If Scott Morrison achieves nothing else as Prime Minister, his apology yesterday to the victims of institutional child abuse will be a fine legacy. He delivered a superb speech, both in plain-spoken presentation and in commitment to substance.
He explained the functions of the National Office of Child Safety, a new best-practice mechanism for understanding and dealing with the impacts of child abuse and supporting survivors, a regular reporting process on the royal commission’s recommendations and a new national museum — “a place of truth and commemoration, to raise awareness and understanding of the impacts of child sexual abuse. We will work with survivor groups, to ensure your stories are recorded, that your truth is told, that our nation does not turn from our shame, and that our nation will never forget the untold horrors you experienced.”
The apology covered key aspects of the legacy of institutional abuse — the failure to believe children, the failure of government safeguards, the lives lost to self-harm, the courage of those who came forward and the pain of those who could not — as well as ones the will persist for decades to come — when ageing survivors face the possibility of having to move into aged care institutions, triggering childhood terrors anew. That Morrison himself is a man of faith, from a church stained by its own history of child abuse, added, rather than detracted, from its power.
Both sides subsequently agreed to cancel Question Time for the day, avoiding the shame of March 2013, when Labor’s leadership circus overshadowed Julia Gillard’s apology for forced adoptions — although maybe they should reflect on what that says about the conduct of Question Time itself.
If there was a theme to Morrison’s address, it was how the victims of abuse were failed systematically, not merely by the churches, schools, scout troops, orphanages and other institutions in which they were preyed upon, but by the authorities that were charged with protecting them. “Why were the cries of children and parents ignored? Why was our system of justice blind to injustice? Why has it taken so long to act? Why were other things more important than this, the care of innocent children? Why didn’t we believe?”
Those are questions that should be inscribed on the walls of both chambers of parliament, because the lesson extends far beyond the many thousands of victims of child abuse. The epidemic of child abuse carried out in institutions was a product of a deep power imbalance that politicians and those charged with protecting children not merely failed to redress but exacerbated by collaborating with abusers and the institutions that protected them.
The churches wielded huge political and institutional influence, ensuring that they could cover up child abuse without fear of police investigating, courts prosecuting or politicians decrying it. Even as late as 2012, some defenders of these powerful interests were railing against the royal commission.
When organisational (or corporate) power is not merely unchecked but facilitated by politicians and regulators, abuse and criminality are the inevitable consequences — but that abuse and criminality will become so egregious that eventually politicians are forced to acknowledge the failure of existing regulation and intervene. That, after all, is what a royal commission is: an acknowledgement that existing systems of regulation have failed or been corrupted and a special, draconian intervention is required that short-circuits the normal power wielded by the guilty.
The politicians sitting and listening to Morrison and Bill Shorten yesterday might reflect on how many other ways, right now, powerful interests are victimising Australians and getting away with it because of the political, financial and organisational power they wield. Fortunately, few cases will be as horrific as what has been revealed by the child abuse royal commission.
But MPs and senators should remember a little more frequently that their role should be to question and scrutinise powerful interests, not act as representatives for them. Otherwise there will be more apologies, about more forms of institutionally enabled misconduct, in coming decades.
It is hard to take this apology seriously from a Government and an Opposition that incarcerate children on Nauru.
Morrison rose to the occasion, OK, but how late in the day? This moment is Gillard’s.
Very late in the day. An insincere revivalist, tub thumper. That is my personal reaction to his sermonising.
Agree: it was Julia Gillard that, as usual, rose completely to the meaning of the apology and thanked for their courage to see the RC through the direct and indirect victims and families so appallingly affected. Belittled, humiliated, and ignored by all the authority bodies.
I look forward to the next Government overseeing proper authority over ALL child care, aged care, disability care providers. Get rid of the Private profiteers. That includes the Religious Institutions, they have “form”!
wow GF50- an unlimited faith in limitless government – that really is both child abuse and adult abuse combined.
Social/ essential services should not be in the hands of the private profit sector. Regulations and compliance to standards must be enforced. The standards must be aimed at world be practice, not she’ll be right as long as the shareholders and directors are getting their chop. I have 50 yrs experience in health care, currently the standards of education and practice in the health field are abysmal, by any criteria.
Sorry to sound so totalitarian and this is not harking back to the good ole days this is hands on experience talking. Look up the complaints tribunals. The level of negligence is appalling and no one is prepared to whistle blow, fear of being labelled, trouble maker, bringing retribution on the patient, a bully, racist, whatever, and finding themselves without a job.
