DELORAINE (AUSTRALIA)
Australian Broadcasting Corporation - ABC [Sydney, Australia]
March 20, 2025
By Loretta Lohberger
In short:
The Anglican Bishop of Tasmania, Richard Condie, will offer an apology to the community of Deloraine, where one of the state’s most notorious paedophiles was a rector in the 1980s.
Some victim-survivors say the church still needs to “own up” to the ways it “facilitated” abuse by moving paedophiles — including former church rector Louis Victor Daniels — around, and by not acting on allegations of abuse.
What’s next?
Dr Condie says the church has finalised 84 payments, totalling $17.5 million, to survivors of sexual abuse since 2018, which is about half of what the church estimates it will need to pay over the next 10 years.
Deloraine in northern Tasmania is where one of the state’s most notorious paedophiles, Louis Victor Daniels, was rector of the local Anglican church in the 1980s.
Warning: This story contains references to child sexual abuse that may distress some readers.
“Abuse leads to a ripple effect, so it not only affects the survivor — the victim of abuse — but their family and their friends and it sort of multiplies out into the local community, so I think it’s really important to try to help as many people as we can in that process,” Anglican Bishop Richard Condie said.
On Saturday, Dr Condie will offer an apology to the Deloraine community.
It follows previous public apologies made by the church since the early 2000s.
“This is the first time doing it in a local community. Hopefully, to bring some closure and some healing and some hope for people,” Dr Condie said.
Daniels is serving his third prison sentence for child sexual abuse crimes.
His crimes were committed in the 1970s, 80s and 90s, in Deloraine and elsewhere.
John Steen was aged between 10 and 16 years when he was abused by Daniels on multiple occasions in the 1980s.
“I’m really interested in seeing what happens in this next phase of the apology … There might be value in it for some people, but I think in some ways the value is more to the church to be seen to be doing something,” Mr Steen said.
Mr Steen was one of two complainants in the most recent criminal case against Daniels.
He also successfully sued the church for damages, which resulted in the Supreme Court of Tasmania last year ordering the church to pay Mr Steen $2.4 million in damages.
“At some point you have to stop apologising and at some point you have to start owning up to exactly what you did and owning up to all the facts, not just some of the facts,” he said.
He said the church “facilitated the abuse” by moving Daniels around and promoting him.
“They still haven’t owned up to that,” Mr Steen said.
‘Still got a long way to go’
It has been more than 20 years since Steve Fisher went public with his story of being abused by Anglican priest, Garth Hawkins.
Since then, Mr Fisher has been an advocate for victim-survivors of child sexual abuse and is the chief executive of support and advocacy charity Beyond Abuse.
He said he was not sure how valuable the apology would be.
“The majority of people are so disgusted with the church that it doesn’t matter how many times they apologise, it won’t make a shred of difference,” he said.
“What they did with the paedophiles in the 70s, 80s and 90s by moving them around and especially with Lou Daniels. They encouraged him and gave him a high position in CEBS, the Church of England Boys Society.
“The church have still got a long way to go. This isn’t just the Anglican church, this is all churches.”
Daniels is just one perpetrator, and Deloraine is just one of the places where children were abused.
“We’re certainly open to doing further apologies to local communities if people find that a helpful thing,” Dr Condie said.
Church’s honour boards removed, for now
Daniels’s name is on an honour board that lists the rectors of the Deloraine church.
The board has been removed for now, but Dr Condie said the church was deciding what to do with them long term.
“The current plan is just to remove the honour boards from Deloraine church in the first instance … it may not always be gone, we may return it with some sort of amendment to it,” Dr Condie said.
Mr Fisher is advocating for honour boards that name perpetrators of abuse to remain, but for perpetrators’ names to be removed and an explanation for the removal to be added.
“The fact that the name is not there will make people look and go, ‘who is that’,” he said.
“And that’s what we want … we want people thinking about what they’ve done and how [the church has] handled it, because the way they handled the Lou Daniels case is absolutely appalling.”
Mr Steen said permanently removing the honour boards would be the “wrong decision”.
“I think we need to remember what happened, but I’d be very grateful to see Daniels’s name removed from those honour boards.”
Redress payments reach $17.5m since 2018
In 2018, the Anglican Church in Tasmania began selling its churches and other properties to raise funds for expected redress claims.
At the time, the church estimated it would need to raise $8 million to meet redress obligations.
That figure has continued to climb.
“So far, we have finalised 84 payments to survivors of sexual abuse. Some of those through the National Redress Scheme, some through civil litigation. So far, we’ve paid out $17.5m,” Dr Condie said.
“That’s probably about half [of] what we anticipate we’ll need to pay out in the next 10 years or so.”
Dr Condie said he was confident the Tasmanian diocese could afford the payments into the future, but said funds would be redirected from other services, including funding youth ministry trainees and a fund that provided outreach services to children and young people in need.
“Every parish in Tasmania will now have a levy on income from investment for the next maybe five or 10 years, which will also build up the funds that are available for redress,” he said.
“We think we can manage it, but it will have a very significant effect on what the Anglican Church in Tasmania is able to do going forward.”
Dr Condie said the church in Tasmania had come far in the more than 20 years since Mr Fisher’s disclosure and subsequent publicity around child sexual abuse involving Anglican clergy in Tasmania.
“I’m proud of the way the Anglican Church in Tasmania has responded in the past 20 years to this historical sexual abuse,” he said.
“My predecessor John Harrower called for the Royal Commission [into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse]. We set up the first redress scheme in Tasmania … and I think we have some of the most robust practices of any community organisation working with children.”
He said the church paid “a lot of attention” to child safety.
“And I think it’s changed the culture of the Anglican Church in Tasmania.”
Sexual assault support services:
- Sexual Assault Support Service (Tasmania) 1800 697 877
- Beyond Abuse 1300 230 213
- 1800 Respect national helpline 1800 737 732
- Bravehearts (support for child sexual abuse survivors) 1800 272 831
Other helplines:
- Lifeline (24-hour crisis line) 131 114
- Beyond Blue 1300 224 636
- Tasmania’s Victims of Crime Service 1300 300 238
- CLAN Care Leavers Australia Network 1800 008 774
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-17/child-sexual-abuse-survivor-anglican-church-payout/103474970