(AUSTRALIA)
The New Daily [Australia]
July 9, 2026
By 7 am podcast
See original article to listen to the podcast.
Survivors say it’s like being stabbed in the back – some were just days away from finally having their day in court against the Christian Brothers when their cases were suddenly put on hold.
The Catholic religious teaching order is crying poor, saying it doesn’t have enough money to pay child sexual abuse victims the compensation they’re owed.
But it’s been revealed that assets worth billions of dollars – that could have been used in the payouts – were instead transferred just out of reach of survivors.
Today, managing partner at Marque Lawyers, Michael Bradley, reveals the multimillion-dollar properties sold off just a dollar, and the crushing court decision that’s left victims in the cold.
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Guest: Managing partner at Marque Lawyers, Michael Bradley
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Transcript of podcast:
Speaker 1 (00:01):
I’m Ruby Jones and you’re listening to seven AM. Survivors
say it’s like being stabbed in the back. Some were
just days away from finally having their day in court
against the Christian Brothers when their cases were suddenly put
on hold. The Catholic Religious Order is crying poor, saying
(00:22):
it doesn’t have enough money to pay child’s sexual abuse
victims the compensation they’re owed. But it’s been revealed that
billions of dollars worth of assets that could have been
used in the payouts were instead transferred just out of
reach of survivors. Today, Managing partner at Mark Lawyer’s Michael
Bradley on the multimillion dollar properties sold off for just
(00:44):
a dollar and the crushing court decision that’s left victims
in the cold. It’s Thursday, July ninth. So, Michael, the
Christian Brothers, this religious order, they recently turned up in
(01:06):
the Supreme Court in New South Wales where they had
what sounds like a fairly big win. Things went in
their favor. Tell me what they were seeking.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
Yeah, So the Christian Brothers approached the Supreme Court of
New South Wales and asked for a moratorium on all
current civil claims in process against the Order, and the
Supreme Court has awarded that moratorium, meaning that all those
current cases that are unresolved are put on pause. And
(01:38):
the basis for that application was that the Christian Brothers said,
we’re running out of money. We don’t have enough money
to cover all of the anticipated payouts, and we’re proposing
to enter into some form of scheme with our remaining creditors,
including these claimants, to arrange payments that presumly will be
(02:01):
substantially less they might have been ordered to pay by
the court.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
Right, so they’re saying they don’t have the capacity to
pay out the claims that are being made. Before we
get into that, into the money side of it, can
you tell me a bit more about the Christian Brothers,
who who are they and what do we know about
what happened in the institutions that they rum.
Speaker 2 (02:21):
Yeah, Christian Brothers are an order of the Catholic Church.
They were established as a sort of primarily educational order
of brothers to educate boys. Quite a lot of schools
in Australia elsewhere have been Christian Brothers schools. Waverley College
(02:43):
in Sydney, Trinity College in Perth, Saint Joseph’s Nudgee College
in Brisbane, and some of them the better known ones
in Australia.
Speaker 3 (02:54):
I’m here to announce that I will be recommending to
the Governor General that a Royal Commission be appointed to
inquire into institutional responses to instances and allegations of child
abuse in Australia.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
The Row Commission identified that a number of orders within
the Catholic Church had particularly appalling records of institutional child abuse.
Speaker 3 (03:20):
Commission members heard from more than eight thousand people who
told them of abuse in churches, orphanages, sports clubs and
schools of the Victory.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
And Christian Brothers was one of the absolute worst. It
was the worst in terms of raw numbers, so well
over one thousand complainants came forward to the Raw Commission
and said that they had been abused as children in
Christian Brothers schools from the nineteen fifties onwards.
Speaker 4 (03:50):
After every other older boy practice in nineteen seventy five
before dropping me home, father Ron would sexually abuse me
every single time I was ten years old.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
Four hundred and eighty three were named as perpetrators of
child sexual abuse. What that meant was that of everyone
who had been an ordained Christian brother from nineteen fifty
until the Royal Commission. Twenty two percent of them were
named alleged perpetrators of child sexual abuse.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
Okay, and so what was the recommendation that came out
of that?
