every day in an electorate like Murray, which has one of the highest rates of homelessness in the country. It is not surprising when we look at the Supported Accommodation Assistance Program, SAAP, that over 40 per cent of those seeking help through that program have previously been institutionalised or brought up in so-called ‘care’.

Along with Daryl and many others who now seek to give every child a chance in this country, I call on the Victorian and federal governments to look very hard at the next generation of forgotten children. They are already with us. We know of the damage and distress that a life of neglect and lack of love leads to, particularly in early childhood. It is absolutely incumbent on all of us who stood in the House or in the Great Hall on Monday and who wholeheartedly embraced the motion of apology that we do not now rest and say the job is done. The job is just beginning for those who are recently enlightened.

I have Daryl Sloan to thank for helping me to understand more particularly what a cruel blow life can deliver to an innocent young child but how you can triumph despite that blow and how you can lead a better life through your work for so many others, but foster carers like Darryl need a lot of understanding, better attention and support.

I also believe that we should not rest in trying to bring to justice those who perpetrated the cruelties and the criminal acts in the deliberate neglect of innocent young wards. Many of them are still well and truly with us in the community, some continue to hold positions of responsibility. I believe as a nation we also need to seek out and prosecute those who are found guilty of very serious charges. We cannot do any less for the victims.

I certainly will continue to be concerned, particularly for those in my electorate. We did have a Presbyterian boys home based in Dhurringile, which is now a prison. At the time numbers of boys from overseas, migrant children, were sent to that place. I am not aware personally at this point whether any of those children suffered a less than proper experience there, but I intend to find out.

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