Restoring Dignity Campaign: Australian Senator offers his support to the Restoring Dignity Campaign

http://www.andrewmurray.org.au/

Senator Murray asking a question in Question Time, Australian Parliament

16 January 2006

To the Internations Justice Federation’s Restoring Dignity Campaign

I am a Senator in the Australian Federal Parliament and represent the State of Western Australia. I was first elected to the Senate in 1996 and re-elected in 2001.

An important part of my parliamentary work has included the establishment and membership of two Senate Community Affairs References Committee Inquiries into children raised in institutional care. I have a particular interest in the issues associated with childhoods bereft of the nurturing and stability that family life can bring.

The first of these parliamentary inquiries was the 2001 child migrant inquiry, the unanimous report of which is Lost Innocents: Righting the Record. The second inquiry was held in 2004 and produced two more unanimous reports, Forgotten Australians and Protecting Vulnerable Children. This latter inquiry was for those Australians raised in out-of-home care who were not former child migrants, nor were they part of the Aboriginal ‘stolen generation’, whose experiences had been recorded in the 1997 Bringing them Home report.

Nothing could prepare the cross-party committee members and all others involved for the nature of the evidence received, both written and in hearings. The one sure truism to emerge from the two inquiries is that if you badly harm a child you will have decades of a badly harmed adult to cope with. And it does not end there. The effects of the harm are often transferred to the survivor’s children, creating generational social problems. 500,000 Australians experienced care in an orphanage, children’s home or other form of out-of-home care during the last century.

The powerful reports of this trilogy of inquiries adds further weight to the now extensive body of research that clearly indicates the need for politicians and policymakers to sincerely commit to understanding the scale and effects of child abuse. It is not a question of isolated incidents that are sad or repugnant or of crimes from which you move on: it is a widespread social problem that carries with it huge costs for the individuals concerned and for society, costs that also comprise a huge drain on budgetary expenditure.

I add my support to the Internations’ Justice Federation request that political parties consider the plight of those survivors who experienced abuse as children in institutional care in Canada. I also urge them to consider the long term social and economic consequences of child abuse. The alternative is even more damaged children developing into dysfunctional adults whose lives can be plagued with homelessness, substance abuse, mental health and relationship problems, criminal behaviour and premature deaths often from suicide.

There can be no better undertaking than to seriously invest in a nations’ most important resource, its children.

Yours sincerely