Andrew Murray (WA, Australian Democrats) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thought for my adjournment speech tonight I would try again to raise the appalling crime of child sexual assault, both past and present. I was prompted to do so by an article sent to me by one of a number of priests campaigning internationally against this scourge. Right at the outset I will ask why some politicians who so loudly proclaim their concern for families or so publicly parade their religion or are so forthright on conscience votes on religious or quasi-religious matters are so quiet on the issue of the sexual abuse or the sexual assault of children. I wish it were not so.

The sexual assault of children remains a matter of such widespread and national concern that it does require the federal parliament and the federal government to take up the gauntlet. Other governments have—for example, the Irish and South Australian governments. I raise this issue again, not only because it involves our most vulnerable and precious community members, our children, but because so many Australian adults—hundreds of thousands of them—experienced sexual abuse or sexual assault as children and suffer for that today.

Currently, the South Australian commission of inquiry into children in state care, set up by Premier Rann, has revealed a staggering amount of sexual crimes committed against children. In that state alone, Commissioner Mulligan estimates huge numbers of children under the age of 16 are likely to have been or are being sexually abused or sexually assaulted. Two recent Senate Community Affairs References Committee inquiries have also revealed just how widespread the sexual assault of children has been and continues to be for those in care. These were the 2001 child migrant inquiry and the 2004 children in institutional care inquiry. Many other studies in Australia talk of a large problem in families and in society at large. Those Senate inquiries also exposed the tragic long-term social problems a survivor may experience in adulthood, which include welfare dependency, criminality, addictions and mental illness—all problems which result in huge budgetary expenditures.

Evidence also reveals that, in the sordid records of sexual abuse and sexual assault, the church in all its manifestations has historically figured prominently. Here in Australia, the Catholic, Anglican and Uniting churches have all been implicated, as has the church based organisation the Salvation Army. This is not something to run away from. It is something to tackle head-on. A number of leading religious figures have been determined to tackle this problem forthrightly, and I support them in doing so.

Take the case of our close ally the United States. The big Catholic archdioceses of Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago and Los Angeles have been rocked to the core with this problem. They now face the task of rebuilding trust and confidence among their laity and their clergy. This situation is confirmed in an article titled ‘An American epiphany’ published in the international Catholic newsletter the Tablet on 21 January 2006. I commend it to the Senate; it is a good article to read. It starts with a piece that appeared back in 2002 in the Boston Globe which told of the sordid goings-on in the Boston archdiocese. It told of how church officials in what was then the proudest bastion of Catholicism in the United States had knowingly relocated a serial paedophile priest many times to many parishes, without punishment, because of repeated allegations of sexual assault. They just moved him on. The Tablet article also reveals how the revelations in the Boston Globe acted as a catalyst to many more allegations of sexual assault by priests and other church workers across the United States. To the great credit of the United States Attorneys-General, they took action.

Four years and hundreds of cases later, the damage to the Catholic faith in the United States is enormous, but many admirable Catholics are leading the way to facing up to the problem and recovering from those times. The article tells us of how compensation paid to sexual assault victims in America now exceeds $US1 billion; of how dioceses have been declared bankrupt and others may follow; of how dioceses have been forced to endure parish and school closures, both because of and adding to the disenchantment among rank-and-file Catholics; of how bishops have resigned; of how local communities have been separated from the church as a whole; of how the senior American cleric Cardinal Law was forced to take early retirement because of his role in concealing the crimes and reassigning paedophile priests; and of how those priests who remain—many of them very fine people—endure a crisis of morale, having witnessed hundreds of their peers consigned to oblivion.

Unfortunately in Australia—with exceptions—neither our law officers or our media, our politicians or our priests have addressed the Australian problem adequately. They should have, because the evidence of children having been or being sexually assaulted is there. There are of course senators and members, including those on the Senate Community Affairs References Committee and others, such as Senator Santoro, who do recognise the gravity of this problem and have called for greater action by both federal and state governments and parliaments. The community affairs committee members endured many agonising hours reading and taking evidence from the survivors of child sexual assault, as revealed in the two unanimous reports of the Senate inquiries referred to earlier.

I am mystified as to how the federal government can ignore the pressing moral and social imperative to tackle the sexual assault of children and its consequences head-on. I am mystified because there are so many politicians amongst us who wear their morality or their religion on their sleeves but who fail to take up this challenge. It is even odder because hundreds of thousands of people are affected. Such selective morality is indeed perplexing. There are senators that rightly engage at length with issues such as stem cell research, abortion, internet pornography and the like, but when it comes to child sexual assault the propensity is for disengagement. Granted, it is a murky and unpleasant issue and one difficult to deal with. But protestations of disgust and empathy are just not enough. Nor is it enough just to handball the issue to the states and territories. It is just too complex an issue, as evidenced by the burgeoning crises in child protection systems across Australia.

It is the easy way out not to face up to this problem and we should not be going down that path. We do have a duty to support those members of the religious groups and those members in the community who are fighting to do something about this problem. We do have a duty to pursue problems of national importance and public concern, especially those that have such damaging long-term implications. Sadly, federally so far the political will to take the matter further has not been there. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in Prime Minister Howard’s response to the call for a royal commission into child sexual assault. On rejecting this proposal, the Prime Minister stated on 13 May 2005 that he would rather spend the money involved in a royal commission on further service provision and early prevention initiatives than ‘lining the pockets of lawyers’. What a cop-out.

I am also bitterly disappointed at the failure of the federal government to agree to recommendation 6 of the Forgotten Australians report. This called for the establishment of a national reparation fund for survivors of abusive childhoods spent in institutional and other forms of care—one modelled on those already operating in Canada, Ireland and even here in Tasmania. Tasmania is far ahead of the federal government in trying to address this issue, as indeed is the South Australian government.

This failure by the Prime Minister and the coalition has left many survivors of sexual assault and sexual abuse as children so disillusioned. In a few sentences, the expectation that their government would finally right their wrongs was dashed and their long wait for a measure of justice for the crimes perpetrated on them as defenceless children has been sunk. They are again stuck with the only recourse previously available to them—either to go through the courts or through negotiations with those who managed or funded the institutions. Both avenues have proved unsuccessful, especially when our DPPs lack the spine of American attorney-generals in being willing to take these matters up.

We do have the principal hurdle of limitation laws which effectively cause time to run out for many criminal and civil cases against the perpetrators. Or, on the other hand, we have church processes which are fundamentally adversarial and tend to revictimise the survivors. There are, fortunately, some church leaders and some churches which do not take that approach and are a great aid to people. Of course, there is Premier Rann’s government which is really trying to do something in this area. I urge all parliamentarians to turn to their conscience on this matter and engage in a serious way. You can start by reading the unanimous Senate reports. National leadership is vital and national leadership on this issue is a must.