Only a Royal Commission can reveal the full extent of child abuse

We shouldn't leave it up to individual churches to have the courage to tackle such a difficult, unpleasant and ugly issue.

Government must show leadership and it must show strength.

We need a Royal Commission to ensure we get a proper national approach, not an ad hoc, city-by-city, or church-by-church, peek at the problem.

In some instances there is a network of paedophiles that work across State boundaries and even across institutions.

Only a national inquiry with full legal powers will uncover this.

The issue of child sexual abuse is very emotional and very dark. It will be a difficult and confronting issue to investigate.

But it needs to be done.

It needs to be done to give the thousands of survivors of sexual assault a voice and justice.

Work has been done, notably by my Democrat colleague Senator Andrew Murray, to establish a Senate inquiry into treatment of children who were brought to this country as orphans. Only through that inquiry was an enormous amount of material able to be made public for the first time.

There is another Senate inquiry now into the treatment of other children in institutions in Australia and, again, that will be very valuable for many people but it has to be said that that is not enough.

Senate committees can only go so far. They cannot realistically compel witnesses to appear, they cannot compel witnesses to answer, they cannot compel people to produce documents, they cannot use search warrants to investigate people's places.

They can give parliamentary privilege to evidence but that evidence cannot then necessarily be used in a court of law if there is a prosecution relating to it. So Senate inquiries, vital though they are, still fall short of what is required to deal with crimes such as sexual assault.