Stephen Jones (Whitlam, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse was a watershed moment in Australia. Because of it, we now know the horrible crimes committed by the powerful against the powerless and the innocent. The royal commission opened our eyes. It forced us to examine something so evil that for so many it was hard to believe that it could be true. Because of it, we all now do. The acknowledgement returns a modicum of power to those who had their childhoods stripped away from them by the very people they should have been able to trust the most. Compounding the unspeakable acts committed on our children was the tragedy that the crimes for many decades were covered up and the victims were not believed.

It's easy to think now, two years after the apology, years after the first hearings of that royal commission, that the holding of a royal commission into these historical abuses was somehow inevitable. After 1,300 witnesses and 8,000 private sessions hearing the testimony of survivors, the evidence of these crimes is overwhelming in its scale and overpowering in its detail. But it wasn't inevitable. It was resisted tooth and nail in this parliament and elsewhere. When those witnesses came forward and the evidence unfolded, we began to understand why: barbaric acts that can only be described as torture and rape committed by some of our society's most powerful institutions on innocent people—our children. This was magnified by the culture of denial and deceit by churches and other institutions. The acts robbed them of their childhood. The churches robbed them of their faith in justice and their faith in faith itself.

It's worth reflecting on the experience of a child who has no language to describe the despicable acts, no words to cry out, no-one to turn to. The pain and suffering is theirs and theirs alone to endure. For those who were able to summon the courage to try and express the horrors that they'd experienced, they were believed. Indeed, compounding this injustice, the victim so often became the accused. They were accused of lying, of making it up, of besmirching the reputations of those who stood at a pulpit or stood in a powerful place. Those people should have been locked up. They should have been sent to jail. Instead they were moved on to somewhere else to commit their crimes again and again and again.

Too often the shattered trust and broken souls these crimes wrought were passed down in a barely traceable chain of suffering from one generation to the next. These are generational crimes. Because of the royal commission, we know something of the price our society paid for the retributions visited on those that were abused, and we still ask this: what did churches and schools and orphanages gain from the cost and the misery that they extracted from so many lives? The answer is pretty simple: protection of power, of reputation—of the institution's reputation over those who were held in their trust. Those were their priorities, not the protection of the young children in their care.

The power of a national apology to those children that came after the royal commission, and because of it, finished its work. It's something that we in this place should all be very proud of. It was an important moment but one that will ultimately be undermined if we don't follow through. The only action that can truly demonstrate to the survivors of abuse is a redress scheme that works as the royal commission truly intended it to. The member for Barton outlined a series of shortcomings between the scheme that was recommended by the royal commission and the one that was adopted by the government. We need to make the scheme more straightforward—for example, by allowing the relevant minister to declare a church or organisation by its name rather than by its subsidiaries. We must streamline the process by which redress payments are made, and we must authorise the disclosure of protected information about an institution that continues to decline to participate in the scheme.

The royal commission estimates that around 60,000 Australians could be eligible for redress—60,000. It's a staggering figure. At the current rate of applications, it will take the scheme 45 years to get through the backlog for proper justice for all of those victims. It doesn't take a genius to work out that in 45 years so many of those victims will have already passed on, perhaps not without passing on the horrors and the disadvantage to another generation of young Australians, which is why it's so important that we get this right. It's clear the application process is difficult to navigate. Survivors are getting old and in many cases have ongoing health complications. Average processing times are between 12 and 18 months. This is not good enough for a population that has already endured so much. Neither is the process that allows institutions to opt out of providing redress through this scheme. More must be done to force these institutions to get on board.

The time for the benefit of the doubt is long gone. These issues are of real concern to me and my community. I've spoken many times in this place about the school I attended and the community I grew up in, and how perpetrators were moved from one school to another, from one town to another, to continue their crimes, covered up by the institutions and schools who cared more about the reputation of the institution than the children that were abused. For the sake of the children, for the sake of the victims and survivors, we must get this right.

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