Graham Perrett (Moreton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

At the core of the National Redress Scheme is the wellbeing of survivors. They are at the centre of its design and the legal process surrounding compensation. The National Redress Scheme will undergo amendments to support greater access to redress, increase the choices available to survivors and ensure fairer and more consistent outcomes that acknowledge the enduring impact of child sexual abuse. The National Redress Scheme for Institutional Child Sexual Abuse Amendment Bill 2023 shows the commitment by all governments to improve access to redress and the survivor experience. The bill will benefit survivors and contribute to improving the national redress scheme for institutional child sexual abuse. It is especially important that the scheme provides a more survivor focused and trauma informed experience that is responsive to survivors of institutional child sexual abuse and prevents retraumatisation of survivors.

The meaning of trauma informed care is quite clear. Trauma informed care is an organisation and system level initiative to understand trauma, such that all staff undertake their tasks and interactions with survivors with an understanding of the impacts of trauma and strategies to minimise the possibility of retraumatising clients. Applying for redress can be an extremely traumatising process because, by coming forward and putting their experiences into words, survivors must relive the event over and over again. Their trauma does not end because the event has passed and because they have healed. My wife, who was a frontline child protection worker and then a lawyer for knowmore, the CLC set up for survivors, talked about interviewing an 80-year-old about the trauma inflicted on her as a five-year-old and how, as the woman spoke, my wife only saw the child in front of her.

On top of this, survivors have to deal with sceptics who do not believe them when they speak up or defence lawyers who frame them as money hungry. This can leave damaging effects that make it easier for survivors to go about their lives carrying an unspoken yet pervasive trauma. We need to do better by our survivors. To an outside observer it might seem like a survivor is high functioning and that because of this they don't need help, they've moved on and put the abuse in the past. But those closest can see the lasting effects of a failed system. The victim blaming culture must end. We must listen to survivors' stories with sensitivity, with patience, with empathy and with respect.

If people are interested in the topic of how victims respond to abuse, I highly recommend the article 'Peace in the home' by Sarah Krasnostein. The 1 November 2023 Monthly article deals with three Melbourne women, Nicole, Hadassa and Elisheva, and how they responded to their evil, cowardly abuser. These brave young women came forward as adults in Australia to protect innocent children they didn't know in Israel. That is pure courage—the best antidote to pure evil. I should strike out that term 'innocent children'. There is no such thing as a guilty child; there are merely children. Packages of innocence, our hope distilled—but I digress.

Krasnostein's article explores the landmines associated with suggesting that there is a commonsense approach to responding to abuse:

The law has long had a binary understanding of emotion and intellect, privileging, in most instances, the truth claims of the latter and thereby losing the information to be gained by valuing the former. Also misguided is the law's placement of emotion and common sense at opposing poles. Common sense … cannot be conflated with intellect. It comes from a world where the fields of psychiatry and psychology never happened. Proud of its ignorance, limited by both its own unexamined experience and low tolerance for discomfort, common sense is riddled with unbridled emotion: biases, bigotry, blame-shifting, denials, defensiveness, projection. All the personal material we take out like the rubbish, left to mingle in the collective field for so long it becomes mistaken for simply the way things are.

Remember, most abuse occurs in the home and is perpetrated by someone who a child loves—someone close to them. Statistically, it won't be an opportunistic faceless stranger striking like lightning from a blue sky. Instead it is more likely that the abuser is a trusted figure who has groomed the child. Often it is a person the child relies on for survival or, as the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse showed, some person who inveigled themselves into a position of trust. To paraphrase my wife, when it comes to paedophiles and vulnerable children, they are like flies to faeces. In 2017 the royal commission released a research paper on grooming. Factors that increase a child's vulnerability to sexual abuse include social isolation, low self-esteem, domestic violence and a history of emotional, physical or sexual abuse.

Our courts are based on the notion of innocence until proven guilty and proven beyond reasonable doubt. As a solicitor I know that these are principles that have served the common law jurisdictions well. However, sadly they're stacked against child victims, especially when it comes to testifying against someone who was close to them. Convincing all the members of a jury is a further hurdle, and, in the case of Nicole, Dassi and Elly, throwing in a small, closed, patriarchal, almost antediluvian, socioreligious community just adds to the size of the legal hurdles.

The memory of trauma is not linear. However, our courts demand cold, dry empirical facts presented logically and that the evidence be error free. At the time a person they love and trust is perpetrating evil on a child, the child's brain does not simply press record. The video recording is corrupted by emotion, the brain's protective defences. The wiring can become scrambled, especially when a good defence lawyer is up the complainant's ribs while they're on the stand in later years. I have no problem with defence lawyers at all; some of my best friends are defence lawyers. I've mentioned Peter Russo, a state MP that I work with. However, I'm merely passing comment on our legal system. If the complainant is close in age to when the event happened, then they are too young and vulnerable. Alternatively, if the person in the box has the protection of age—maturity, wisdom, experience, perhaps a tougher skin—then they are much further in time away from the incident. Memory fades, especially the protected pigeonholes that victims construct just to cope and to survive. The person might remember the shame and embarrassment of the real moment in time but not the colour of the curtains, the configuration of the room or the clothes the person was wearing.

