No recompense to victims 'foolish'

YUKO NARUSHIMA
November 11, 2009
Sydney Morning Herald

A REFUSAL to compensate 500,000 ''forgotten'' Australians who the Federal Government will apologise to next week has been branded foolish by its own adviser.

On Monday, the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, and the Opposition Leader, Malcolm Turnbull, will deliver speeches acknowledging the neglect and abuse endured by people taken from their families as children and placed in state care.

The former senator chairing the Government's advisory group on the parliamentary apology, Andrew Murray, said a financial reparation should accompany it.

''The Government has said no although I think that is unwise,'' Mr Murray told the Herald yesterday. ''It is affordable and can achieve a great deal.''

More than half a million children were placed in institutional care in Australia during the 20th century. While the majority were non-indigenous Australians, some 10,000 were child migrants from ''poor'' families in Britain and as many as 50,000 were indigenous children removed from their families, Mr Murray said.

Monetary compensation projects exist in Ireland, Queensland, Western Australia and Tasmania. A capped compensation scheme would work alongside other reparation programs that work to restore identity and improve health and justice services for those who have suffered abuse.

''You can't have an open-ended compensation system because frankly, some of the trauma people went through requires such a level of money for compensation that in aggregate, you couldn't afford it.''

A parliamentary apology has been recommended in six reports to government on institutionalised children, since 1997.

Senators on some inquiries were reduced to tears at hearing of the loveless conditions children were held in.

''When you hear a grandmother tell you of her life of loss and the effects on her sexuality, feminity and relationships or from a man who was sodomised by a priest persistently as a child, it is really very difficult,'' Mr Murray said.

He acknowledged that most of the burden to compensate the child victims rested with agencies and churches and that others, treated well, did not feel the need for an apology.

The Minister for Community Services, Jenny Macklin, acknowledged that people had suffered ''terrible levels of abuse'' but has said compensation was not the Commonwealth's responsibility.

''Some of the states have already put in place various schemes to help forgotten Australians, and some have got different forms of assistance put in place,'' she said yesterday.

Some of the churches and other providers had also put compensation schemes in place, she said.

Mr Murray was a child migrant taken from his mother as a two-year-old. He was sent to Rhodesia at the age of four and was later reunited with his mother and sisters after he was released.

He commended the Rudd Government for committing to an apology.

In August 2004, Parliamentary senators wept as they presented Forgotten Australians, the report from the Senate Inquiry into the treatment of children in care. Half a million children grew up in ‘care’ in twentieth-century Australia, and most often these children lived with daily brutal physical and emotional abuse in the sterile environment of an institution. Drawing on interviews, submissions to the Senate Inquiry, and her own experience, Joanna Penglase describes, for the first time, the experience from the perspective of the survivors. With tenderness, compassion and intellect, Penglase begins to unravel the seemingly inexplicable: how and why did this happen. She looks not only at the profound personal costs to these children, but the huge social and economic costs of these past policies.