Cathy McGowan (Indi, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Today I rise to acknowledge the work of Care Leavers Australia Network, CLAN, and offer them my full support for a national independent redress scheme for Australian care leavers. There are over half a million people in Australia who have spent some of their childhood in Australia's orphanages, children's homes, foster care and mental institutions. In my community of Albury-Wodonga such orphanages were a part of my childhood. Every year we so looked forward to Band Sunday—going to St John's Orphanage and listening to the bands planning. It was an annual event of great excitement, but little did I appreciate the human suffering that was behind such a—for me—happy event.

Today I would like to acknowledge the report of the Australian Catholic Church and the statistics they have released regarding sexual crimes of the priests working between 1950 and 2009. The church surveyed 10 religious institutions and 75 church authorities to uncover the abuse data on priests, non-ordained brothers and sisters, and other church personnel employed in that time.

In my electorate of Indi the figures are shocking. They show that in the Diocese of Sandhurst, which covers Indi, Bendigo and the electorate of Murray, with Sale, which is in the Gippsland electorate, it was 15.1 per cent, but in my electorate of Indi a shocking 14.7 per cent of the clergy were involved in some form of abuse. That is a huge statistic, and it presents itself daily in my office when members of CLAN come and talk to me. They talk of their suffering, of their pain and of the impact that such stuff has had on their lives. These are the statistics, and we hear their story.

I wanted, in my speech today, to say to the members of CLAN and all the others—your family and your friends—that we do take a collective responsibility for what has happened. I stand here with great humility to say how sorry I am, to offer you my compassion, to acknowledge your pain and hurt, to acknowledge and thank you for your courage, your persistence and your dedication, and to say that, with every bit of energy that I have, I will lobby the Prime Minister and ministers to take the action needed for a national scheme. I will also write to the Bishop of Bendigo, Andrew Curnow, asking him to make a formal apology. But I say here and now that the people in this parliament acknowledge your hurt; we say thank you for what you have done, and we give you our commitment that we will do everything we can to make sure that you get the redress that you so richly deserve.