INSTITUTIONS that fail to sign up to the National Redress Scheme for child sex survivors should have tax concessions and charitable status suspended, a parliamentary committee has recommended after warning the scheme is at serious risk of not delivering justice to survivors.
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A damning unanimous report supported by opposition, crossbench and government members contains 29 wide-ranging recommendations, including restoring the maximum payment to $200,000, as recommended by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.
The Federal Government controversially capped the scheme at $150,000, denied access to redress for people in prison or with serious criminal convictions, and initiated an assessment matrix at odds with the royal commission recommendations.
Newcastle MP and deputy chair of the committee, Sharon Claydon, said many scheme failings reported to the committee during hearings across Australia flowed from the Federal Government ignoring the royal commission's considered recommendations. The committee took submissions in Newcastle in November.
"The royal commission spent five years in a gruelling forensic examination of all the available evidence, providing a benchmark for best practice," Ms Claydon said.
"Every time the government has deviated from the recommendations of the royal commission without sound evidence, it has been to the detriment of the scheme and against the interests of survivors."
The select committee said the scheme ran the real risk of not delivering on its objective of providing justice to survivors.
In October former Newcastle resident and survivor of sexual abuse at St Pius X, Adamstown, James Miller, said the landmark redress scheme was overly legalistic, insensitive, bureaucratic and risked alienating the people it was meant to support.
Ms Claydon said one third of survivors who had put in applications when the scheme began operations on July 1 were "stuck in limbo because the institutions they were abused in still hadn't signed up for the scheme".
"This is untenable. I expect every institution to sign up for redress before the deadline, but if this doesn't happen, governments must look at every option they have at their disposal to ensure all institutions sign up."
The committee recommended consideration of measures to compel institutions to participate in the scheme, including the suspension of tax concessions and charitable status.
The level of counselling offered was another key problem identified by the committee.
"Again, State and Federal Governments need to look to the recommendations of the Royal Commission and deliver adequate counselling services that extend over the course of a person's life as needed, not a capped dollar value that could be exhausted in a matter of months," Ms Claydon said.
"We offer lifelong counselling support to our veterans suffering from post traumatic stress, as we should, so why can't we provide the same thing to survivors of institutional child sexual abuse?"
The committee recommended revisiting the assessment framework, and particularly a controversial assessment matrix that is contrary to the royal commission recommendation; extending the scheme to people in prison or with criminal records; ceasing the indexation of past payments and ensuring survivors have access to free and appropriate financial counselling services.