If the defence proves the curtains were a different colour or that the room didn't have an alcove, the intense shame and embarrassment that is real forever is legally discarded. Thus justice further attenuates the complainant's shame and embarrassment. The problem of shame is a wicked problem indeed. Krasnostein's insightful article touches on this in some detail:

Shame tells us that what happened didn't happen. Or that it wasn't that bad. Or, if it was, that we are to blame. Shame … is concrete in its understanding, small in its repertoire. It seizes any imperfection as proof of universal discredit. Most victims of developmental trauma, relational trauma or sexual assault live with that voice every moment of every day. It takes an extremely strong person … to endure this style of cross-examination.

All survivors, irrespective of their background and experiences, deserve to be heard and deserve to be afforded a trauma informed experience.

The bill will improve the process for applicants with serious criminal convictions and allows incarcerated survivors to apply for redress. We must focus on improving integrity, fairness and access to redress. The Albanese government has supported a recommendation that survivors should be provided with end-to-end support by experienced, culturally appropriate and trauma informed professionals. That is recommendation 3.5. Ongoing initiatives include more frequent and meaningful communication with survivors, particularly at the points of entry to and exit from the redress scheme and through regular updates while their application is processed. We need to ensure that survivors can apply for redress in a trauma informed way that minimises that retraumatisation I mentioned earlier. A trauma informed framework has been developed and is being applied across the entirety of the scheme's operations, including training, recruitment and communications, as per recommendation 6.1.

As the minister explained when introducing this bill, the review made 38 recommendations to increase access to redress and improve the scheme's operation, making it more trauma informed, efficient and, ultimately, more survivor focused. Of the recommendations, 29 were supported in full, five in part and four were not supported. This bill will fulfil the work of the review and improve the scheme and the experiences of survivors for its remaining life.

A number of recommendations have already been implemented, including advanced payments, changing to the date for indexation of relevant prior payments, removing the requirement for a witness statutory declaration, introducing payment instalments and extending funder-of-last-resort provisions. This bill continues the government's work in improving the scheme and gives effect to the remaining changes outlined in the government's final response to the review, which was released on 4 May last year.

In line with the scheme's governance arrangements, all states and territories, as partners in the scheme, have agreed to the amendments in this bill. That is incredibly encouraging and must be a relief to all survivors. The fact that agreement exists demonstrates the national commitment of everyone involved to work towards the healing of trauma for survivors. The establishment of the scheme was a significant achievement, which has been described as requiring unprecedented cooperation between Commonwealth, state and territory governments and the institutions.

The referral of state and territory powers to the Commonwealth is not something that happens frequently, easily or without careful consideration. This demonstrated the shared preparedness to take responsibility for past abuse and to commit to child safe practices, contribute to the healing of survivors by acknowledging that the abuse should not have occurred and that, more importantly, it should not occur again. The National Redress Scheme acknowledges that many children were sexually abused in Australian institutions. It recognises the suffering endured because of this abuse and holds institutions accountable for that abuse.

In 2018, I spoke in parliament about the impact of child sexual abuse at the time the National Redress Scheme was introduced. We know that for survivors the impact of child sexual abuse is devastating. That is an understatement, I know, but there are limited words in the English language to really convey the impact this abuse has on a survivor. As you know, for a long, long, long time this abuse was not talked about. Survivors, in many cases, were shamed into silence. We have not developed language strong enough to really convey the trauma felt by survivors.

Sexual abuse is life changing, life limiting, and, sadly, can even be life ending. It is especially important to look beyond the shattered husks of lives, gutted before they'd even truly begun. When a child is being abused at school they won't want to go to school; that is something that is not too hard to understand. But if they are forced to avoid school, it means that their education has been stolen from them, along with their childhood. Without an education, and suffering from extreme trauma as adolescents, victims of child sexual abuse are vulnerable. Their capacity to work can be reduced. It means that as adolescents they may well be vulnerable to criminal activity. We have to acknowledge, with much sympathy and understanding, the path that survivors have been led down. Where survivors have been led into crime and convicted, they have taken responsibility. They've paid their debt to society just like everyone else who's convicted of a crime.

The former government sought to place restrictions on the redress being accessed by survivors who have a criminal history. At the time I spoke about this because I believed it was wrong and deeply unfair. I still believe that survivors who have been led into criminality should not be denied access to redress because there is clear evidence that people with a history of childhood sexual abuse and trauma are more likely to be incarcerated later in life. Denying this group of survivors access to redress will not only deny them the ability to rebuild their lives; it is likely to cause recidivism. Denying this group of survivors access to redress is cruel, shortsighted and unfair. I said at the time that whatever has happened—

Andrew Wilkie (Clark, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The member for Moreton will resume their seat. It being 6.30 pm, the debate is interrupted in accordance with standing order 192B. The debate is adjourned, and the resumption of the debate will be made an order of the day for the next sitting. The member for Moreton will have leave to continue speaking when the debate is resumed on a future day.