AUSTRALIA
ABC – PM
MARK COLVIN: Officials from the child abuse Royal Commission have rejected claims that only one person from the Kimberley in WA is prepared to give oral testimony.
For the past six months, the inquiry has been working intensively in remote Aboriginal communities to encourage survivors to tell their stories.
One non-government organisation, Relationships Australia, says only one person from an Indigenous community has signed up to speak to the inquiry.
The Royal Commission’s CEO Janette Dines spoke to Emily Bourke.
JANETTE DINES: We’re actually very pleased with the progress that we’re making in the Kimberley. We’re working very closely with trusted community organisations there. We’re working with Anglicare; we’re working with the Kimberley Stolen Generation; we’re working with the Kimberley Community Legal Services groups.
What those groups told us way back in August was, it would be slow and that we needed to take our time and that we couldn’t come once and expect that people would then be ready to talk, but that we needed to actually give people time, let some of the existing service providers in the community help us to engage, and that’s what we’re doing.
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