I know this is a rant but on topic as the abuse as uncovered by the RC is the tip of the iceberg and it continues within all care programmes, as basic standards are not overseen, ignored and minimised and dismissed.
Putting important issues directly in the hands of government and not in the hands of private business is the antithesis of totalitarianism. Our governments are notionally democratic whilst private businesses are totalitarian dictatorships of the worst possible kind. They have smooth CEO’s with no accountability to the public, who makes all of the critical decisions and whose primary aim is to make money for themselves (bugger the shareholders). They are cosseted, elite rent-seekers who are a plague on our society.
CEO’s should never be left in charge of anything important like people. They should be allowed to make unimportant stuff that is discretionary. Stuff that is important to people like food, health-care, utilities, banks and the environment should be kept away from them.
Thatcher a fellow traveler of Nixon and Regan said about the poor and the dissidents;
“They are casting their problems at society. And, you know, there’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. ”
The assumptions underlying this statement are:
– If you have problems it’s all your fault, not other peoples. I wonder how the Jews in Hitler’s death camps would have responded to this.
– Individuals are the only important construct of human existence. Interesting idea. Could an individual have gone to the moon alone? Would the genome have been decoded by a hobbyist working in her garage?
– Why bring up families at all? The purpose of families is to bring up children, to educate them and socialize them, there is not any more to it than that. She added families, not because she believed families are important, but because it’s politically correct. Did she ever do anything for families except put the fathers and mother into an economic system that degrades and marginalizes workers so they are never home and can’t look after their children?
– If there are only men, woman and families then what is she doing? She was the prime minister of what? Governments in her definition of the human experience don’t exist.
– And what of “free markets”, the religious institutions that she and Regan were so in awe of. They couldn’t exist either, but then they didn’t. Thatcher and Reagan were the greatest protectionists of the ruling elite that had been seen since the British Rhaj. Neo Liberal free markets self-serving instruments of the wealthy to protect their interests against the great unwashed. There is nothing free about them and they are not a market.
Harking back to the good old days is useful. We had far less inequality of both opportunity and outcomes, real growth, and jobs not subject to the whims of international bankers.
Keep Harking I say.
That’s it, in a nutshell. I admit, I didn’t hear Morrisson’s speech and for all I know it could have been great. But it’s also hard to take a “hearfelt apology” serious when it comes from a man who was and is instrumental in the ongoing abuse of children and adults.
Make no mistake, this apology was absolutely needed. But making an apology for the crimes of others is easy. Once you make one for your own, that’s when I take you seriously.
The regulations are part of the causation the problems coupled with “accreditation” – it requires multiple staff members to comply with the Government compliance burden so that less resources are available to deliver the actual services . Even charities are cutting down services or even leaving some fields, why ? – guess what government regulation, pseudo-standards etc.
Look at the NDIS debacle – proof of the pudding. Services were delivered more efficiently by charities etc – not perfectly but more effectively . So – it was not perfect , but much better than the alternative –
Guess that makes child abuse in Manus and Nauru ok then? Did you read what you replied to?
Please, anyone can mouth platitudes written for them by a political adviser. The true hard-yards were done entirely by the Gillard government, in the face of staunch opposition from the Coalition-every step of the way.
Now Morriscum thinks that a museum is a better way to spend money than actually dealing with past & present forms of child abuse.
I would wish this was incognito but have no idea how to make it so. I will never accept an apology nor would I ever dream of claiming compenation but it needs to be said. I was sexually abused by a Scout Leader over five months from January 1948 to June of the same year. The second of five boys with an ailing father, my mother would not hear anything against my abuser. So I obediently returned time after time until I could no longer endures the shame and pain. My relationship with my mother, whom I had always cherished, never survived the experience. She went to her death many years later unaware of why our close mother son affection had declined so tragically. Nor did any of my brother have the slightest inkling of the submerged disaffection. The shame of the situation was refreshed each morning for the next 24 years when I finally emerged an angry young man determined to take no shit from anyone.
I’ve always admired the poem below for what it says about the anonymity and isolation of suffering. But it gets only some of your situation right, and not the most important part: that people knew, and still “sailed calmly on”. Strength and peace to you.
Musee des Beaux Arts
W. H. Auden
About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
In fact Bernard I thought that Shorten delivered an excellent speech also but obviously you did not! Actually the ‘blubbering’ was a bit too far from a Party that was not all that comfortable with the setting-up of the Royal Commission. I wonder how Abbott’s mate Pell felt yesterday?
I doubt Pell suffers too much guilt – his focus has only ever been the money and the power….
Nice, good points in final paragraph.