Senator Brian Greig
Portfolio: Attorney General & Justice
Related: Sexuality Issues
| Dated: 14 May 2003
Location: Parliament House - Canberra
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Senator Brian Greig speaks regarding the Governor-General matter |
GOVERNOR-GENERAL
Senator GREIG (Western Australia) (10.02 a.m.) —It is not my intention to speak for long on this matter, but I want to get some comments on the record from a slightly different perspective. I endorse the motion. I believe that His Excellency the Governor-General has shown such bad judgment previously and currently that he deserves to remove himself or to be removed. I do not intend to go over in any detail the legal and constitutional arguments surrounding that. I want to talk more about what I perceive to be the humanity of the issue.
I would like briefly to acquaint the Senate with a colleague of mine in Perth called David, although that is not his real name. David came to me about three years ago. I was still a senator at the time. It was his hope and expectation that I might be able to help him with a problem. At a very young age in primary school, David was sexually abused by his primary school teacher. This went on for some years. It tormented him to the point where he eventually sought the confidence and counselling of the family priest, who seized on David's vulnerability and continued to sexually abuse him for the next four or five years. His confidence in institutions, whether they are school or church, is of course shattered. He suffers the psychological trauma of repeated child sexual abuse and I would argue that he is on a long path to slow suicide through alcoholism and marijuana abuse. That is why it shocks me when I hear that our Governor-General, when confronted with cases like this, did not take appropriate action and, in one case, dismissed what I understand were substantial allegations against one person by saying that he should see out his tenure because he was about to retire. I wonder what kind of difference it would make to the lives of the many Davids and women out there if we had better, more effective and sincere responses to such criminal behaviour.
I would argue that the bad judgment shown in the past by the Governor-General is also shown currently in two ways. Firstly, I think it is critical that the office of the Governor-General be beyond controversy and, where possible, beyond politics. I do not think, I know, that that is not currently the case. Rightly or wrongly, His Excellency has brought the office into if not disrepute then an environment of strong discomfort with the community, something we must always avoid. Secondly, the Governor-General has shown bad judgment in his current tenure, let alone during his previous life. I raised this issue last year. I wrote to the Governor-General and expressed my strong displeasure and dismay over the fact that he had attended, although I am not sure whether he spoke at, an annual council meeting—a national congress dinner, I understand—of the Australian Family Association. My long experience of the Australian Family Association—the AFA—is that they are a hate group. They promote some of the most disgraceful and shocking vilifying materials that I have experienced and seen in this country. And it is not just me saying that. Only recently this group presented a case to the High Court in favour of the legislation that would prevent single mothers and lesbian couples having access to IVF, and the High Court reprimanded this organisation and its lawyer for the shocking materials that it submitted.
The Advertising Standards Board found this group guilty of vilification when it arranged a series of billboards and leaflet materials vilifying gay men and lesbians in Western Australia. I drew this to the Governor-General's attention and presented my argument that it was not appropriate for him to provide his imprimatur to such an organisation. When I introduced my antigenocide legislation a few years ago, the RSL, surprisingly, put in a strong submission of some 20 to 25 pages vehemently opposing the legislation. But they presented only one argument against the bill. Their argument was that my antigenocide legislation, aimed at addressing war crimes and crimes against humanity, was:
... a thinly disguised vehicle for promoting homosexual rights.
It was the most bizarre, hateful and extraordinary submission. I encourage members to read it. It is published and contained within the submissions to the Senate Legal and Constitutional References Committee. The bill was introduced in 1999, and the submission was published the following year.
The submission from the RSL argued that homosexual people have a greater propensity to spread disease, molest children, infiltrate society and community structures, and risk child safety and public health. It is the kind of material that, were it directed at Aboriginal or Jewish people, would probably be prosecutable under race and religious antivilification laws. But, as we do not have sexuality antivilification laws, it is possible for people to make these extraordinary claims. When we questioned the submitter of this RSL submission, we were perhaps not surprised to learn that he was the immediate past president of the Australian Family Association of Victoria—and then it all made sense. So I argue very strongly that His Excellency has shown very poor judgment in providing his imprimatur by speaking at this dinner.
I did not get the courtesy of a direct reply but one from, I presume, a correspondence secretary, basically saying that it was the duty of the Governor-General to meet with all groups in Australian society. I reject that. There is no evidence for that. I sincerely doubt that His Excellency would speak to an anti-Semitic, a neo-Nazi or a racist organisation. Yet the arguments that we hear from the AFA and their ilk are no different.