Speaker 3 (04:32):
Then?
Speaker 1 (04:32):
What was supposed to happen once this was made public
by the Royal Commission.
Speaker 2 (04:36):
The Commission identified they had allowed serial predators to operate
for many decades under their umbrella and predate on children
in lots of different locations over over long periods of time.
The Commission didn’t have any power to resolve claims. What
(04:56):
it did was set up, as part of its outcome,
a scheme what they call the National Redress Scheme, which
is still operating but is coming to attend. It was
set up for ten years and the idea was for
victims of these institutions to get access to compensation without
having to go through the courts. And that was sort
of the main practical outcome of the Commission. There have
(05:20):
been many, many cases that have run through the state
civil courts since the Royal Commission. They’re currently paying out
an average of one point seven million dollars a week.
So this is in settled claims or rejudicated claims, and
they say that they’ve got about twenty three million dollars left,
which would mean they’re going to run out of money
(05:41):
in about eleven weeks twelve weeks time at the current rate.
But there’s still hundreds of unresolved cases in the system.
There’s about thirty two current cases in the courts, five
hundred and forty still in the national address scheme. So
we’ve still got many hundreds of survivors still with unresolved claims,
(06:02):
and obviously, according to the Christian Brothers, there’s vastly insufficient
funds to cover that.
Speaker 1 (06:09):
That’s not the whole story, though, is it tell me
what’s come out about their properties.
Speaker 2 (06:13):
That is not the whole story. So the Christian Brothers are,
like many parts of the Catholic Church, hold or held,
vast amounts of property in Australia that’s obviously incredibly valuable land.
And in two thousand and seven a new entity was
established called Edwin Rice Education Australia. Edmund Rice was the
(06:36):
founder of the Christian Brothers, so they set up this
new entity and the schools were essentially transferred from the
Christian Brothers order to this new entity and huge amounts
of property that were owned by the Christian Brothers. Twenty
six properties were transferred through zero dollars or one dollar each.
(06:57):
That result of that is Rea is now a massive landholder.
It reported assets of two point three billion dollars two
years ago, and Christian Brothers, which used to own all
that land, now doesn’t and is now poor. And Christian
Brothers is saying, well, this is all we’ve got left
because we’ve given most of our assets away. You know,
(07:19):
if this happened in the building industry, so you know,
in the construction industry, there’s a well trodden path of
you know, what’s known as phoenixing, where you create an
entity to build a building, the entity goes broke, and
you then create, magically another entity appears with the same
directors and same shareholders and carries on business and has
(07:43):
no liability for the losses of the previous one. And
that’s kind of you know, really what’s happened here. The
area was created by the Christian Brothers. There may have
been good commercial or whatever strategic reasons to do that,
but the effect is the same as.
Speaker 1 (08:01):
A phoenix singer, right, And so what do the Christian
Brothers say about why they have transferred well actually essentially
given these properties to Edmund Rice’s Education Australia.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
The story is that at some point a strategic decision
was made to restructure the organization, set up this separate
entity and for it to take over the good works
of the Christian Brothers in education. The area has been
very clear in its public statements that it’s an independent entity.
(08:39):
It’s not legally responsible for anything that the Christian Brothers
have done, and presumably part of the logic or the
rationale of that comes from what the Christian Brothers ultimately
said to the Royal Commission, which was one of the
things they said was or it was a bit of
a mistake putting all these completely untrained brothers in charge
(09:03):
of lots of small boys. So they’ve sort of set
up a more professionalized organization as the Educational Institution. And
I guess logically, then if there is running the schools,
it should own the schools and own the land that
the schools is on. So that’s what we’ve done. Nothing
(09:24):
to see here. It all made logical sense and had
nothing to do with the fact that they were sitting
on a powder keg of claims that were absolutely going
to be coming their way from children that abused.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
Still to come. Will the Christian Brothers get away with
its creative accounting. So, Michael, what does this ruling mean
for the survivors, for the people who up until this
point were still trying to get compensation from the Christian
Brothers through the courts.
