How the Anglican Church and its Grafton Diocese failed Northern Rivers communities

The Anglican Church North Coast Children’s Home has been the subject of eight days of evidence before the Royal Commission Into Institutional Responses To Child Sexual Abuse.

Most of this evidence points to a manifest failure by the Anglican Church, its clergy and Grafton Diocese's administrative body to protect those children in its care and under its protection.

It comes as no surprise then to find that to date, despite his history while an active member of the Anglican clergy, now retired priest Allan Kitchingman’s name has never been entered onto the church’s own national register of all clergy against whom a notifiable complaint or a notifiable charge has been made.

BACKGROUND

Newcastle Herald, 6 August 2002, Page 7:

Judge Coolahan said he accepted that Father Kitchingham assaulted the boy during a 12-month period and had been of good character before and after 1975.

Newcastle Anglican Christ Church Dean Graeme Lawrence had spoken in support of Father Kitchingham [sic] in court.

References on Father Kitchingham's [sic] behalf were tendered from Bishops of Brisbane and Bathurst, which were not publicly available......

Anglican year books show Allan Kitchingman was at Singleton from 1963-66, Wallsend 1966-68, Lismore 1969-70, Eureka/Clunes/Dunoon 1971-72, Lismore 1973-76, Mullumbimby 1976-81, Tweed Heads 1981-88, Tamworth 1988-97, and Darwin 1997-2000 until he retired.

Newcastle Herald November 14 2010:

The names of a number of other former Newcastle Anglican members will be entered on the church's national professional standards register according to the terms of a church canon in 2007.

They include Robert Ellmore, jailed for nine years for offences against children over more than four decades; trainee priest Ian Neil Barrick, jailed for two years for offences against a 14-year-old in 1998; Allan Kitchingman, jailed for offences against a 14-year-old in 1975; and Stephen Hatley Gray, 68, a former rector of Wyong given a good behaviour bond after sexually abusing a juvenile in 1990.

Newcastle Herald, 8 November 2013:

THE late Newcastle Anglican Bishop James Housden kept a ‘‘very careful watch’’ on Allan Kitchingman when the former ‘‘nightclub entertainer’’ and major record company public relations officer studied to be a priest at St John’s College, Morpeth, from 1960.

That was because of Kitchingman’s ‘‘earlier background and associations’’, the bishop said in a letter in 1968.

But when Kitchingman was charged with a ‘‘child sex matter’’ in 1968, the bishop offered his immediate support and pledged to keep him in the ministry ‘‘under a bishop who would be fully informed of the circumstances’’.

Two weeks later, in late December 1968, Kitchingman was interviewed by a Grafton Bishop and appointed to Lismore parish, which included the church-run North Coast Children’s Home.

In a letter to Kitchingman in January 1969 Bishop Housden wrote that he was ‘‘glad to know that the Bishop of Grafton was so kind and understanding’’.

‘‘I ... believe that you can and will have a happy and fruitful ministry there,’’ Bishop Housden wrote.

In 2002 Kitchingman pleaded guilty to five charges of sexually abusing a North Coast Children’s Home youth, 14, in 1975 and 1976. He was jailed for 18 months.....

Newcastle Herald 22 November 2013:

HISTORICAL Newcastle Anglican diocese files alleging ‘‘falsification of records’’, including those of child sex offender priest Allan Kitchingman, were found this year and referred to police, an explosive statement to the royal commission into child abuse has said.

Diocese professional standards director Michael Elliott has told the commission about an anonymous 2002 letter which said the ‘‘disappearance’’ of Kitchingman from a clergy list in 1968 and his subsequent move to the Grafton diocese ‘‘could today be construed as a type of cover-up’’.

‘‘This ‘disappearance’ was deliberate,’’ the  letter said.

In 1968 Kitchingman was convicted of an indecent assault on a male, although the commission heard on Monday ‘‘such an act is no longer a criminal offence’’.

ROYAL COMMISSION INTO INSTITUTIONALRESPONSES TO CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE Public Hearing (Day 16) 18 November 2013:

Reverend Kitchingman was convicted in 1968 of one

count of indecent assault of a male while he was a priest

in the Diocese of Newcastle. He was sentenced at the

Newcastle Court of Sessions, placed on a recognisance and

given a two-year good behaviour bond. The Bishop at the

time wrote a reference for him, which he sent to the judge.

The offence did not apparently concern his priestly duties

and today such an act is not a criminal offence.

Nonetheless, Reverend Kitchingman was removed from his

position in the Diocese of Newcastle and the bishop

assisted him to find a place in the Diocese of Grafton.

