Help on offer but compo unlikely

Kevin Rudd. Photo / Supplied

CANBERRA - Prime Minister Kevin Rudd will unveil a package of measures to back his pledge yesterday that Australia will never repeat the brutality and austerity that scarred the lives of hundreds of thousands of children placed in government care.

Rudd delivered a formal apology on behalf of the nation to the more than 500,000 Australians who grew up in state and church institutions over the past century, thousands of them sent from Britain as child migrants.

The apology followed a series of damning state and federal reports, including a Senate inquiry that proposed a long list of recommendations that Canberra has taken a decade to begin implementing.

Describing the former wards' stories as a "valley of tears", Rudd told an audience of about 1000 in Parliament House's Great Hall: "The truth is, a great evil has been done."

Although the full details of the package have yet to be revealed, it is unlikely to include compensation despite such schemes in Western Australia, Queensland and Tasmania, and widespread demands for similar federal action.

The call was repeated before yesterday's apology by Family First Senator Steven Fielding, who said he had been abused for years as a child by a scoutmaster.

"I have very strong emotions and feelings on this issue," he said. "My heart goes out to anybody in this category."

Warning that a nation that forgot its past was condemned to relive it, Rudd said that with 28,000 to 30,000 children at present in their care, federal, state and territory governments must ensure the systematic auditing, inspection and quality assurance of the child protection services they administered.

"Governments must put in place every protection possible to reduce the risk of mistreatment in the future," he said. "If you hurt a child, a harmed adult will often result ... and the social, economic and personal cost is huge.

"We must do everything possible to break the cycle.

"I recognise this is a difficult, complex and sensitive area of policy, but the nation must continue to lift its game and do whatever can practicably be done to provide for the protection of little ones."

Rudd said the Government had prepared a comprehensive response to the recommendations of two Senate reports and it would be tabled in Parliament "in the coming days".

Measures he outlined included specific aged care provisions, including counselling and other support services, funding for "Forgotten Australians" advocacy groups, a national database and help in tracing and reuniting families, and funding for National Library and National and National Museum of Australia projects to record the stories of former state wards.

His apology, punctuated by tears, cheers and applause from an audience that included many who had suffered in state and church homes, included a motion that will be passed by Parliament acknowledging an "ugly chapter" in the nation's history.

He said Australia needed to say sorry to children taken from their families and abused - "the absolute tragedy of a childhood lost".

"We look back in shame that many of these little ones who were entrusted to homes and foster homes were instead abused physically, humiliated cruelly and violated sexually," Rudd said.

"And we look back in shame at how those with power were allowed to abuse those who had none ... [and who] were left ill-prepared to fend for themselves, often unable to read or write, and to struggle alone with no friends and no family.

"We acknowledge the particular pain of children shipped to Australia as migrants, robbed of your families, robbed of your homeland, regarded not as innocent children but ... as a source of child labour.

"The laws of the nation failed you."

Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull, visibly moved as he told the stories of victims he had spoken to, said the apology had his unqualified support.

"Today we acknowledge that with broken hearts and breaking spirits you were left in the custody - we can hardly call it care - of too many people whose abuse and neglect made a mockery of the claim you were taken from your own family for your own good."

The apology was also welcomed by organisations whose predecessors had run many of the institutions responsible for the abuse, including Anglicare, the Uniting Church and the Catholic Church.