NICK:

So I went to Deloraine midway through last year and Deloraine is a beautiful little town in the Meander Valley set on a river. When you walk around Deloraine, there’s arts and crafts shops and up and down the street there are cafes, it’s a generally lovely place.

But I know that there is a kind of darker underbelly.

You know it's got an incredibly low literacy rate, the town it’s around 40%.

And the main employers are the youth detention centre and Extractus Bioscience that supplies around half of the world’s legal opiates, morphine, codeine, oxycodone etc.

It’s like two towns in one really, the one you see from the outside and the one you know that’s more the realistic, difficult place to live and to grow up.

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ANGE:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ange McCormack. This is 7am.

Nick Feik spent 8 months looking into one of the worst institutional failures to protect children from sexual abuse this country has ever seen.

It took him to the Tasmanian town of Deloraine and to Ashley Youth Detention Centre, where he found a culture of violence, child sexual abuse, coverups, blame-shifting, and a system incapable of rooting out abusers.

Today, contributor to The Monthly Nick Feik, on the child sexual abuse scandal that should be a national priority.

It’s Wednesday, February 7.

And a warning this episode discusses child sexual abuse and suicide.

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ANGE:

Nick, you've been looking into this youth detention facility in Tasmania, Ashley Youth Detention centre. And you've been looking at some of the horrific events that have taken place there. To begin with, can you tell me about Ashley, about who gets sent there and what kind of reputation it has?

NICK:

Sure. So Ashley Youth Detention Centre used to be a boy's home for decades. And in the early 2000s, it became the youth detention centre. It's really the only detention centre in Tasmania. So if you get in trouble as a kid, if you're 10 to 18, and you're going to be detained, it'll be in Ashley.

People on the mainland don't really know much about Ashley. You don't hear a lot about it. But everything we do know about it is bad.

You know, to give you an example, at the recent commission of inquiry into the Tasmanian government's responses to child sexual abuse in institutional settings. They read out a statement by a young woman called Erin. Erin was 14 years old when she first went into Ashley, and she was there because she had nowhere else to go. Basically, her parents didn't want her. The shelters were too full. She'd stolen a packet of Doritos because she was hungry.

And she got sent straight to Ashley, left in a room by herself with about ten other male detainees, she was the only girl in there at the time. Among all the boys and just her.

There was no worker supervising. Guards would leave her unattended.

And she was sexually assaulted. She went to Ashley several times, and she was always being assaulted.

To deal with her sexual assaults the staff put her on the pill. They wouldn't give her sanitary products. Her complaint to authorities was ignored. And her time there has affected her life forever.

The terrible thing about her story is that it's not an unusual one. This happened time and time again to people. Every single witness to the inquiry gave similar stories of abuse, as the staff that just didn't care for them, no interest in, in helping them, really. They were treated as prisoners, not troubled youths.

And it's just impossible to do justice to the scope and the horror there. For all of them, it's just a constant threat of violence and, sexualised strip searches, medication, food bedding was withheld, solitary confinement imposed as sort of a punishment.

It just goes on and on. It was the normalisation of the most incredible brutality.

ANGE:

Just hearing that story of Erin is so harrowing and horrifying, but it's even more appalling to know that her story was just one of many. To think that this is happening at any kind of scale is really troubling. How did this all begin to be uncovered, and how did you personally find out about this story?

NICK:

I think you've done a story about Kieran Pender in his whistleblower project before.

ANGE:

We have. Yeah.

NICK:

Yeah. So, I was writing a story about the whistleblower project before it had started. And he said “you should speak to this woman. Her name's Alicia. I won't tell you anything more.” So I called her up one day, knowing absolutely nothing about the story, and I started speaking to her. And her story is incredible.

So she began working there in 2019. Was totally appalled by what she'd seen. She was sending reports up the chain. No one was doing anything.

Audio excerpt – Nick Feik:

“Would any of the other kids who have been caught out recently? Like confirm that.”

Audio excerpt – Alicia:

“Yeah, I reckon. I said to him…”

NICK:

And I was just flummoxed that this could be happening in Australia. and in fact, everything she told me was, was just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the abuse that was happening in Ashley.

Audio excerpt – Alicia:

“They did it to everyone, like when they were very first admitted. And then over and over and over again.”

Audio excerpt – Nick Feik:

“Wow. Like when they're strip searching them?”

Audio excerpt – Alysha:

“Yeah. And abusing them.”

NICK:

But she found that she was really the only person on the staff who'd put her head up above the parapet.