The then Bishop of Grafton accepted him in the knowledge of

the offence and undertook to place him with an archdeacon

who understood the situation. Reverend Kitchingman then

moved to Lismore in the Diocese of Grafton where he became

assistant priest.

By 1975, he was the chaplain of the North Coast

Children's Home and had conducted evening services there

for several years. He had also had frequent access to

children in the home, teaching them music, drama and

performance, as well as in his pastoral duties.

In 2001, Reverend Kitchingman was arrested and charged

with a number of counts of indecent assault on a 12 and

13-year-old boy who was under his care at the time. The

indecent assaults involved Reverend Kitchingman

masturbating his victim and performing oral sex on him on

numerous occasions over a 12-month period.

He was sentenced on 5 August 2002 to periods of

imprisonment of 9, 10, 11 and 12 months for the first four

offences, to be served concurrently, and a partially

concurrent sentence of two and a half years for the fifth

and most serious offence. His non-parole date meant he was

to serve a maximum of 18 months' imprisonment.

At the time of Reverend Kitchingman's conviction the

then Bishop of Newcastle, Roger Herft, now the Archbishop

of Perth, was informed by an anonymous source that the 1968

conviction had not been put before the District Court. The

evidence is likely to reveal that he raised the issue with

the Office of Public Prosecutions.

The primary question for this public hearing with

respect to Reverend Kitchingman is whether steps were taken

to discipline him in the Diocese of Newcastle and in

Grafton after the conviction.

Reverend Kitchingman was resident in the Diocese of

Newcastle up until his conviction and then after his period

of imprisonment. Evidence will be adduced that during the

period 2002 to 2007 his name appeared in the Anglican

Directory as a member of clergy.

ROYAL COMMISSION INTO INSTITUTIONALRESPONSES TO CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE Public Hearing (Day 23) 27 November 2013:

Q. Ms Cosenza has just received an email from your office

annexing, in relation to the national register, what

appears to be a national register report. I will just hand

up three copies for the Bench and one for Mr Drevikovsky.

The email we have received is from Ms Mary Phipps-Ellis.

Is that your executive assistant?

A. Yes, it is.

Q. You will see that this is a national register report

with respect to Reverend Kitchingman?

A. Yes.

Q. There is a note at the bottom there that says:

There is currently no information on the

National Register for a person with the

name ...

Do you see that?

A. Yes.

Q. The information we had from Bishop Stuart was dated

14 November.

A. That's right.

Q. So do I take it that it is correct to say that

notwithstanding that communication from Bishop Stuart,

there does not appear to be an entry in the register for

Allan Kitchingman?

A. That is technically a correct conclusion, but I don't

know that it addresses the substance of what Bishop Stuart

has said.

Dangerous decisions by Clarence Valley Council

A BAD MOVE BY CLARENCE VALEY COUNCIL

Letter to the editor published in The Daily Examiner 26 November 3013:

Dangerous Decision

FROM 1983 to 2003 a very large part of my life was dedicated to managing and growing tourism services within the Clarence Valley. It wasn't always easy as the Clarence River Tourist Association (CRTA) had a chequered history up until 1983 and there were five sceptical councils and hundreds of business operators to win over.

It was a long but exciting journey and with some wonderful staff, excellent CRTA management boards, highly co-operative councils and many highly supportive business operators we built one of the best tourism authorities in Australia.

The recent decision by Clarence Valley Council to terminate a current MOU and all future arrangements with the CRTA and then close the South Grafton visitor information centre within three years is alarming and fraught with danger for our local tourism industry, which has become our biggest local industry.

I cannot understand why the recently completed consultant's report was not released in draft form to allow general community input before adoption by the council. There are so many items in this report that are not accurate or not relevant to tourism in the Clarence Valley.

I cannot understand how councillors can adopt this report without so much as a question or a comment. I guess when you don't understand something it's hard to question a consultant's report that cost $30,000.

I can't understand how the council considered this matter without the input of the councillor with the most experience at the front line of the tourism industry, Karen Toms.

If this was the State Government she'd be Minister for Tourism. Within the CVC she feels she'll be in trouble if she offers guidance to other councillors and staff who have such little experience within the tourism industry.

One of the great tragedies of the consultant's report and CVC consideration of its content is that there is no appreciation of the history of many critical issues.

The first of these is CVC claiming the Commercial Rate Levy of $170,000 per annum to the CRTA is a council cost.

This levy was adopted by three councils in 1989/90 to replace CRTA business membership fees as a more effective way for local businesses to contribute to the running costs of the visitor centre at South Grafton.

If CRTA had not engineered this levy and the local business community not agreed to it, it would not exist today.

