SYDNEY (AUSTRALIA)
ABC
December 16, 2017
By Tom Keneally
In politics, it is rare that a mechanism for unqualified good is put in place.
A body called by the highly provisional title, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Abuse, might have proved to have been a squib if not given appropriate powers and if not well-led.
But it was given such powers, and like others, I was delighted to hear the Prime Minister refer to the completed hearings as “an outstanding exercise of love”.
Now the Federal Government, the states and the institutions have to apply themselves to its recommendations with similar exercises of generosity of spirit.
I have been asked to record here a sense of the impact of the royal commission at a personal level. In fact, the commission has also been a revelation even to those of us who had earlier heard the subterranean reverberations of a national crisis, but had no idea of the scope of it.
The scale of the abuse, even the numbers of abusers, were greater than was ever suspected.
But then, at least as shocking, the fact that behind each abuser was a corps of friendly agents, people in authority, moderators of the public conscience who yet showed no conscience over misuse of children.
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