National Child Abuse Redress Scheme

Ms REDMOND (Heysen) (14:32): My question is to the Minister for Child Protection Reform. In relation to the proposed national redress scheme for institutional child abuse, and in light of the minister's responses yesterday, can the minister confirm that it is the case that the existing state-based scheme is only for victims of child sexual abuse in state-run institutions—that is, not in charitable and other institutions—and that the maximum payout to date under this scheme is only $15,000, whereas the maximum anticipated payout under the proposed national scheme is $150,000?

The Hon. J.R. RAU (Enfield—Deputy Premier, Attorney-General, Minister for Justice Reform, Minister for Planning, Minister for Industrial Relations, Minister for Child Protection Reform, Minister for the Public Sector, Minister for Consumer and Business Services, Minister for the City of Adelaide) (14:32): I thank the honourable member for her question, and there are a couple of things about it. First of all, as to what the maximum payment has been in any one of the many ex gratia payments that have been made under that scheme to the present time, I would have to check.

I don't know what the actual maximum payout to date has been, but I can tell members that the ex gratia scheme that operates at the state level, and has been operating for some years, first of all has a maximum payment of $50,000. If we are going to compare apples with apples, just because the commonwealth proposal is $150,000 doesn't mean that everyone who goes in there is going to be getting $150,000.

Ms Cook interjecting:

The SPEAKER: The member for Fisher is called to order.

The Hon. J.R. RAU: The comparison is between our scheme, which has been running for some years and, I might say, has resolved the complaints of many individuals who would have had virtually no hope of any sort of recovery at common law because the threshold for the proof that they would have had to establish of facts relevant to the circumstances of their abuse would have actually prevented them from being able to sustain a claim. We have a number of people who have taken advantage of that. The benefit, Mr Speaker—because I think in your time this scheme was originally established—for those people has been that they have had some end to the torment associated with this by having resolved their matter by way of a payment under the ex gratia scheme. That's the first thing.

We have had our scheme running a long time. Yes, it is true that our scheme applies to people who were in state care or people in respect of whom the state was an intervener. So, it's not necessarily the case that the state was in control of them in the sense that they were in a state orphanage or they were in some other state institution. It might well have been that the state was in some way responsible for that individual being placed somewhere else and in the other place something happened which was completely unacceptable.

To say the state scheme is confined to state care is to artificially constrain the scope of what the state scheme actually does do. What the commonwealth is proposing, as I understand it, or at least the royal commission is proposing and I believe the federal government is now picking up to some degree, is that in respect of every other institution—and these are institutions, we are talking about here, who may have had no particular contact with the government at all; without singling anybody out, we are talking here in terms of people like the Salvation Army, the churches and so on, institutions that might have had the care and responsibility of looking after children—the new scheme should apply to those institutions and to the state governments.

Those institutions, if they are either no longer in existence or find themselves devoid of sufficient funds to be able to make good on any claim, would then be able to use the state Treasury as an insurer of last resort in circumstances where the state Treasury has never ever been in the business of insuring these people. The state Treasury has not received a penny in premiums at any time historically to insure these institutions and these people. What that means is that the commonwealth is potentially asking the state to accept an extremely large potential unfunded bill for which the commonwealth presently is offering no compensation.