Sue Lines (WA, Deputy-President) Share this | Hansard source

I too rise today to offer my most sincere apology to the victims and survivors of institutional child sexual abuse. I thank former Prime Minister Julia Gillard for having the coverage to set up the royal commission and I thank Senator Cormann and Senator Wong for leading the apology to victims and survivors in this place today. I want to start quickly with my own story. My father was sent out here as a child migrant from England and he grew up at Fairbridge in Western Australia. Thankfully, my father was not a victim of child sexual abuse, but others at Fairbridge were: children that he knew and children that he loved. His brother was also sent out, and what they did suffer was hardship and abuse, but it was not sexual, and I think that's one of the great areas that we have to pursue into the future: that children in institutions were treated appallingly. They were beaten. They were put to work. They were just not treated as human beings, and my father was in that category.

I know firsthand what it feels like to have your family ripped apart. I've just recently met my cousin in the UK. I look like my grandmother. I didn't know that before. Of course, I never knew my paternal grandmother. I look like my cousins. I share the same name as them. All of this my father lost, and it was lost to me and my children. That is one of the legacies of children in institutions.

Of course, to then abuse children in the way that happened in our country is unbelievable. To have people in positions of trust that sexually abuse those children, that thought that those children were there for them to abuse and to sexually abuse—and we know that it ruined lives. We know it tore families apart, and what has happened in our institutions, in our schools and in our churches is absolutely unforgiveable. The best that I can do today is to stand here as one of the many senators and offer my apologies.

But I want to focus particularly on First Nations Australians, because it should not have taken that royal commission. In my own state of Western Australia, there's no doubt that First Nations people have been treated harshly and cruelly in the land that is their own. In Western Australia, the first royal commission was held in 1905. We knew then that children in institutions were being raped—we knew that. That inquiry was not about the sexual abuse of children; it was about the harsh treatment of natives, as they were called in those days. But, nevertheless, the abuse of children, the rape of children, the harsh treatment of children became a feature of that royal commission. Nothing changed. In fact, after 1905 we saw a harsher regime. AO Neville eventually became the protector of Aboriginal people in Australia, and we saw a regime that became much more harsh.

Another royal commission, the Moseley commission, in 1935, looked again at what was happening to First Nations people. Again, one of the consequences was that that royal commission heard about the sexual exploitation, the sexual abuse of Aboriginal children in care. We know, as the colonisers of this country, that we have had a history of murder, of taking children away—and it goes on. There were more reports. In 1997, we had the Bringing them home report. There are horrific stories in there.

Of course, there were many people, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, who were not able to tell their stories to the royal commission. I stand here today and apologise to those people, to those victims and to their families, to the many thousands who were not able to tell those stories.

There are many stories in the Bringing them home report. One of the institutions particularly close to me is Sister Kate's, which was an institution set up in the 1930s by a nun who took light-skinned children to, allegedly, give them a better life. I know that because my mother taught the children from Sister Kate's at Queens Park Primary School. Some of those children were sexually abused at Sister Kate's. This is unbelievable, but anyone could come and knock on the door and offer to take those children home for the weekend and home for the holidays, and many of those children were sexually abused. Sadly, I'm not sure if any of that got before the royal commission, but it is in the Bringing them home report. So it should not have taken a royal commission to get to where we are today.

I applaud the men who, in that tearful way, told their stories on television and who, over and over again, were just not believed. I would hope that, if we've learnt nothing else, we have learnt that when children tell us an injustice has been done to them that the first thing we should do is believe them, because the damage that has been done is there, and it will continue into the next generation and the generation after that.

From Western Australia's perspective, from 1905, when those first official reports were made, to where we stand today, we knew what was happening, at least to First Nations children. In the 1930s, we should have known what was happening in institutions. It took until Prime Minister Gillard had the courage to set up the royal commission for those people's stories to be told once again and for us to now stand in this place and say that we believe them.

I would hope, as we've heard other senators in this place say today, that this would never happen again. But it's on all of us to make sure that children who are in institutions—and Western Australia, sadly, is leading the way. We have many, many children in out-of-home care. Most of them are First Nations children. In fact, the Healing Foundation said just recently that, of the children whose stories were told at the royal commission, 14 per cent were First Nations children. This is unforgivable. We have to do better. If that takes laws and it takes dollars, if that takes investing in early childhood and investing in communities, then that is what has to happen—because we can never allow what the royal commission has uncovered to happen again. My apologies are on the Senate record.