Speaker 2 (10:03):
I mean, it’s a crushing blow. The only thing with
courts and the legal system can offer them is compensation,
and it’s the only thing that the institutions are willing
to provide because they’re clearly not actually sorry. So to
for that to be closed off, to be told now, well,
actually you’re not going to get your day in court
because the defendant is crying poor, and then to learn, oh,
(10:28):
actually the reason they’re poor is because they’ve given all
their assets away from their right hand to their left hand,
and I’m sorry, you can’t get out the left hand.
It’d be absolutely devastating blow to the remaining survivors who
are now looking at you, probably recovering a fraction of
what they should be entitled to.
Speaker 1 (10:51):
And you get the sense from the point of view
of the Christian Brothers that they are trying to safeguard
the future of their religious order right, making sure it
can continue on under this other organization. But I just
wonder how you can weigh that up against the damage
that something like this does to the reputation of a
(11:14):
religious group when it becomes clear that, you know, the
money that should go to victims of abuse isn’t going
to them, and it seems like the church wants to
I guess, bury any kind of accountability that it might
have towards people that were done wrong by them.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
Yeah. I think there’s a couple of things going on here.
One is, in the broader context of the Catholic Church,
what the church has consistently demonstrated before and since the
Raw Commission is its unwillingness to accept responsibility for the
harm that it has done through in Australia, for example,
(11:55):
through the leadership of George Pell and the Melbourne response,
and it’s you all kinds of legal tactics through the
courts in recent years. The one thing it hasn’t done
at any point is stood up and gone, you know what,
this is on us. The other thing is that there’s
a kind of pragmatic argument that seems to be run out,
(12:16):
which is a sort of. Yeah, Well, if the church
paid the full financial price, it would go broke, and
that would be a bad thing because the church is
a good thing. So the same applies some sort of
smaller scale to the Christian Brothers. Christian Brothers is a
good thing because it’s a religious order that does good
(12:37):
in the community, runs schools and whatever, it provides pastoral care.
It’s not in the public interest for it to cease
to exist, which it would do if it went broke.
And some people think that’s a good argument. The counter
argument that is, well, if that is the actual consequence
of the wrong they’ve done, then that should be right. Like,
(12:59):
if it’s not the instutution paying the price, it’s the victims.
Speaker 1 (13:02):
And is that likely to be the end outcome here
in this case with the Christian Brothers. Are there any
other avenues open to the victims or is it kind
of cut and dried from this point?
Speaker 2 (13:15):
I mean, look, it’s you know, it’s hypothetically possible that
there could be attacks made on the restructure depending on
how it was done. It sounds to me like it
was done sort of early enough and in a way
where it’s probably legally immune. They’ve probably succeeded in quarantining
(13:37):
those assets away from the hands of their victims. But
you know, I don’t know enough of the facts to
hold any particular opinion on that, and I’m sure lawyers
for abuse survivors will be exploring whether there is an
avenue for trying to use legal process to get at
(13:58):
the area’s assets. You know, there’s a legal principle which
supposedly deals with the Phoenix situation, which is that if
you restructure your affairs for the purpose of avoiding your creditors,
then that can be unwound. And the courts have significant
powers to do that, to unwind transactions so as to
(14:22):
enable creditors to get their hands on assets that were
there and are now gone. And you know, sometimes that works,
but it’s a very complex area of law and it
fails more often than it succeeds. But yeah, it’s possible,
but I would say faintfully considable.
Speaker 1 (14:42):
Well, Michael, thank you so much for speaking with me.
Speaker 2 (14:44):
My pleasure.