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Royal ...
By Janet Fife-Yeomans
Royal commission into child sex: former bishop Keith Slater ignored advice to report abuse allegations against North Coast Children’s Home to police THE former Anglican Bishop of Grafton, Keith Slater, has come under fire from the child abuse royal commission for the way he mishandled a litany of claims against the church. When more than 40 former residents of the notorious North Coast Children’s Home at Lismore came forward seeking help and compensation after being abused by at least 12 priests and members of staff, the Anglican Church denied any liability, despite running the home since 1919. Bishop Slater had been “advised” by his boss, the head of the Anglican Church Archbishop Phillip Aspinall, to tell the police about any criminal allegations from the children’s home and to seek out other people who had been abused there. He did not do either, the report into the Anglican Diocese of Grafton response to child sexual abuse at the home, said today. The report, tabled in Federal parliament, said that the diocese denied responsibility for sexual abuse that took place at the home, which had been established by its local rector on church land. The commission also found that the diocese did not handle the claims with any sympathy. Bishop Slater resigned last year as The Daily Telegraph was preparing to run stories with one of the victims, Tommy Campion, after a ‘horrified” church official uncovered the full extent of the diocese’s treatment of the former residents. In September last year, the diocese published an apology for both the abuse and the way it had handled it. The commission’s report found that with $209 million in assets, mainly controlled by charitable trusts, the diocese never budgeted to pay out any of the claims, telling the victims that it could not afford it. However it managed to find $10 million to bail out the Clarence Valley Anglican School which had run up the large debt, the commission said. It settled the claims for less than $23,000 each. After Rev Allan Kitchingman, curate and assistance priest at the home from 1969 to 1970 where he taught music, was convicted in 2002 of five counts of indecent assault of a boy in or about 1975, no church disciplinary action was taken against him. The home, set up for children who were wards of the state, orphans or who had been abandoned by their parents, had been poorly funded, stank of faeces and physical discipline was carried out at the end of a pony whip or a leather belt, the commission had been told. It was established by the Diocese of Grafton of what was then the Church of England and became the Anglican Church. One of the boys, who had been abused while at the home from 1949 to 1958, had been diagnosed with cancer shortly before he gave evidence at the commission earlier this year - and thought it was good news because it would bring him relief. “That’s the best news I have ever had in my whole life,” he told the commission about his diagnosis. “The pain will stop. That’s the effect you have all your life from these events. It doesn’t go away. It holds you. All you hope for is death, just to stop the pain.”
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