Wicked riches

Five years ago I wrote about our National Redress Scheme (NRS) for victims of historical institutional sexual abuse, reporting that after two years of operation over $500 million had been paid to 5,920 of 10,000 applicants then processed.

Lawyers cheerfully explained to me that it was a piece of cake filling in the online NRS forms, with just a few paragraphs required to hop the low bar required for the average payments – then running at around $84,000. One lawyer explained that if your old Rugby coach had been determined to be an abuser, "… there's nothing to stop you saying the same thing happened to you. Get the accused's name right, dates rights, and you'll just sail through."

There was a book published at that time – Child Sexual Abuse Inquiries and the Catholic Church – which examined at length the question of false claims to the NRS. The author, Charles Sturt research fellow, Dr Virginia Miller, compared national inquiries in Ireland, the US and Australia, analysing findings, methodologies and conclusions. Walker concluded the Australian Royal Commission, in particular, undervalued the need to safeguard against false claims, noting that 77% of the complaints of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church were made after the creation of redress schemes in the late nineties.

It's a racket and everyone knows it. Lawyers across the country will admit to knowing cases where people pocketed money for sexual abuse from these schemes where it later was proved they'd made the whole thing up.

We have huge schemes, both state and federal, all funded with taxpayers' money, designed to acknowledge the pain of alleged victims, with absolutely no concern about the truth of their allegations. As always, it is fuelled by "believe all women" ideology which is weaponised against men. Our governments cheerfully kowtow to the feminist line with absolutely no concern for whom ends up paying.

Award confirms monstrous lie

We all pay these crooks and shysters. But there's another group who pay in a different way. Men like Adrian Grainger whose estranged daughter will turn 18 in 2027. That's when she will receive a $10k payment as a victim of sexual abuse by her father. This alleged abuse was cooked up by her mother during a family court battle, and since then determined by three family court judges to have been fabricated. Yet the daughter will still receive that money which has been kept in trust since the mother made the allegations in a claim in 2015.

"Adrian Grainger" isn't his real name. That was the name given to this aggrieved father by the Family Court as he fought his way through 13 years of hearings. The mother's allegations against the father were not substantiated by police nor relevant child protection authorities. They were also rejected by three Family Court Judges and the District Court. In April 2015 Family Court judge Peter Tree found the child was not at risk of harm in her father's care. "This child cannot grow up with the belief that her father sexually abused her or presents an unacceptable risk of sexual harm to her," he said. "The evidence simply does not reasonably support such a conclusion."

Some years later another judge, Michael Baumann found that Mr Granger was a "thoroughly decent human being" and that the child was not at "any risk of physical, sexual or emotional harm in the father's care."

Yet Baumann thought the then nine-year-old child's negative views of her father had become so entrenched that it was not possible to move the child to her father's care. The mother was awarded sole parental responsibility.

Ever since this woman applied for victims' compensation for her daughter - without the father knowing – she's been waving around the compensation payment as 'evidence' that Grainger abused his daughter.

Grainger, who is soon to qualify as a lawyer, decided to launch legal action asking the NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal (NCAT) set aside the decision to award his daughter the compensation on the grounds that she "was not a victim of actual abuse by her father and suffered no injury caused by him."