I also strongly support the call for an inquiry into child sex abuse—criminal assault against children. There are a number of reasons for that, but I advance two reasons. Firstly, and associated with my previous comments, there is the fact that there is a very strong and very powerful misconception in the community that homosexual men are more inclined to sexually abuse children than other men. This argument is frequently advanced most often by religious organisations. We hear this argument once again in the current debate in New South Wales dealing with the equalisation of the age of consent. Religious leaders, including Archbishop George Pell, have once again advanced the argument that boys are prone and vulnerable to sexual advances from older homosexual men. It is a powerful myth, and there is not a scrap of evidence to support it. The claim is not supported by the federal Attorney-General or by any state or territory attorneys-general. The claim is not substantiated by any criminal body in Australia which does the statistics on abuse. Yet there are some groups in the community who continue to push this line.
I believe one thing an inquiry could do—not that I think it needs to be done again, but perhaps it should—is to set the record straight. I believe that those people who advance the argument that there is a link between sexuality—and homosexuality in particular—and child sexual abuse should be made to account for that. They should be made to substantiate their claim. They should be made to prove it. Perhaps they should also be shown the evidence from Second World War concentration camps—Mauthausen in Vienna, in particular—where the very same arguments were advanced to detain and slaughter gay men on that basis.
We need to have a serious discussion about what appears to be—and I stress `appears to be'—the link between religious organisations and child abuse. Why is it that not a month goes by without us hearing of yet another case of child abuse involving a priest, a religious leader or someone involved in a church group? Perhaps it is just a skewing of the statistics. Perhaps it is because we do not hear enough about the extraordinary and shocking levels of child sexual abuse that happen in the home. We should remember and make it very clear that the most unsafe place for many children is in the family home, that overwhelmingly child sexual abuse is by fathers or close male relatives and that it is most often against girls not boys. But it is still the case that outside of the family unit it is the church which seems most often to be brought into the public spotlight with yet another child sexual abuse allegation.
Some years ago the legitimate sex industry here in Canberra produced a publication entitled Hypocrites: evidence and statistics on child sexual abuse amongst church clergy, 1990-2000. They did that as part of a campaign, rightly or wrongly, to present their argument that often church groups and self-appointed moral guardians should be looking more at themselves than pointing any fingers at the sex industry. They made the point that the church—and that is a loose term, of course—employs approximately 20,000 people and that in a 10-year period some 450 of those 20,000 people have been convicted of child abuse.
They run the argument, rightly I think, that were that to occur within any other organisation, such as Telstra—and I am using them as a hypothetical example; perhaps I should just say a business that employs 20,000 people—and were we to find that some 450 of those employees were sexually abusing children, there would be a public outcry. There would be parliamentary inquiries and royal commissions. We would be very determined to get to the bottom of that. But because it is happening within the church there is a level of discomfort and quiet. I think that is partly because there is a fear amongst many politicians of taking on the church and holding it to account. I am not one of them. I believe we should try to get to the bottom of why there is either a perception or a reality that for some reason religious organisations and institutions have a higher incidence of child sexual abuse. Maybe it is to do with celibacy. Maybe it is to do with the sexual repression that comes from some churches. Maybe it is to do with the power that comes with being a respected religious leader and the power that that could provide you with in terms of pastoral care and people in pastoral care being vulnerable to abuse. I do not know and I do not pretend to have the answers, but I do believe we should look for solutions.
In summary, I argue that His Excellency has shown very poor judgment, not just previously but currently. I believe strongly in the call for an inquiry. I believe strongly that we should do more to shatter the myth that there is a link between homosexuality and child abuse—a claim that we have heard even in this chamber. I believe strongly that we should try to understand why it is that church groups and religious organisations seem to be at the forefront of institutionalised abuse. But I would not want in any way for that to be a witch-hunt. We have seen witch-hunts on that basis already. We saw it in the Wood royal commission, which reported in 1997, and I think we saw some of that in the allegations made by Senator Heffernan against Justice Kirby—which I acknowledge Senator Heffernan has since apologised for and withdrawn.
I think we need to be very serious about addressing the issue. I do not think it is enough for the Prime Minister to say—and I am paraphrasing—that he would rather spend the money that might be poured into an inquiry or a royal commission on addressing the harm that has already been caused. By all means, let us address the harm that has already been caused. It is profound. I am not suggesting for a moment that I am the only person in the chamber who knows somebody who has been sexually abused. I am sure many of us do. David is not the only person I know who has been sexually abused. Let us look seriously at the evidence; let us look seriously at the issues. Let us do it in an academic and considered way. Let us ensure that the witch-hunts that have existed in other fora are not repeated and copied. Let us do the right thing by those children who have suffered and those who continue to suffer. Let us be an international leader in the kind of approach that we take as a parliament. On that basis, I endorse the calls for the Governor-General's resignation but acknowledge that the situation is regrettable. Let us endorse a proper and full inquiry to address the issue seriously.
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