The second is the total disregard for the history of the purchase of the land and the construction of the South Grafton visitor information centre.

The CRTA selected the site, assisted with the land purchase from the NSW Government, and helped co-ordinate community and government contributions to the building costs.

Subsequently a section of this land was leased to McDonald's, but the rent paid by McDonald's is never credited to the CRTA while the costs for mowing and maintaining this front door to Grafton is inevitably allocated by CVC, in full, to the CRTA.

I have read the consultant's report and so much of it has little relevance to this area. There are great dangers in the direction CVC has taken. Of course there are ways to do some things better in future and save money - no-one should deny this.

It's not too late to revisit the council's decision and many people, including me, would be happy to work with CVC for the best possible outcomes.

Bill Day,
former CRTA manager
Yamba

AN EVEN WORSE MOVE IN PROGRESS

The Daily Examiner 26 November 2013:

Clarence Valley Council is having a workshop about its meeting structures, which could see committee meetings scrapped in favour of two ordinary meetings a month.

At present the council holds one day of two committee meetings. With five councillors on each committee, they discuss and vote on matters that are then brought to the ordinary meeting for a final decision.

In a report presented to councillors at the last ordinary meeting, general manager Scott Greensill wrote that there were a number of issues with the current format, including double handling and delayed decision making.

Before each committee meeting, the public is allowed to make deputations to the council.

"This 11th hour information can often cause problems as the person giving the deputation can introduce new information that neither councillors or officers have had time to appropriately consider," the report said.

"Many council reports are the result of months of work and the receipt of late information, often without time to allow for factual verification, is not conducive to good decision-making."

Deputations would therefore need to be held at a different time.

The council will workshop the issue before making a decision.

The list of people angry with Prime Minister Abbott's inability to govern wisely grows

On Monday 25 November 2013 the Federal Minister for Education Christopher Pyne, after just sixty-eight days in office, announced the Abbott Government’s plan to abandon the ‘Gonski’ national education funding reforms.

This was Laura Tingle writing on the subject in the Financial Review in the wake of Pyne’s press conference on 26 November:

Two months after being sworn in, the Abbott government is now at war with conservative states, the Senate and parents across the country. Not only is the politics of education calamitous, the government risks a High Court challenge to any attempt to walk away from education funding agreements with the states, being blocked in the Senate, and has even raised questions of sovereign risk...

 It now seems the Coalition neutralised a positive issue for Labor by lying about its intentions. This is the only possible conclusion you can draw from Christopher Pyne’s attempts to rewrite the history of what he said before the election at a fiery Canberra press conference on Tuesday.....

The federal government cannot surely be serious in its assertion that it can simply walk away from a binding agreement with another government.

Maybe Mr O’Farrell is right and this is but another example of the Coalition failing to come to grips with the difference between being an opposition and being a government.

NSW Premier Barry O’Farrell reported in The Sydney Morning Herald on 26 November:

"Can I just make this point to the federal Education Minister," he said. "In all my years in politics, I have worked out that it is best to have respectful discussions and consultations in private, not through the media.

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"And secondly, when you move into government, you have got to stop behaving like an opposition."

Mr O'Farrell said the schools funding issue had been poorly handled by the Abbott government. He wrote to Prime Minister Tony Abbott on Monday to express his concerns.

Mark Kenny writing in The Sydney Morning Herald on 26 November:

Christopher Pyne is too occupied with ripping down the education funding architecture of the past Labor government to spend a bit of extra time studying it first.

An offer by members of the Gonski panel to take him through the detail before he begins the demolition job has been rebuffed.

Of all portfolios, for a minister of state for education to appear so wilfully uninterested in further evidence is concerning at several levels.

At stake is no less than the optimum usage of multiple billions in taxpayer funds and, therefore, the future productivity of the country.

His refusal to allocate the few hours needed to satisfy himself – and be seen to be satisfying himself – of the facts, exposes an emerging pattern for this government: that its primary energies are more often directed at undoing reforms rather than making them.

Peter Van Onselen gives his opinion of Speaker Bronwyn Bishop

The Advertiser online 23 November 2013:

THE first fortnight of parliamentary sittings has proven one thing: Bronwyn Bishop is going to be a hopeless Speaker.

Not, of course, if you are a partisan who happens to enjoy the Coalition winning the day in Question Time, for Bishop ensures that happens on an all-too-regular basis.

She is hopeless for anyone who thinks a Speaker operating with even just a modicum of independence is good for our parliamentary process.

Every day of Question Time over the past two weeks she showed her partisan stripes. She was condescending to the Opposition, to Opposition Leader Bill Shorten and, particularly, to manager of Opposition business Tony Burke.

