HON ALISON XAMON (North Metropolitan) [5.26 pm]: I rise tonight to make some comments about the commonwealth redress scheme, which has an implication for this state. Members may know that on 26 October, legislation was introduced into the Australian Parliament to establish a commonwealth redress scheme for institutional child sexual abuse. The establishment of a commonwealth redress scheme was one of the many recommendations that has come out of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. I thought I would tell members that since its establishment in January 2013, the royal commission has examined more than 1.2 million documents, heard evidence from more than 1 200 witnesses, conducted 57 public hearings across Australia and has also published 50 reports. The royal commission has almost finally completed what has been a mammoth and, I imagine, an extraordinarily distressing task and its final report will be delivered in December. Although it is recognised that child abuse is not confined to a particular time or circumstance, in undertaking its work the royal commission has shed light on a particularly heartbreaking period within Australian history when the conjunction of prevailing social attitudes to children and an unquestioning respect for the authority of institutions by adults, unfortunately coalesced to create the high-risk environment in which thousands of children were abused. Although the primary responsibility for the sexual abuse of an individual always lies with the abuser, the royal commission’s work has resoundingly demonstrated that both individual institutions as well as governments have failed abysmally in their responsibility to ensure that children are kept safe.
As members would be aware, the commonwealth scheme is not the first child abuse redress scheme in Western Australia. The Redress WA scheme was devised and announced by the Labor government in 2008 to acknowledge and apologise to adults who, as children were abused and/or neglected while they were in the care of the state. I recall at the time when the redress scheme was introduced that it was appropriately and widely welcomed. However, Redress WA was effectively fraught from the time the Barnett government took office. We know that the Barnett government chose to halve the maximum payment available, which perpetuated many of the victims’ feelings of distrust and anger towards the government and their sense of worthlessness and betrayal. Also, what ended up being quite an arduous application process was followed, for many people, by a really long and quite agonising wait to hear the decision. For some, the wait was over a year. Applications were accepted for only a limited time, which meant that people who were not ready or able to tell their story missed out, or were forced to rush an often very painful process of disclosure. Other people simply missed out because they did not find out about it in time and did not realise it applied to them. I was the portfolio holder for the Greens at the time, and my office was contacted by many people. Hearing their stories was quite harrowing. It made me extraordinarily sad as well as angry, and I ended up speaking about this issue many times in this place. As far as I am concerned, Redress WA became a stark example of the considerable capacity for redress schemes, if they are not conducted well, to cause a secondary harm and for victims to be left feeling devalued and re-abused.
Not surprisingly, the announcement of the commonwealth scheme has been met with varying reactions. Although the announcement has raised hopes and expectations among many survivors and advocates, for others the announcement has triggered painful feelings and memories, uncertainty and confusion. The commonwealth scheme aims to provide redress on a nationally consistent basis, and it has three elements: a tax repayment of up to $150 000, which is considerably more than what the state scheme contemplated; it will not affect welfare entitlements; and it is expected that survivors who might have received lower redress through another scheme, such as the WA scheme, can have their amounts topped up. It will enable access to psychological counselling of the survivor’s choice and, if requested by the survivor, a direct personal response from the institution.
Tragically, many concerns are being expressed about this commonwealth scheme. One of the issues is that the commonwealth scheme will provide redress only for sexual abuse, in contrast to the WA scheme, which provided redress for the whole spectrum of abuse that people experienced. If passed, the scheme will run for only 10 years, from 1 July 2018. Although I welcome the fact that the scheme will run considerably longer than the WA scheme did, I note that the recommendation from the royal commission was that it needed to be an open-ended process. One of the things it fails to recognise is that disclosure is very different for different people. Often, disclosure becomes a lifelong process. The commonwealth government has also indicated that people who have committed a sexual offence, or who have been sentenced to five years or more imprisonment for serious crimes will be excluded from the scheme. I do not know of any other redress scheme that has similar provisions. This fails to recognise that often survivors will have criminal convictions precisely because of the horrific things that they experienced as children, and the long-term effects of child abuse and trauma, as well as the effects of self-medication through alcohol or illicit drug use.
Although I appreciate that there are a lot of issues still to be worked through, and that the WA government is yet to decide whether it will opt in to the scheme, redress remains an outstanding issue for many people, and it is crucial that the mistakes of Redress WA are not repeated. Survivors and their families, as well as advocates, want and deserve certainty, and support organisations need to have information about what will happen so that they can prepare. Public information must be easy to access and easy to understand, because too many people were not aware until too late that they were eligible under the WA scheme, and so they missed out. We need to make sure that the application processes will be simpler than they were last time and that people will be contacted regularly and not just left with no information for long periods, and counselling and support must be available.
It is also important that those parties who opt in, including the commonwealth, the state government, churches and charities, all provide adequate funding for the scheme and keep any promises made about those amounts. It cannot be changed midstream in the way that occurred with Redress WA, because it creates too much distress. We know that we still have a lot of work to do in this space. Many of the people who have previously suffered horrifically in some of the institutions have been in and out of home care. A lot of them are now vulnerable, ageing and ill. Their hopes have been raised but they are still waiting. They are also waiting for the promised legislation, which this government has indicated it will draft to remove the statute of limitations for victims of child sex abuse. This is a long-awaited reform and we need to get moving on it. The government needs to ensure that redress is properly sorted. It is really important work and it is crucial that we get it right. It is crucial that we learn from the mistakes of the past given what has happened with this scheme, and I hope we see some urgent progress in this area.