WHEN former Newcastle Anglican Dean Graeme Lawrence was awarded a Medal of the Order of Australia on June 8, 1998 as part of the Queen's Birthday honours list it was for his "service to the Anglican Church and to the community".
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On the "It's an Honour" website, overseen by the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, you can type Lawrence's name into a search list and read that he was honoured "particularly as a fundraiser and administrator during the restoration of the earthquake damage to Christ Church Cathedral in Newcastle".
In 1998 the public didn't know that Lawrence had already been accused of sexually interfering with two boys at a church camp, or that he had group sex with other priests and a teenager in the 1980s, or that he concealed child sex allegations about other Newcastle Anglican priests.
We didn't know, so Lawrence got his gong.
He sits in jail now, the convicted child sex offender who was defrocked by his church in 2012 after a disciplinary hearing in 2010 established the group sex incident occurred. And Lawrence is still entitled to put the letters OAM after his name, and still appears on "It's an Honour" as "The Very Reverend Graeme Russell Lawrence", nearly seven years after Newcastle Anglican Diocese asked the Governor-General's office about stripping Lawrence of his award.
The test for these honours should be whether they would have been awarded in the past, if all information about the recipient was known.
Would honours holders who were the subject of adverse findings by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse have received their gongs in the past if we'd known they'd covered up for child sex offenders, to protect the reputation of churches and schools?
If the answer is no, then why do they still have them?
Newcastle MP Sharon Claydon has it right with a proposal to deal with a situation that clearly brings the honours system into disrepute. Rather than relying on people like Hunter child sex survivor Steve Smith to take responsibility for stripping a Graeme Lawrence from the honours list, why don't we have a system that monitors and registers adverse findings, and holds recipients responsible?
Why don't we ask them to show cause why they shouldn't be stripped of their honours?
Issue: 39,543.
