Dorinda Cox (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak to the National Redress Scheme for Institutional Child Sexual Abuse Amendment Bill 2023. This bill amends the process of the scheme, which was first established in 2018 following the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abus and is currently scheduled to be in place for 10 years. The amendments contained in this bill implement certain recommendations from the final report of the second-year review of the National Redress Scheme.

This scheme provides three elements of redress for eligible applicants. They are payment of $150,000, access to counselling and psychological services, and the option to receive a direct, personal response from a responsible institution. This scheme is so important. As we know, far too many people experience trauma at the hands of state institutions. This scheme is, frankly, the least the government can do to try to address the hurt and the long-lasting effects of child sexual abuse. However, we know that this scheme is too hard to access. There are so many hoops that participants have to jump through, and many organisations that were responsible for this abuse have not signed up to the scheme, meaning justice is, in fact, out of reach for far too many victims.

I know personally how hard this scheme is, as I have loved ones who have had to go through this process and, in fact, are still going through this process. The trauma of having to relive and explain what you were subjected to cannot be overstated. It is important to acknowledge that many of the people who are victim-survivors and are trying to access this scheme were also part of the stolen generations of this country. We need to acknowledge the complex trauma that these people carry with them and the impacts of intergenerational trauma. Despite what some people in this place might think and, in fact, what they do say, intergenerational trauma is real, and the impacts of colonisation continue to be felt in First Nations communities across Australia. The issues in this scheme only exacerbate the inherent distrust that many First Nations people feel towards government institutions.

Further, there are many different redress schemes. This one and various stolen generation redress schemes are in every jurisdiction but Western Australia, my home state, and Queensland. There is overlap in a number of administrative processes that people must follow, meaning it sometimes takes years to get a result. In WA and Queensland, for members of the stolen generation, this scheme may be all they have access to for some type of justice. I have been told directly by survivors of the stolen generation that the Western Australian government is waiting for them to die. It is waiting for them to die out. The fewer survivors that are left there, the less money the government will have to pay. This is unacceptable. It is an absolute disgrace. The WA and Queensland governments need to get their act together and implement a redress scheme for survivors of the stolen generation, and we need a national scheme for those who were taken across state lines or who, for whatever reason, were not able to participate in those schemes that were run in the past.

Once again I stand in this place and say that this is the absolute, bare minimum. It is the least that this government could do. No amount of money will ever account for the loss of family, the loss of connection, the loss of culture and the loss of community. Entire families were wiped out by this policy. Languages and sacred knowledge have been lost. In some places we can never get that back. That is why we fight so hard to protect what we have left. If governments really want to make up for what they did during those times, they will stop continuing to lock our kids up, they will stop destroying our sacred sites, they will invest in our First Nations communities, and they will let First Nations people be at the core of those solutions for the problems that governments have created as legacy pieces for us. So, yes, we need this Redress Scheme for victims-survivors of institutionalised child sexual abuse, and this is an important step, but we also could be doing a whole lot more.