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Survivors of child sexual assault and cover-ups are watching with familiar trepidation the making of an unprecedented national redress scheme.
The Government does not yet know how many states or institutions will opt into its proposed model for victims unable to find justice through common law.
The only certainty is a limit on payments.
Attorney-General George Brandis and Social Services Minister Christian Porter have already defied part of an expert recommendation from the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.
In 2015, the royal commission found negligent institutions should make "modest monetary payments as a tangible means of recognising the wrong survivors have suffered". It estimated 60,000 survivors would be eligible to make a claim under a $4.3 billion scheme.
The commission recommended individual payments be capped at $200,000.
But the Commonwealth is setting up a scheme with payments not exceeding $150,000.
"It was a difficult decision," Mr Porter said of the 25 per cent reduction.
"Largely we did that because we wanted to have a maximum amount that encouraged all other jurisdictions to join.
"We took a view that if we adopted fulsomely (sic) the $200,000 recommendation that that might end up being a significant barrier to some states and perhaps also some churches and some charities joining the scheme."
While the Government saw lowering the cap as an incentive to cooperate (even though average payments would be less than half the maximum), some survivors feared institutions were being let off lightly.
Australia's largest royal commission has held 6,700 private sessions — 32 per cent of those cases involved abuse in government institutions.
Commissioner Justice Peter McClellan said in his most recent speech: "Although the primary responsibility for the sexual abuse of an individual lies with the abuser and the institution they were part of, we cannot avoid the conclusion that the problems faced by many people who have been abused are the responsibility of our entire society.
"The broad social failure to protect children across a number of generations makes clear the pressing need to provide avenues through which survivors can obtain appropriate redress for past abuse."
Governments throughout Australia are nervous about their potential redress bills, on top of enormous common law payouts arising from past abuse.
Fifty-nine per cent of royal commission private sessions have heard evidence of abuse in religious institutions.
Mr Porter has the job of convincing churches and charities to opt into his offender-pays scheme.
Last Friday, the minister had a positive meeting with representatives of the following churches (with some more percentages of abuse reported in private sessions included):
- Catholic Church (37 per cent)
- Anglican Church of Australia (9 per cent)
- Salvation Army (4 per cent)
- Uniting Church (1.3 per cent)
- Baptist Union Church (0.6 per cent)
- Churches of Christ (0.4 per cent)
- Lutheran Church (0.3 per cent)
Australian Christian Churches, YMCA, Scouts, Yeshivah Melbourne and Yeshiva Bondi were also present; Seventh-day Adventist Church (0.4 per cent) and Presbyterian Church (2 per cent) were apologies.
Jehovah's Witness (1 per cent) did not attend but will be involved in round two of negotiations — one-on-one meetings with the minister's department.
Mr Porter was pleased the Victorian Catholic Church diocese of Ballarat was "likely" to opt in.
"The Catholic Church are very important to this," he said.
"What's in the best interests of survivors is to ensure that the Anglican Church, the Catholic Church, the Salvation Army, all opt into the scheme so that there is this consistent, maximum reach of the scheme."
Survivors have been let down for decades
Waiting to see what redress is finally delivered to them are survivors and their families, forever suspicious of being failed not only by churches but also politicians over many decades.
For example, a committee of the Victorian Parliament released a report called Combating Child Sexual Assault: Inquiry into Sexual Offences Against Children and Adults in 1995.
After hearing all the evidence, committee chair Ken Smith MP stated:
"I'm certain there's been a [Catholic Church hierarchy] cover-up in these issues and it would be an ongoing thing.
"I believe it would be occurring right now."
Despite this finding, then-premier Jeff Kennett and Victoria Police gave the then newly-elected Archbishop of Melbourne, George Pell, permission to set up his own payment scheme, which gave pitiful sums to traumatised victims only after they signed away their legal rights to sue the church.
Incredibly, no Victorian government has dismantled the heartless and discredited Melbourne Response.
Such inaction further erodes trust.
Catholic Church gains a key seat at the table
Two weeks after the Turnbull Government made its national redress announcement (November 4, 2016), the Catholic Church belatedly raised its long-serving Melbourne Response payment cap from $75,000 to $150,000.
The timing made some survivors wonder whether the Catholic Church had been negotiating the price of a national redress model with Canberra.
Mr Porter rubbished those anxieties, insisting the church had no say in the cap.
But the Catholic Church was then given influence over the redress scheme through a representative on the Government's Independent Advisory Council on Redress.
The nation's richest and worst offending institution is now sitting alongside survivor groups, academics and legal experts to provide advice to the Minister on (as per terms of reference):
- The governing principles that underpin the scheme;
- Elements of the scheme's design, that may include eligibility and the principles around the process of application, assessment, psychological counselling and direct personal response;
- How to best encourage state, territory and non-government institution participation in the scheme; and,
- How the Commonwealth scheme will interact with other redress scheme.
When asked about this on News Breakfast last Friday, Mr Porter said the Catholic Church's involvement would aid "cooperative input to create the best scheme".
He added: "I would personally like to thank all of the survivor and stakeholder groups for all of their forbearance and cooperation during this process. Because they've done things that they might not ordinarily want to do in the interests of trying to create the best possible system with the maximum opt in."
Such statements may or may not assuage survivors' fear of once again being unfairly treated, but scrutiny on the Government's response to this impressive royal commission will hold until justice is served.
Topics: government-and-politics, royal-commissions, law-crime-and-justice, child-abuse, sexual-offences, australia