A warning, this story contains details of child sexual abuse. The Tasmania’s Anglican Bishop will apologise to a community in the states north, where a notorious paedophile was rector of the local church in the 1980s. Some victim-survivors say it is a small step towards the church owning up to how it enabled paedophiles in the past.
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00:00One of Tasmania's most notorious pedophiles, Louis Victor Daniels, was the rector here
00:10at the Anglican Church in Deloraine in the 1980s.
00:14Abuse leads to a ripple effect.
00:16So not only affects the survivor, the victim of abuse, but their family and their friends
00:22and it sort of multiplies out into the local community.
00:28Daniels is serving his third prison sentence.
00:31His crimes were committed in the 1970s, 80s and 90s.
00:36I was assaulted in the 1980s on several occasions.
00:41I know other boys who were as well and some of them are sadly no longer with us.
00:45The church has previously apologised to victim survivors of Daniels and of other perpetrators.
00:51I would like to make an unreserved apology to those who were sexually abused by clergy
00:58or other officers of the Anglican Church in Tasmania.
01:03Tomorrow Bishop Richard Condie will offer an apology to the Deloraine community.
01:08This is the first time doing it in a local community and hopefully to bring some closure
01:15and some healing and some hope for people.
01:17I'm really interested in seeing what happens in this next phase of the apology.
01:23It seems like a never-ending apology.
01:25At some point you have to stop apologising and at some point you have to start owning
01:28up to exactly what you did, owning up to all the facts, not just some of the facts.
01:33It's been more than 20 years since victim survivor Steve Fisher went public with his
01:38story of being abused by another Anglican priest.
01:42I'm a victim of Garth Hawkins.
01:46Since then he's been an advocate for victim survivors of child sexual abuse.
01:51I think the majority of people just are so disgusted with the church that it doesn't
02:01matter how many times they apologise, it won't make a shred of difference.
02:08What they did with the pedophiles in the 70s, 80s and 90s by moving them around and especially
02:15with Lou Daniels, I mean they encouraged him and gave him a high position in SEBS,
02:24the Church of England Boys' Society.
02:26In 2018 the Tasmanian Anglican Church started selling churches and other properties to raise
02:32funds for redress payments.
02:34At the time it estimated it would need $8 million to meet those obligations.
02:39That figure has continued to climb.
02:43So far we have finalised 84 payments to survivors of sexual abuse.
02:50Some of those through the national redress scheme, some through civil litigation.
02:55And so far we've paid out $17.5 million and that's probably about half what we anticipate
03:02we'll need to pay out in the next 10 years or so.
03:06Daniels is just one of the perpetrators of abuse and Deloraine is just one parish where
03:11children were abused.
03:13The abuse happened in a number of different locations and we're certainly open to doing
03:18further apologies to local communities if people find that a helpful thing.