Derryn Hinch (Victoria, Derryn Hinch's Justice Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I was at an emotional and very informative public hearing of the Community Affairs Legislation Committee in Melbourne recently. We were hearing evidence about the bill officially called the Commonwealth Redress Scheme for Institutional Child Sexual Abuse Bill 2017, and the related bill. It must be proffered to the Senate by this committee before I take over as chairman of a joint parliamentary committee to oversee, to be a watchdog for, the national redress scheme, which the Prime Minister has announced will be launched on 1 July. That's not very far away. I will concede it is still an eon away for some victims of the institutional sexual abuse which has been dissected by the royal commission over the past five years.

At that public hearing, I had an epiphany, forced on me by one of the stalwarts of CLAN, Care Leavers Australasia Network. Frank Golding is a passionate and eloquent vice-president of CLAN, but he appeared before us in a private capacity. He jolted me. He more than jolted me; he extracted a confession and an apology. Golding and CLAN CEO Leonie Sheedy graphically pointed out that, for years, all the headlines, all the attention, had been on sexual abuse of children in institutions, when in fact many of the around 500,000 Aussie kids who had been in state and church care had been also emotionally and physically abused—used as child labour, used as child sex slaves, cleaning the orphanages, working in the vegie gardens. At a later meeting with Golding and Sheedy, I was told about three sisters brought up by nuns in a Catholic orphanage. Their education was curtailed—they didn't even get to high school—because they were given the job of looking after disabled children in the institution. They also deserve redress in both financial and counselling terms. Their Dickensian horror stories reminding me of Oranges and Sunshine, the devastating book and movie of that title about British 'orphans' being sent to 'idyllic Australia' after World War II.

At the hearing, Golding said:

I think it is not just the fact that the royal commission has focused for the last five years on sexual abuse only and has ruled out hundreds of people who want to talk to them about other forms of abuse; it is also that the media has been fixated on this. Headline after headline after headline, radio reports, television reports, hammered home the message of sexual abuse …

I interjected:

Because those stories are so shocking; that's why.

Golding replied:

They absolutely are. Please don't get me wrong; they are the worst of all possible crimes against children. Nevertheless, there are lots of people who've suffered other forms of abuse of the sort that we've talked about …

He said:

They've had to sit in the background and hope that, when the national redress scheme came out, the parliament would have the wit to say, 'We had a royal commission which looked at sexual abuse. We've had all these other Senate reports and so on that looked at other forms of abuse. We can roll this national scheme into a comprehensive redress scheme.' That is why, I think, the bill that you're looking at needs to be scrapped and we need to start again. I know that is not the message you want.

And it wasn't. But I did pledge to campaign to get redress in another form. I even raised the prospect, possibly, of a new, non-specific royal commission.

To conclude, I want to tell you a story of a 14-year-old boy who was in a Salvation Army institution. He doesn't qualify for redress under the current scheme because he wasn't technically sexually assaulted, but, when you hear this, you may disagree. Don't you think there is a sexual sadomasochistic issue when an adult is caning the naked buttocks of a young boy? I will call him Brian. He was sent to a Salvation Army institution in Queensland. The manager was Captain Victor Bennett, who administered the corporal punishment. After many beatings, Brian stole a bike and ran away. Taken back home by the police, he was punished. He got six of the best on his hands and his naked backside. Then Captain Bennett ordered him to spend the next week naked with welts on his buttocks from the flogging. He would work, line up for meals and sleep on empty potato sacks naked. How perverse is that? Brian remembers even now how humiliated and embarrassed he was when one of the female laundry staff saw him naked.

There are thousands of stories like this among care leavers in Australia, and they too, I believe, deserve redress. They deserve financial redress and a lot of counselling. It won't happen under the current terms of reference, but I believe it is our duty to find a way, because they must not remain the forgotten Australians.