Meet Your Australians - 2025 SA Australian of the Year Professor Leah Bromfield. ACM is proud to be media partner for the 2025 Australian of the Year Awards.
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00:00Six in ten Australians have been abused or neglected.
00:06Six in ten, it's a national emergency.
00:09And we don't treat it like a national emergency.
00:12We don't really like to talk about it.
00:15My first memory in life, like too many Australian children,
00:20is of violence.
00:23And I'm a person with a disability,
00:27and when I was growing up, that meant that you were bullied.
00:32And so I just did so much to pretend that I was normal.
00:38I fell into the field of child protection,
00:41not really connecting my past to my present,
00:44but it makes me better at what I do.
00:47A really significant kind of early impact in my career
00:50is just seeing the issue of cumulative harm
00:54being recognised in our laws.
00:57That sounds very academic, but what it actually means
00:59is that kids who are experiencing chronic abuse and neglect,
01:05there was a legal way that we could intervene
01:09to protect those children.
01:10Later in my career, I was really lucky to be appointed
01:16as a professorial fellow for the Royal Commission
01:18into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.
01:21I was able to develop the research agenda
01:24for the Royal Commission.
01:26We should be so proud of it as a nation,
01:29what that Royal Commission achieved.
01:32It shone a light on our dark history of abuse in institutions,
01:37enabling those stories to come out and change to be made.
01:41I'm proud of that.
01:43Actually, when you look back at the history of child protection,
01:46there's not a point where you can say that system was good.
01:50And it's not because it's filled with bad people,
01:53it's actually because it's a bad system.
01:55My ultimate goal is a transformed child protection system
01:59that is fair, that has heart, and that we can be proud of.
02:06That's not just rhetoric to me.
02:08I think it means that we have to be really brave
02:11to pull together the knowledge that we have,
02:14to transform the way that we approach
02:16the design of child protection systems
02:18so they can actually be helping systems,
02:21rather than systems of fear, systems of shame.
02:25We've got a lot of the answers already from the evidence.
02:28Some of what we need is the courage to actually apply that evidence
02:33and be prepared to really do things differently.