Sussan Ley (Farrer, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Justice and Customs) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased to speak on the occasion of this parliament’s national apology to the forgotten Australians and former child migrants. The apology is long deserved, and the sadness is that it has ever been necessary. We as a nation must acknowledge the trauma and abuse that this generation of people suffered, and we must work with them to improve their lives and allow them to reconcile with their past.

It is reported that more than 500,000 Australians have experienced life in an orphanage, home or other form of out-of-home care during the last century in Australia. Many of these were child migrants who were transported from Britain to these shores, bringing with them the hopes of their families for a better life. Many of us have met someone who lived in an orphanage or a ‘naughty’ girls or boys home, as they were known when I was growing up. In Albury, St Johns at Thurgoona was for many years a Catholic orphanage, as was St Anne’s Home of Compassion girls home in Broken Hill.

I am not critical of St Johns or St Anne’s as I do know that they offered a safe haven from difficult and traumatic family situations for many who lived there. However, I also know that life was tough for the girls who lived there. The nuns were hard taskmasters. They were strict disciplinarians and they could not understand behaviour that was not mainstream nor offer comfort or affection in times of sadness. I am sure for those nuns these girls were from almost alien backgrounds and they were ill-equipped to deal with the emotional trauma that resulted from being separated from families and homes.

One of the most dreadful facilities in all of Australia was the Hay Institution for Girls. It is also in the Farrer electorate. It opened in 1961 and operated as a secondary punishment centre for girls from Parramatta who were considered incorrigible or failed to meet minimum standards. Many had undiagnosed mental health conditions. Most came from poor socioeconomic backgrounds. Many had been state wards from a very young age. Some were Indigenous stolen generation children and, most importantly, none had committed any criminal offences. They were simply the lost and forgotten children of Australia’s welfare system.

Girls were transferred at night by train to Narrandera and then to Hay in the back of a lock-up van. On their arrival they were issued with a set of institutional clothes, given routine instructions and had their hair cut short to a depersonalised institutional bob. Their introduction to hard labour in Hay was a 10-day stint locked in a cell where they were forced to scrub paint from the walls back to the brick surface. This was followed with repainting the surface for the next unfortunate arrival. Cells were furnished with a single iron-frame bed, a thin mattress, a blanket, sheets, a pillow, the Bible and a night can. The girls were only allowed 10 minutes twice a day to talk between themselves, eyes to the floor at all times. They were only allowed to talk to a staff member by raising their arm and awaiting a response and at all times they had to be at least six feet apart from each other—no visitors, no mail in or out, no privacy, every movement monitored, controlled, every response signalled by procedure or order. At night they were issued only four sheets of toilet paper and ordered to sleep on their sides, facing the door and checked every 20 minutes.

The institution closed down on 30 June 1974, and in 2008 the Outback Theatre for Young People produced a play titled Eyes to the Floor by Alana Valentine based on the experience of the girls from Hay. Over the years there have been many reports into institutional care for children, some in fact date back to the 1800s when it was determined that institutional care was not the best outcome for children. One report in 1945 into a Sydney industrial school found many shortcomings which they said at the time could be matched at institutions throughout the Commonwealth, and yet we still continued to allow these facilities to operate.

A British report in 1956 called the Ross report strongly criticised Australia’s children’s institutions for their lack of trained staff, isolation from the community and the poor educational and employment opportunities provided, and yet we still allowed them to continue to provide care. In 1961 the Schwarten inquiry into the Queensland correctional centre for boys, Westbrook, drew attention to the many issues, including the poor standard of food, inadequate hygiene and excessive drill. The inquiry focused particularly on the institution’s punishment regime, noting that: the strap was used excessively and too often; punishment for disciplinary breaches was unduly harsh and excessive; and boys were physically assaulted by certain members of staff in a vicious and brutal way, a story echoed across Australian institutions. Yet we still allowed it to happen to these most vulnerable of humans—children.

I could continue on with the many other reports but I will focus on the one that I have had some involvement in and which I believe has been instrumental in the apology this week. That is the report entitled Forgotten Australians released in August 2004 by the Senate Community Affairs References Committee. At the time of the Senate inquiry into Australians who experienced institutional, out-of-home care as children I was the Parliamentary Secretary for Children and Youth Affairs and so I met personally many of those people who made submissions to the report. I feel this week as I felt then the extraordinary feelings of their suffering and helplessness and have just some very, very small idea of how they must have felt on the day of the apology this week.

