CANBERRA (AUSTRALIA)
Canberra Times
May 1, 2019
Weighing in on recent criticism of the National Redress Scheme by a federal parliamentary committee, Jason Parkinson, principal at Porters Lawyers, says the $3.8 billion scheme to compensate people who were sexually abused as children in Australian institutions is the ”pink batts” of child abuse compensation.
Porters, a leading Canberra, Sydney and Wollongong rights-based law firm, specialises in litigation for individuals. ”People are going to sign up for the redress scheme, where they are being told the average compensation is $81,000 – so they’re already telling people what they’re going to receive before even assessing the cases. ‘Then these people will discover, according to law, their compensation for general damages alone ranges between $100,000 – $300,000, let alone compensation for ongoing medical treatment and economic loss they may have suffered,” says Parkinson. ”Once they deal with the National Redress Scheme, they have extinguished all their common law rights.”
The scheme was created after recommendations were made by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. It started on July 1, 2018, and will run for 10 years. As of March 22, more than 3300 applications have been received and 115 redress payments made. The five-year Royal Commission made 74 recommendations on how a national redress scheme should operate.
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