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The Department of Social Services provided legal correspondence to the Catholic Church that was then leaked to the Murdoch press and used in an attempt to silence victims. By Rick Morton.

Exclusive: DSS shares legal letters that help silence church victims

A prominent Catholic Church figure, who for legal reasons cannot be identified.

Credit: Getty Images

Catholic Church officials have accused survivors of child sexual abuse of engaging in a “criminal offence” for telling their stories after receiving redress payments from a national scheme – and then appear to have leaked details of legal correspondence to a conservative newspaper in an attempt to kill the resulting story.

The officials were helped in this endeavour by an eager-to-please Department of Social Services, which administers the National Redress Scheme and which handed private legal letters straight to the church.

Australian Catholic Redress Limited – a body set up and controlled by the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference to handle the church’s obligations under the redress scheme – complained to the federal department within hours of being alerted to an upcoming cover story in The Monthly by journalist Louise Milligan, an early access copy of which went out online to subscribers.

The Monthly, published by Schwartz Media, which also publishes The Saturday Paper, revealed two men were found by independent assessors at the National Redress Scheme to have been abused by a prominent Catholic Church figure when they were boys and that they were awarded redress as a result of these findings.

What followed was a tangle of legal and political power plays designed to erase the voices of sexual abuse survivors in deference to a large institution with a history of silencing such voices, deliberately or otherwise.

Australian Catholic Redress Limited complained to the Department of Social Services and it responded with uncommon speed in meeting the interests of the church.

On January 31, DSS chief counsel Bronwyn Worswick wrote to the “proper officer” of The Monthly with concerns about “potential unauthorised use or disclosure of National Redress Scheme information”.

The letter was sent to a generic email address and was initially missed by the magazine.

“Information contained in this article is clearly extracted from two decisions of the operator [DSS Secretary] under the scheme. This type of information is ‘protected information’ under the National Redress Scheme for Institutional Child Sexual Abuse 2018 (Cth) (the Act),” Worswick wrote.

“Section 99 of the Act makes it an offence to disclose ‘protected information’. The department requests that The Monthly considers removing this article from its website, and not using this information in the future.”

Despite the framing as a “request” and asking for “consideration”, Worswick is later more absolute in her language.

“Section 99 of the Act makes it a criminal offence for anyone to, obtain, make a record of, use or disclosure of protected information except where authorised in very limited circumstances,” she writes.

“There is no journalism exemption in relation to dealings with protected information. Given the article makes reference to the two decisions under the scheme, we can only assume that The Monthly has been provided with copies of these two decisions, and it is clear there has been an unauthorised disclosure of protected information to The Monthly.”

A similar letter was sent to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, where Milligan is employed and which also published versions of her reporting.

Worswick failed to note, however, that one of the exceptions contained in the law is for victim-survivors to tell their own stories about what happened to them, including through the redress scheme.

The act says: “A person may obtain protected information or make a record of protected information or disclose protected information to another person or use protected information … with the express or implied consent of the person or institution to which the information relates.”

Milligan had permission from these two men to do exactly that.

“As I stated earlier, the unauthorised disclosure or use of protected information is a criminal offence contrary to section 99 which is subject to serious criminal penalties (including imprisonment),” Worswick’s letter continued.

“The Monthly is now in notice that it has published information that was disclosed to it in circumstances that constitute a criminal offence.”

In an extraordinary development, these letters were then sent by the Department of Social Services to Australian Catholic Redress Limited, the church vehicle controlled by the bishops conference, as proof that the department had acted on its complaint.

The letters were then leaked to Dennis Shanahan at The Australian newspaper, who wrote two articles with colleagues about the saga while continuing to name the abuser. Shanahan appeared perturbed that both the ABC and The Monthly rejected the purported legal advice from the DSS chief counsel.

Soon after publication, The Monthly and the ABC learnt of a related civil court case that could be prejudiced if the material remained in public and so the article was taken down online and the magazine removed from shelves in Victoria. The Australian has continued to name the senior church official involved in the trial, despite the legal risks this creates for the alleged victim.

The editor of The Monthly, Michael Williams, said the magazine “strenuously rejects any suggestion that there is anything improper or criminal in the way we acquired and published the accounts of redress recipients”.

“Louise Milligan is one of the country’s best journalists and that’s why victim-survivors choose to share their stories with her. We are proud to honour those stories by publishing them and stand by that choice,” he said.

“The DSS interpretation of the act reduces the scheme to a government-backed retread of the church’s own Melbourne Response: a mechanism for protecting institutions and further silencing victims.”

Australian Catholic Redress Limited was sent questions about how it came to be in possession of DSS legal correspondence and why those letters might have ended up with The Australian newspaper, but its chair, Denis O’Brien, ignored these in favour of a one-sentence answer: “Australian Catholic Redress Ltd continues to uphold its commitments to the National Redress Scheme, including those related to protected information, and makes no comment on the continued publication of protected information by The Monthly which was disclosed to Louise Milligan in circumstances that constitute a criminal offence.”

