Mark Dreyfus (Isaacs, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Attorney General) Share this | Hansard source

The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse was announced by Prime Minister Julia Gillard in November 2012 and established in January 2013. During the five-year course of the royal commission, it handled over 42,000 calls and almost 26,000 letters and emails, and it held just over 8,000 private sessions with survivors of child sexual abuse. The final report of the royal commission, comprising 17 volumes, was delivered to the Governor-General in December 2017. I'm proud of many of the things the Gillard government achieved, but I feel that the royal commission will be shown to be one of that government's more important initiatives, an initiative that should have lasting benefit for the Australian community because it revealed the most appalling of crimes—crimes that had been hidden for decades behind walls of secrecy and cover-up.

So it is of great concern to me that the great work carried out by that royal commission and the bravery of the thousands of survivors who came forward to give evidence to it are being betrayed by the Morrison government. Every day, more Australians are discovering that this Prime Minister runs a government that is heroic when it comes to announcements and hopeless when it comes to delivery. In the context of the Redress Scheme that the current bill deals with, this means that we have a government that is happy to make announcements about how it respects the findings and recommendations of the royal commission into child sexual abuse and about how the government supports justice for the survivors of those terrible crimes. However, when we look at the Redress Scheme this government set up and how it actually works, it's clear that survivors of child sexual abuse have been hung out to dry by a government that has every interest in self-promotion and not enough interest in delivering justice for the survivors of childhood sexual abuse.

While this situation is appalling, it is, sadly, unsurprising. Boastful announcements with hopeless follow-up is how the Morrison government operates, and a very clear link can be drawn with what the Morrison government has done with the banking royal commission, conducted by the eminent lawyer and former High Court judge Ken Hayne. To begin with, the then Treasurer Mr Morrison and his Liberal crew fought against that vitally necessary royal commission tooth and nail, voting against its establishment 26 times, desperate to stop the inquiry. The then Treasurer described it as 'hot air' and 'a stunt' and declared to his lasting shame that such an inquiry was 'nothing more than a populist whinge'. Subsequent reporting about what went on inside Mr Turnbull's government—that was before the current Prime Minister knifed Mr Turnbull to take his job—revealed that the current Prime Minister was the last to hold out in cabinet, trying to shield the big banks from scrutiny.

Looking back now, that isn't at all surprising. We can now see that cover-up is this Prime Minister's first instinct whenever there is a hint of crime, corruption or other wrongdoing by those with power. Of course, the reverse is true for the working poor—you only have to look at the cruel and unlawful robodebt fiasco to see how willing this Prime Minister is to pursue those who can't fight back. Whether it's sports rorts, dodgy land deals for Liberal donors or the use of forged documents by one of his ministers, Mr Morrison's approach to crime and corruption is always the same: deny, distract and cover up, and, above all, never take responsibility for anything.

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