The lack of a new redress system for survivors proves the royal commission of inquiry’s recommendations were pointless, argues Steve Goodlass.
It is a cruel irony that on the very day a US cardinal – implicated in covering up abuse – was elevated to Pope, the New Zealand state chose to entrench the status quo for children abused in its own care, while casting faith-abused survivors aside.
In appeals to the New Zealand Catholic clerics, I’ve often used the parable of the Good Samaritan to appeal to their supposed Christianity. It will not be lost on anyone that Jesus used it to illustrate an issue of his time where the religious (the priest), the Levite (in our case, the state) ignored the robbed and beaten traveller lying in the ditch by walking on by. The good Samaritan comes and assists the traveller. In the New Zealand context the Samaritan is whānau, other survivors, and the gangs that formed directly out of the abuse rendered by the state and faith-based institutions. The message of a 2,000-year-old parable plays out again today.
I’ve been critical of the Abuse in Care Inquiry in the past and still am as we experience the fallout of its failings. Last week, the government’s lead minister Erica Stanford announced that there would be no new compensation scheme for survivors, despite it being a recommendation from the inquiry and the prime minister hinting at it in his national apology in November.
In a wider context, this is just another example of how inquiries roll in New Zealand. A symbolic action for public appeasement, set up to fail by virtue of scope, commissioner selection, budget and in-process meddling because our inquiries are not independent at all.
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