AUSTRALIA
The Australian
Sarah Elks
From:The Australian
November 26, 2012
CHRIS Wetherall was just 11 when he was first sexually abused by his teacher — later described by prosecutors as a “master pedophile” – at an Anglican school in the early 1980s.
But it wasn’t until the general practitioner was 34, and then governor-general Peter Hollingworth was under pressure over his past handling of separate abuse allegations at Dr Wetherall’s alma mater, St Paul’s, and other Anglican schools in Queensland, that it dawned on him just how traumatised he was.
By then it was too late. The Anglican Church’s Brisbane diocese invoked a legal defence to block Dr Wetherall’s $3 million civil damages suit, arguing he had missed his window by failing to bring his claim by the time he was 21.
In a historic decision in 2008, a Supreme Court judge ruled Dr Wetherall could sue even though the statute of limitations had expired, but the Court of Appeal and the High Court backed the church’s time-limit defence.
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