Fr Frank Brennan SJ on abuse victims, Indigenous Australians and asylum seekers

Fr Frank Brennan SJ's Law and Justice Oration at the Law and Justice Foundation 2012 Justice Awards Dinner in Sydney, delivered on October 31st, has tackled head-on the issues surrounding law and justice for abuse victims, Indigenous Australians and Asylum seekers. 

Abuse in the Catholic Church

His speech first examined the problem of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, a topic which, in his capacity as a Jesuit priest, Brennan is particularly concerned with. He noted that “the Church itself cannot be left alone to get its house in order,” and called upon “all lawyers having a commitment to justice” to “contribute fearlessly to the debate on how religious and other organisations increasingly charged by the State with responsibility for the oversight of the care and nurture of our most vulnerable children can perform their tasks freed from the abuse of the past and with State protection of all children assured; and please advise how we can better deal with complaints which surface decades later, whether or not the now adult victims want to go to the police.”

Indigenous Australians

Brennan affirmed the need to be “more attentive to the different meanings of justice when it comes to Aboriginal claims within a postcolonial society,” and noting the mistake inherent in confusing distributive justice and social justice. He examined the problem of banks being historically unwilling to provide mortgages over native title land, and suggested that the time had come for the Indigenous Land Corporation or equivalent corporation to act as guarantor for registered native title holders wanting to mortgage their land for economic development. Brennan spoke of the need to “heed Aboriginal requests for unlocking the economic potential of lands which have been won back, without risking the indigenous patrimony all over again.”

Asylum seekers

Brennan discussed the failure of the Malaysia proposal for offshore processing, and stressed the need to find another proposal which could “pass ethical muster as well as being workable, given the Parliament's newfound bipartisan hostility to onshore processing.” Brennan’s suggestion for a short-term, workable solution involves an increase in efforts to obtain a bilateral arrangement with Indonesia for offering human accommodation during processing and while awaiting resettlement. He concluded that “we need to set up a workable, transparent, honourable queue in Indonesia. Persons in the queue would receive appropriately deferential treatment from UNHCR deciding that the neediest cases would be dealt with preferentially. What we need is Indonesian agreement to an arrangement whereby Australia funds the accommodation and processing arrangements in Indonesia, with Australia setting an agreed quota of resettlement places from Indonesia. The quota needs the agreement of both governments – being sufficiently generous to assist clear the Indonesia caseload, and being sufficiently tight not to set up a honeypot effect luring more asylum seekers to the Indonesian queue awaiting passage to Australia.”

No Human Rights Act

His speech went on to discuss the lack of specific human rights legislation in Australia, noting that our politicians remain distrustful of shifting power on matters of social policy from politicians to unelected judges. However, he expressed his belief that Australia will ultimately require such an Act “to set workable limits on how far ajar the door of human rights protection should be opened by the judges in dialogue with the politicians.”

Fr Frank Brennan SJ’s speech can be read in full here.

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