AUSTRALIA
The Guardian
Australian Associated Press
Wednesday 19 November 2014
The father of the Tasmanian premier told a teacher to keep quiet about alleged sexual abuse at an elite Hobart school in the 1960s, an inquiry has been told.
The royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse heard that sexual abuse at the Hutchins school in the 1960s was common knowledge.
Geoffrey Ayling, a science teacher, resigned in 1966 and changed careers after his attempts to raise the alarm were stifled, he told the commission in Hobart on Thursday.
He consulted his friend and lawyer Michael Hodgman, who was a Hutchins old boy. Hodgman was later a Tasmanian politician and is the father of the premier, Will Hodgman.
“Mr Hodgman’s advice to me was to me was that I should say nothing,” Ayling recounted. Hodgman died in 2013.
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