Richard Marles (Corio, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The love that a parent provides for their child is about as fundamental to the human condition as it gets, a sense of self-worth is about as important a gift as any parent can give to their child, and providing security to their children is the most important obligation that any parent has. These three things—love, worth and security—are the essence of a healthy childhood. They are the building blocks of a life. And yet for half a million Australians who grew up as wards of the state in children’s orphanages, in children’s homes and in other institutions, these three things—love, worth and security—were denied. This represents for them an unimaginable abuse.

This abuse did not start with the state; it started with parents, either through neglect or circumstance, who were not able to provide for their children or perhaps, for the worst form of circumstance, where there were no parents in the first place. For Leonie Sheedy, who was born in 1954, it was a case of her mother having left the home and her father being unable to cope with four young children, which led her and her two older sisters and, later, her younger brother to grow up in the St Catherine’s Orphanage in Geelong.

Large institutions looking after wards of the state, people without parental advocacy, were by their very nature harsh places to grow up. Parental love could not be provided across 100 kids, self-worth was a distant concept, and these places were not secure. Indeed, they were places where abuse could happen, and it did. Leonie was not the victim of any physical or sexual abuse but she did shed the tears of pain of separation from her parents and ultimately her two older sisters, who both left the orphanage at different times while she was there.

Whatever all of that meant for the children who grew up there in their later adult lives, and the consequences have been many—drug dependence, depression, family breakdown, homelessness, prostitution and suicide—their scars are only matched by the scars upon our own nation. Because, ultimately, as a society we are not judged by the tallness of our buildings or the wealth of our richest. Rather, we are judged by the care that we provide to our most vulnerable, and there are no more vulnerable than orphaned children. In their case, we did not provide enough care.

This is a very difficult issue. There was no malice of intent here in terms of the public policy. Indeed, to this day we still remove children from their parents where there is serious risk, and it is right to do that. But there are two ways in which public policy in those days did fail the people who grew up in institutional care. Firstly, the threshold for removing people from their parents then was far lower than what it is now. The significance of family relationships in the development of a person was not understood in the way that it is now. Secondly, putting these kids into large institutions was a recipe for disaster.

That public policy has now changed is the very reason why these people should now be acknowledged. Leonie Sheedy went on to become instrumental in the Care Leavers of Australia Network, CLAN. Through her courage and determination, and the determination of many involved in CLAN, there was the agitation for the Senate inquiry which ultimately led to the Forgotten Australians report. Senator Andrew Murray, who himself was a Fairbridge child migrant, has been the main advocate for the forgotten Australians in this parliament. Senator Murray’s term in this parliament will expire in the middle of this year, so CLAN have approached me to be the new advocate in this parliament on their behalf, a job that I see as a great responsibility and indeed, for me, a great privilege.

The reason I was approached was that Geelong had an unusually large number of orphanages in the area; indeed, the largest number of any centre outside a capital city. As a result, there are a large number of forgotten Australians who are now constituents in the electorate of Corio. While I will not be able to match the advocacy of Senator Murray in this parliament, borne of deep personal experience on his part, I do hope that I can play some role in ensuring that the forgotten Australians are properly remembered.