But it is no less heartbreaking five years later to think that we as a supposedly civilised country turned our backs on children in this way. It is unbelievable. While it does seem totally at odds with our culture and our beliefs, it still happened. The Senate committee was due to report in December 2003 actually, but due to the sheer volume of evidence that required processing and the complex issues that the inquiry unveiled the reporting date was extended to August 2004. The committee received 614 submissions from care leavers who had been in institutions or foster homes across all states in Australia from the 1920s to the 1990s.

The Senate committee said at the time that without doubt this inquiry has generated the largest volume of highly personal, emotive and significant evidence of any Senate inquiry. The committee members and the staff of the secretariat and the department were overwhelmed at the events described in the evidence. It was as unthinkable to them, and in fact to me, that human beings could treat one another, let alone such young and helpless people, in such a psychologically and physically abusive manner. The submissions that I read at the time were almost surreal in their intensity. I would like to quote from one care leaver whose submission was included in part in the introduction of the inquiry report:

In some ways I feel like wasted potential, I feel that because I was full of potential as a child and if I’d had a different childhood I could have done anything and been anyone I wanted but instead I was lumbered with a childhood where I had no rights and the government “carers” did whatever they felt like doing to me, so instead of being anything I wanted I’ve had to deal and cope with the horror of my childhood. This is something that I will keep doing for the rest of my life. I also ask, “what if what happened to me, happened to one of your children”? That’s how you need to view me, as a child as valued as your own because I am someone’s daughter, my parents just aren’t here.

I believe that this quote eloquently and clearly outlines to us as a government that we must take some responsibility for this dark period in our history, and that this apology will go a long way towards us as a nation accepting what happened.

I still keep in contact with some of the care leavers, and it saddens me that many still do not believe that they have the right to live a better life—that they are not worthy of good things—and that they face great difficulties in improving their situation. Over the past few years I came to know Sherry, who lives in my electorate. She has been married a couple of times, she has children with whom she often had a difficult relationship and her youngest daughter is a talented musician. The first time Sherry told me her story, in her quiet, self-effacing way, it moved me immensely. She had been belted in her home by the heavy bunch of keys that the carers carried around on their belts, and she told me of girls being branded with hot irons. She told me of her escape from the institution and of her awful life on the streets. When your life begins with such hardship it is almost impossible to get it back on the rails, and Sherry’s life has never been easy. But she has great spirit. She studied and she gained a certificate in aged care. She is a fabulous mother to her own daughter and she has reconnected with her own mother, difficult though that surely must have been.

I could recite many stories which are included in the submissions to the Senate inquiry, but I want to mention one particular person who deserves to be acknowledged. She has been acknowledged by many members of the parliament. My first contact with CLAN, or the Care Leavers Network, was through Leonie Sheedy. She was a care leaver herself but also a volunteer who had inadvertently started a helpline for other care leavers. She was passionate, loving and absolutely exhausted, because she had heard thousands of stories from care leavers and she just did not know how much longer she could continue to physically and emotionally help them. But still she went on. What was amazing to me was that she had very little assistance or financial support. She was obviously trying hard to be all things to all people, and the emotional impact on her was immense. She had so few resources to help her with this huge task. For me to see her big smile during the apology on Monday was just fantastic.

The circumstances of these forgotten children are unique. Many do not know who their parents were, or even their correct name or date of birth. They have been subjected to abuse and ignorance, and they do not believe they deserve love or assistance, so they will always struggle with acceptance and trust. The apology and the many reports have gone some way to proving to care leavers that they are deserving of assistance, but we must work with them and their children and their partners to ensure that they get all of the help, love and support that they deserve. This week we have taken the first step of what will be a long journey, but the years ahead will be hard because, of course, this apology is no miracle cure. We must build more specific support systems for this group of people into the future, and I very much support the measures that the Prime Minister outlined as a good start.

I would like to provide a short but insightful quote from Solzhenitsyn, which came to him during his time in the Gulag:

It was only when I lay there on the rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart … If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.

When we look at those who stood by and saw the evil deeds committed in the name of churches, charities and state governments, it is too easy to say that these were evil deeds committed by evil people in another time. To think that would be wrong and would lull us into a false sense of security. The reality is that children are still victims, are still betrayed and still need all of us to exercise continual vigilance on their behalf. We cannot fix it for the forgotten Australians but we can pledge to do all we can to make sure that this shameful period of our history is not revisited for any child in anyone’s care. On behalf of all the people of Farrer who I represent here in the federal parliament, may I offer my sincere and heartfelt apologies to the forgotten Australians for the wrongs done, the hurts inflicted and the childhoods lost.

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