David Shoebridge (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the minister for that contribution. It's right in part, that the scheme is meant to be survivor focused. I agree with many of the things that Senator Thorpe said in her contribution today about some of the structural failings in the scheme. We should reflect on those because they're being identified repeatedly in the ongoing inquiry, which I'm a participant in, into the Redress Scheme. It's meant to be survivor focused, and it has provided substantial relief to many survivors. I think we should acknowledge that. But there are serious defects with how the scheme operates.

One of the serious defects is that it privileges institutions over survivors. There's an asymmetry of information in applications. The institution has all the information; the survivor gets almost none. The survivor gets an edited version of the determination, even, and doesn't really know the basis upon which the payment is made to them. That asymmetry is real, and it's not trauma informed.

And there's this constant threat by institutions that, if the scheme is tweaked to deliver any more fairness toward survivors, they'll just walk away. They'll just exit the scheme. We should not accept that from the institutions. We should collectively not accept that from the institutions—this bullying, threatening attitude from institutions that, if we even do the smallest tweak for fairness, they'll just walk away from the scheme. If they do that, we should come together as a nation and, if necessary, refer the power to hold them and bind them into the scheme. We should say clearly to them, 'We're not just going to let you walk away when we want to deliver a small snippet of fairness to survivors.'

But the idea that simply opening this short window to survivors would somehow see institutions walk away or see their position prejudiced is actually not true, because all of the institutions who join the scheme would have assumed that they would be making payments based upon the law as we understood it after the royal commission recommendations were implemented. GLJ was a bolt out of nowhere. It would not have featured in any of their costings or actuarial estimates. It was literally a bolt out of the blue that suddenly gave the institutions a potential windfall, obviously at the cost of survivors. So none of the assumptions that the organisations had about the cost of the scheme would have been informed by GLJ.

What this amendment seeks to do is just put us back to where we were before GLJ happened. It restores the status quo to 1 June 2022. That isn't a case of prejudicing the institutions at all; it's just restoring that fairer situation that happened before GLJ was decided and up until it was overturned. I will ask the minister, though: has the minister responsible for the scheme commenced discussions with the states and territories about the effect of GLJ? Has there been any communication or any efforts to seek to remedy this unfairness with any of the minister's state or territory colleagues?