Church abuse victims resigned to being left out of New Zealand inquiry

WELLINGTON: Church abuse survivors have resigned themselves to being excluded from the upcoming royal commission of inquiry.

The public consultation period about how the inquiry should run concluded a week ago and its chairman, Sir Anand Satyanand, has begun going through the 300 submissions.

‘‘At this stage I have not formed any final views or recommendations,’’ he said in a statement on Monday.

However, Liz Tonks, of the Network of Survivors of Faithbased Institutional Abuse, said she got a very different impression from meeting Sir Anand.

‘‘I asked him whom he had received submissions from when he suggested there wasn’t anyone else except us asking for all survivors to be included,’’ she said.

‘‘I asked him had they been proactive in the inquiry and approached other churches, had they considered approaching sports clubs?

‘‘His response to that was that he didn’t see it as his job, that the inquiry was public and people knew they could make submissions.’’

The commission launched a major public awareness campaign at the start of April, two months into the threemonth public consultation period on the inquiry’s terms of reference, which closed last week.

Ms Tonks said her group had trouble getting to see Sir Anand, but he said he had met a wide range of people and groups and canvassed many issues.

‘‘The issues have involved things like clarity of expression, appropriate placement of the Treaty of Waitangi, coverage of Pacific people as well as Maori, and as well the matter of a parallel inquiry financed by the churches,’’ he said.

That last issue came up when he met the leaders of the Catholic Church and Anglican Church in March, he said.

The Anglicans subsequently issued a public submission and letter to Sir Anand and the Prime Minister, in which the church dismissed a parallel churchled inquiry, arguing it would have less standing and less restorative benefit.

However, in late April, Sir Anand told Newshub he had raised the prospect of such an inquiry with the churches. Ms Tonks said that when she raised the Anglican submission, it appeared Sir Anand did not know the church had opposed a parallel inquiry.

Bill Kilgallon, who led the New Zealand Catholics’ response to clerical child abuse until February, when he retired, and was on a Vatican commission on the same subject, also made a submission.

‘‘The churches don’t have any legal powers to call people to account in the way a Royal Commission can, and there’s no existing structure that brings all faith institutions together to undertake such a task,’’ he said.

The church investigating the church was not a good look either, he said.

Mr Kilgallon said the commission could instead look first at abuse within state institutions, then move on to nonstate abuse.

He had offered to meet Sir Anand, but that had not eventuated.

Leo McIntyre, of the Road Forward Trust, in Wellington, works with men who have been through abuse in state and church institutions, and some who have suffered both.

‘‘The majority of people that I’ve spoken to would prefer to have the churches included,’’ he said.

‘‘If people have to compartmentalise the abuse that’s happened in their lives and have some of it acknowledged and responded to, and some of it denied, then that’s not helpful to people.’’

Sir Anand said early last month that focusing on abuse which had a state link would give a ‘‘clarity of purpose’’, and expanding the inquiry would make it lengthier and much, much more costly.

In Australia there was highprofile criticism of New Zealand’s plan to exclude the church.