Senator JACINTA COLLINS (6:44 PM) —I do not think anybody who listened to the debate after question time yesterday will be surprised that I rise to support the motion moved by Senator Faulkner. In doing so, I would like to take some time to reflect upon issues that have been raised by a number of others in this debate. Let me start with the point that Senator Mackay made just a moment ago. Perhaps one of the biggest problems for Dr Hollingworth is that it is patently clear that in many respects in relation to managing cases of child sexual abuse he is not taking responsibility now. Senator Brandis in his contribution, much of which I will reflect upon a bit later, attempted to make the point that we are talking about a case which occurred in 1993 with the community attitudes of 1993 and that Dr Slaughter, for instance, had indicated that the approach Dr Hollingworth had applied was in some senses an improvement on what had occurred previously. What the Australian community are reflecting on is that his approach today is not good enough and even his approach back then was not good enough.

There have been some misrepresentations of Dr Slaughter's position, which I will come to in a moment, but I think I should first concentrate on responding to many of the areas raised by those seeking to defend Dr Hollingworth retaining his office. Dr Hollingworth claimed in his response to the Aspinall board—and this was at the time when he was Governor-General; he still is Governor-General, having stood aside—that he `had personally carried out a detailed pastoral and disciplinary investigation' in the Elliot case, case 5 in this report. Anyone with an understanding of how cases of child sexual abuse should be managed by today's standards and even by the standards in 1990 knows that this is patently not the case. One simple thing that Dr Hollingworth should have done in that case was to seek to test the claim of the perpetrator—to test his view, or his reconstructed view—that this was isolated incident.

The report does indicate that the perpetrator claimed that he had not interfered with any other boys, but we now know that this was patently untrue. But what is worse is that in his `detailed pastoral and disciplinary investigation' Dr Hollingworth never sought to test this. Others claim they told him, but if you give any weight to Dr Hollingworth's reconstructed view, he never sought to test it. So how, by today's standards, he can still cling to the claim that he `had personally carried out a detailed pastoral and disciplinary investigation' in this case is of great concern. If he said today, `My error in judgment was not only that I left the priest in his post but that I did not carry out a detailed pastoral and disciplinary investigation,' one might give some weight to the view that, on today's standards, he has caught up—he has got it, he does understand what has occurred here. But his evidence to this inquiry makes it very clear that, even on today's standards and even after he had learnt his lesson from the Australian Story program, he has still not got the point.

The error of judgment that Dr Hollingworth applied was not, as suggested by Senator Brandis, based solely on this case. Senator Brandis knows full well, contrary to his comments in the chamber on this debate, that case 3 shows error of judgment as well. We know that from Australian Story—this was the case involved there—but when you look at the detail in the Aspinall report on case 3 you understand that exactly the same thing occurred: he left the perpetrator in a post.

Debate interrupted.