National Child Abuse Redress Scheme

Ms REDMOND (Heysen) (14:37): Supplementary question to the Minister for Child Protection Reform again: how does the minister justify his apparent unwillingness to opt in to the proposed national redress scheme for survivors of child sexual abuse in light of the Premier's statement yesterday that, 'We know the cost of not investing in our children,' and again, 'We are devoting the resources necessary,' and the Premier's agreement in question time yesterday that he accepted responsibility for the government's failure to protect the state's vulnerable children?

The Hon. J.W. WEATHERILL (Cheltenham—Premier) (14:37): It's probably worth going back to the history of this whole question of abuse of children in state care to understand the nature of our response. Back at the time when we designed our response, it really had three elements to it and we considered it carefully. We took advice from respected psychologists in relation to trauma, people who had actually been involved in setting up the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, and it had a number of different elements to it.

At its most basic level, for some people what they wanted for this process—and we happened upon the Mullighan inquiry process, which allowed people to come and tell their stories—was their story told. They wanted to be able to have somebody respectfully listen to their story and have it validated and honoured. That is what some people wanted. Other people wanted the people who were the perpetrators brought to justice. You will recall around that time we also removed the time limitation date on pursuing criminal justice cases in child sexual abuse. Some people wanted that and only that.

Some people wanted the payment of money, and the payment of money could be dealt with in two ways; one is through their common law rights. We freely accepted that if they had common law rights they should be paid every last cent of their loss, not something artificially constrained but every last dollar of what they had lost and what they had suffered. Fourthly, and a variant of that, we also wanted to give an option for people who did want the payment of money but didn't want to go through a lengthy court process. In that sense, we offered the redress scheme, the $50,000 redress scheme.

We also had to make sense of our system of civil wrongs. How could we distinguish between somebody who was essentially injured in these circumstances compared with, say, our criminal injuries compensation scheme, which also had a $50,000 limit? That's why we happened upon this regime. Some people wanted to access all those opportunities, and some only some of them, but that is the decision we took.

The advice we received from some of the people providing support, whether they be psychiatrists or other people providing support, was that there was an important opportunity here for people to retell the story of their life so that instead of being victims they could be recharacterised as survivors. Instead of being somebody who was seeking to maximise the way in which this had disabled them to try to maximise their compensation—which is a necessary but perhaps unfortunate part of the way in which our litigation system is designed—they could actually accept a sum of money, which perhaps wouldn't be as large as the sum they might otherwise have pursued at common law, but get on with their lives in a way that was beneficial for them and their families.

That's the approach we took. We made that available to the royal commission when it was looking into these matters, but the royal commission took a different approach and suggested a different scheme. I think the commonwealth is a bit tendentious to set up the scheme and invite all the states to participate in it, with a very large bill attached to it, but not offer any sum associated with it at all and, in some respects, paying very little respect to the fact that some states had actually already attempted to resolve this matter in a particular way. So, I don't think it is fair to criticise this state for being tardy about the way in which we have sought to respond to survivors.