She let the manager of government business, Christopher Pyne, get away with behaviour even Prime Minister Tony Abbott thinks is unparliamentary when Pyne called Shorten "electricity Bill".

Bishop has only just started in the role, so the many slip-ups forgetting members' electorates and basic procedures can be forgiven. But the overtly partisan style she has adopted is unlikely to change.

In fact, it will probably harden as the political contest becomes tighter, once the Coalition starts making unpopular decisions.

I didn't have much time for the performances of her predecessors Harry Jenkins or Anna Burke during Labor's time in power but at least they tried to develop non-partisan approaches to rulings.

If one good thing came out of the minority Parliament that was it. Bishop can't even keep her snide remarks out of her partisan interventions. She has reverted to the well-worn precedent in this country (as opposed to in the UK, for example) of the Speaker simply being an extension of the government - a hack who might as well be sitting on the benches behind the Prime Minister.

If there is one shining light in Bishop's woeful performance as Speaker this past fortnight, it is that she is doing her relatively insignificant job rather than being a member of Abbott's cabinet.

When are organised religions finally going to freely admit the degree to which paedophiles and violent personalities number in the ranks of their clergy?

ABC News 27 August 2013:

The Anglican Church set up a national register in 2004 designed to provide a database for information if a member of clergy had a complaint or finding of abuse established against them.

The General Secretary of the Anglican Church Martin Drevikovsky told the Commission that right now there are hundreds of abuse investigations taking place nationwide.

"In the case of Sydney it was 600. In the case of Melbourne I know it was hundreds," he said.

He said the number of clergy to make it onto the register is expected to be far fewer when the review is completed in the coming months.

What ABC News is not saying is that in relation to abuse allegations the Anglican Church is understood to have a record of 122 clergy who are persons of concern and up to 209 more clergy who are under investigation in relation to emotional/physical/sexual abuse.

It would appear that some of these alleged offenders/members of the Anglican clergy were not reported to police until earlier this year – presumably only after the church realised that it could not avoid giving an accounting of it actions to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.

UPDATE

The Daily Examiner 27 November 2013:

Martin Drevikovsky, General Secretary, General Synod of the Anglican Church of Australia told the commission this morning that the register was incomplete.

He said that when the royal commission was announced, every diocese was given directions to "search for (complaint) files and review them to ensure all necessary steps had been taken and if not, to take immediate action".

As a result, Mr Drevikovksy said, "a large number of files have come to light".

He said an estimated 209 files were listed for review and expected that between 40 and 45 and "possibly more" names would be added to the persons of concern register.

Earlier, Grafton/Newcastle Diocese Professional Standards Director Michael Elliott said at least four names of concern from northern NSW region had not been added to the register including that of Allan Kitchingman, a former Lismore priest who was jailed in 2003 over the sexual assault of a teenage boy.

Mr Elliott also confirmed that along with the North Coast Children's Home files, there were between 10 and 15 files involving allegations against members of the Grafton Diocese which had yet to be reviewed.
The hearing continues

Hopefully Prime Minister Abbott will handle this Snowden revelation better than the last

The Age  24 November 2013:

Singapore and South Korea are playing key roles helping the United States and Australia tap undersea telecommunications links across Asia, according to top secret documents leaked by former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden. New details have also been revealed about the involvement of Australia and New Zealand in the interception of global satellite communications.

A top secret United States National Security Agency map shows that the US and its “Five Eyes” intelligence partners tap high speed fibre optic cables at 20 locations worldwide. The interception operation involves cooperation with local governments and telecommunications companies or else through “covert, clandestine” operations.

The undersea cable interception operations are part of a global web that in the words of another leaked NSA planning document enables the “Five Eyes” partners – the US, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada and New Zealand - to trace “anyone, anywhere, anytime” in what is described as “the golden age” signals intelligence.

The NSA map, published by Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad overnight, shows that the United States maintains a stranglehold on trans-Pacific communications channels with interception facilities on the West coast of the United States and at Hawaii and Guam, tapping all cable traffic across the Pacific Ocean as well as links between Australia and Japan.

The map confirms that Singapore, one of the world's most significant telecommunications hubs, is a key “third party” working with the “Five Eyes” intelligence partners.....

http://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2013/11/23/nsa-infected-50000-computer-networks-with-malicious-software/

The Guardian 27 November 2013:

Indonesia's president has said that his country will restore normal diplomatic relations with Australia if prime minister Tony Abbott signs up to a new bilateral code of ethics on intelligence-shariing.
But Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono also said that his government would summon Singaporean and South Korean diplomats in Jakarta over reports they had assisted Australian and US spying in the region.