AUSTRALIA
Sky News
A lawyer who represented abuse victims from a NSW children’s home says the way the Anglican Church dealt with the claims was the most ‘scurrilous and mean-minded’ he has ever seen.
When Simon Harrison led a group claim for victims of abuse at the North Coast Children’s Home in Lismore, a lawyer for the Grafton diocese, Peter Roland, claimed there were limited funds for Mr Harrison’s clients.
‘He was pleading poverty, but I have seen that so many times with churches I just took it as a matter of course,’ Mr Harrison told the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse on Tuesday.
‘Out of all the claims I’ve dealt with over quite a few years, the way this was dealt with by the church was perhaps the most scurrilous and mean-minded attitude I’d ever come across quite frankly.’
And when Mr Harrison represented a former resident, known only as CA, who sought compensation after the group settlement had been reached in 2007, he was told the North Coast Children’s Home file was closed.
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