AUSTRALIA
Ballarat Courier
October 21, 2018
By Peter Gogarty
ON Monday we get another apology – this one from our newest Prime Minister Scott Morrison.
By “we” I mean the tens of thousands of Australians who were sexually abused in hundreds of trusted institutions over the past 70 years while other people looked on. They looked on because they looked after themselves rather than the vulnerable children in their care.
“We” also means the family and friends of those survivors. It means the hundreds of thousands of people in the community who were lured into providing these (mostly religious) institutions with tax exemptions and extraordinary influence over our lives.
Much of this apparently disgusting, appalling and often criminal behaviour was carried out in the name of Jesus Christ and the various forms of his church.
Monday’s apology in our federal parliament building, after more than five years of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, is a bit different to others we have seen over recent years. This time our national parliament is saying sorry for not doing enough to keep the institutions which pledged to care for children, often on behalf of governments, safe, transparent and accountable.
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