Abuse and neglect on a scale so large it was too big to fail

Friday, 15 July 2022

Frances Tagaloa was one of many Pasifika survivors to speak at the Royal Commission.

Joel Maxwell is a senior Stuff reporter and columnist.

OPINION: Institutions are by nature nameless, faceless; usually described in the language of mechanics – wheels, gears, cogs, granite, electric currents. All things, really, that make wonderful torture devices when you think about it.

Over the past week, the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care held its disability, deaf, and mental health institutional care hearing.

My colleague Olivia Shivas has covered the hearing, the latest in a series running since mid-2021, in painful but necessary detail.

The Kimberley Centre in a photograph taken in 2013.

* 'National disgrace': Abuse in care survivors failed by state, inquiry finds

* Abuse in care: Disabled survivors put into care as 'containment from society', inquiry finds

1964 video footage from Levin psychopaedic hospital, what then became Kimberley Centre, was played at the royal commission.

Day one started with gut-wrenching testimony from former residents of the Kimberley Centre for disabled children, near Levin.

Here was our great system at work: humans cut off from society and confined to a separate world with its own sadistic masters. Once again, we faced the truth that the vulnerable have never been protected, and the abusers were allowed to relax into a gentle retirement, protected by time and the steadfast ignorance of those living in the outside world.

In my mind, I cannot even put a face or faces to the perpetrators. Abuse and neglect float detached from named abusers and justice. The testimony is a passive-tense beat-down to the psyche: teeth were pulled without anaesthetic, rape was performed, thin wrists were bound, unnecessary drugs administered.

Joel Maxwell: “I’m not going to cry or anything, but hearing the video did cause me visceral pain.”

The frightening thing is that the sheer amount of abuse seems to have created its own invisibility. Institutions like Kimberley – and the institution of state care itself – birthed abuse on a scale that was too big to fail.

The commission estimated that, since 1950, about 256,000 people may have been abused in state and faith-based care in our country. That is considered a conservative estimate.

I visited Kimberley briefly in 2007, I think, for a story on something or other, months after it closed. I remember its ramshackle weatherboard buildings, which seemed to be settling resentfully into closure like a bad case of arsenic poisoning.

It was a huge complex that had the timeless ugliness of all institutional facilities – except there had been no effort to hide the peeling lime paint, the boarded upstairs windows, the neglected rust; the general sense of a weeping, open secret. The past was still close.

I turned heel on my own shudder and drove back to Levin for my next job. There were rumours, of course, about mistreatment in the institution, but now it was closed and the residents were living in homes in the community, so we could all move on.

We have to hope that the commission’s recommendations released in next year’s final report will be followed. The commission’s existence and the opportunity for testimony by former residents is part of a slow climb towards decency and full protection of the vulnerable. Thank God they could finally speak.

Even the idea of places like Kimberley – where we segregate people from society – now seems Victorian, although it only closed in 2006.

Victorian ways of doing things, I must admit, have persisted in my own thoughts. But mostly they focus on crime and punishment.

I have no doubt that, at that time I drove away from Kimberley, the abusers – those people who might euphemistically be described as the few bad eggs in the system – sat in their local pubs and clubs, sipping beer and laughing darkly about their days in that place.

Some of them might still be alive today, existing in institutions themselves, reliant on the goodwill and kindness of aged care staff, who will likely provide the proper support they never did.

Even if they can’t read Olivia’s stories, even if they can’t remember what they did, part of me hopes Kimberley still exists for them in troubled dreams of those poisonous weatherboard buildings.