It’s a long road from 2015, when the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse recommended a redress scheme be established after criticising the operation of the Melbourne Response, developed by then archbishop of Melbourne, George Pell, in the mid 1990s.

The royal commission recommended a national redress scheme that would, on signature, release the government and the institution from any future liability, with redress paid up to a cap of $150,000.

Crucially, it recommended: “No confidentiality obligations should be imposed on applicants for redress.”

This recommendation is reflected in the law, as the bill’s explanatory memorandum noted in 2018: “Subclause 42(4) provides that the rules made for the purposes of paragraph 42(2)(j) must not require the person to enter into a confidentiality agreement.”

Information under the scheme, however, will be “subject to confidentiality”.

“Outside of Scheme representatives, only survivors and those they nominate will have access to records relating to their application. Strict offence provisions will be put in place to mitigate risks of unlawful access, disclosure, recording, use, soliciting or offering to supply Scheme information,” the memorandum says.

There are no explicit offence provisions related to survivors who disclose their redress decisions to anyone else, even journalists.

When the scheme began in 2018, the then president of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference, Brisbane Archbishop Mark Coleridge, said the church was “keen to participate in it”.

“Survivors deserve justice and healing and many have bravely come forward to tell their stories,” he said at the time.

The trauma of abuse is frequently overtaken by the sheer psychic damage survivors experience navigating often hostile systems to receive an acknowledgement of what was done, let alone any redress. This was recognised by the royal commission, which was also resolute in its call for any redress scheme to be designed with survivors in mind.

“Any institution or redress scheme that offers or provides any element of redress should do so in accordance with the following principles,” it said.

“Redress should be survivor focused. There should be a ‘no wrong door’ approach for survivors in gaining access to redress. All redress should be offered, assessed and provided with appropriate regard to what is known about the nature and impact of child sexual abuse – and institutional child sexual abuse in particular – and to the cultural needs of survivors.

“All redress should be offered, assessed and provided with appropriate regard to the needs of particularly vulnerable survivors.”

There were more than 300 claims of redress offered under the Melbourne Response, according to data compelled by the royal commission, between its beginning in October 1996 and March 31, 2014.

Payments were initially capped at $50,000 but averaged only $38,800. In total, more than $9 million in ex gratia payments were made to victims of sexual abuse to the end of March 2014. However the cost of administering the Melbourne Response was $17.011 million, the royal commission heard. This includes independent commissioner costs of $7.794 million and significant additional legal costs to the chosen legal firm of the Archdiocese of Melbourne, Corrs Chambers Westgarth.

The National Redress Scheme established following the royal commission was supposed to rise above problems with the Melbourne Response, or the church’s other redress body, Towards Healing, which paid out an average of $48,300 to almost 900 people over a slightly longer period.

Part of the thinking was that survivors should be released from the implied legal threats and uncertainty that plagued church-controlled bodies.

Now, the Catholic Church appears to have regained some of that control.

A series of detailed questions were put to the Department of Social Services, asking whether it took the view that child abuse survivors could only ever speak about what happened to them under the redress scheme if they avoided discussing their abuser, the institution in which the abuse happened or any detail that might otherwise have contributed to the truth and justice requirements of redress.

Would such a statuary interpretation – not tested anywhere – just be handing the right to silence victim-survivors back to the very institutions that harboured their abusers, a sort of veto on accountability?

The department declined to answer that specifically.

“The protected information provisions in the legislation are designed to protect all parties involved in the Scheme as a measure to ensure the Scheme’s integrity,” a spokesperson for DSS said in a statement.

“The Department received a complaint about the publication of protected information and subsequently wrote to a number of media outlets including The Monthly (letter dated 31 January 2025).

“In circumstances where the Department receives any formal complaint about the publication of protected information, we advise the complainant of the steps we have taken to address the complaint.

“To that end, a copy of the letter of 31 January 2025 to The Monthly was provided to the Australian Catholic Redress Limited, who is the relevant participating institution.

“The Department can confirm that it did not disclose any correspondence to The Australian.”

While the conservative broadsheet, known for its enthusiastic backing of traditional Catholic power, continued to name the abuser in relation to its reporting about perceived noncompliance from The Monthly and the ABC, the department said it did not write any legal letters to the Murdoch masthead because its reporting “did not give rise to any protected information concerns … therefore there was no need for the Department to write to The Australian”.

The department claimed it had to inform the Catholic Church of the steps it had taken to act on its complaint about the magazine reporting, but it did not elaborate on why it considered it appropriate to provide the legal correspondence to them.

“The Department has nothing further to add,” a spokesperson said.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on February 22, 2025 as "Exclusive: DSS shares legal letters that help silence church victims".

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