And In the case of Alicia's whistleblowing, she realised that if she didn't say something, no one would, and it would continue forever.

So she felt an obligation, she had promised kids that she would try and help. For years. She tried to blow the whistle, and no one really listened for, for a couple of years, until eventually the government was sort of pushed into this commission of inquiry.

Audio excerpt – Nick McKenzie:

“We now know that teens and children were subjected to abuse for decades at the Ashley Youth Detention Centre and some staff were well aware of it.”

Audio excerpt – ABC News Reporter:

“Under mountain pressure the state government announced a commission of inquiry - Tasmania’s version of a Royal Commission.”

NICK:

And it turned out that this is just part of a systemic problem, as in Ashley is the worst example. But across northern Tasmania and then in fact, all over Tasmania, there were these instances of systemic failure. So this has been going on for decades, people in the mainland just don’t seem to know about this stuff.

ANGE:

After the break, why is Ashley Youth Detention Centre still open?

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Audio excerpt – Marcia Neave:

“Good morning everybody. My name is Marcia Neave, and I'm the president of the Commission of Inquiry into the Tasmanian Government's responses to child sexual abuse in institutional settings.”

ANGE:

So Nick, Alicia’s whistleblowing eventually led to a commission of inquiry being established and reported back last year. It was partly looking at Ashley Youth Detention Centre, but also other institutions in the state. Obviously a commission of inquiry like that is really extensive and we would have heard so much evidence from it. But as someone who has watched this closely, what stood out from that report and, and those hearings that happened last year?

NICK:

So what stood out the most was the scale of the abuse. The cover ups were across departments, that were across authorities, that were across the police, the working with children's office. There were failures across the integrity Commission, failures across the health department, failures across in every single systemic context you could think of. These systems had failed.

Audio excerpt – Marcia Neave:

“Has the Tasmanian government's response to allegations and incidents of child sexual abuse in institutions since 2000 been adequate? The answer is too often no.”

NICK:

And it wasn't just in relation to youth detention, it was in relation to schools and hospitals and out-of-home care, foster care, and the systemic nature of how these things had been covered up was just striking.

Audio excerpt – Marcia Neave:

“Too often, institutions did not manage active risks to children and young people effectively. Nor extend adequate care to children and young people when they disclosed abuse.”

NICK:

There’s a whole kind of legal apparatus around these things. For example, if you're an employee at the Ashley Youth Detention Centre and someone makes a complaint about you, no one will take that complaint seriously unless there's a written statement by the victim. The victim is likely to be a 12 year old kid who's terrified of the people that he's supposed to be making a complaint about. These things never get made. The complaints never get taken seriously.

The the detention centre has a memorandum of understanding with the local police that Ashley will be the lead agency on investigations into crimes and episodes that happen within Ashley Detention Centre.

You can imagine that things don't always get investigated like they should.

And there was so much hope about the commission of inquiry because there was a 3000 page report, you know, documenting the most horrific sort of abuse. You would think that it would shake everything up for good.

But in some ways, the most shocking thing, more shocking even than the evidence itself, was that not a single person has been prosecuted as a result of the commission of inquiry. There was there was a single misconduct finding from all of the thousands of cases that led to nothing. Not a single person in the state service has been fired as a result of what came out, so nothing has happened since.

And it took a lot of digging to go back through the legislation and to look at the conditions of this inquiry to uncover what had happened. And essentially, the act that governs the commission of inquiry said that evidence given by a person before the commission is not admissible in subsequent legal proceedings.

So all of the evidence that was given at the commission was excluded from future proceedings. So there's a class action by 150 odd kids against the government that's in chain at the moment. They can't use the evidence that was presented to the commission of inquiry.

ANGE:

Right. So someone like Erin’s story, who, as we discussed, was sexually assaulted while in Ashley Youth Detention cannot...

NICK:

That story needs to be reinvestigated entirely by the police.

ANGE:

...Before she can pursue any legal action because she did the right thing by giving evidence at this commission of inquiry.

NICK:

Correct.

ANGE:

She's kind of in doing so has meant that her further legal avenues have been reduced?

NICK:

Correct. I mean, it sounds completely far fetched. But to make it safe for people to to present and bear witness at the commission of inquiry. The, the legislation governing it said, don't worry, there won't be any reprisals against you if you speak out in this. This is a safe space.

But in fact, that was turned around to be used to protect enablers and perpetrators more than it was a whistleblowers.

The victim survivors that I know… some of them are homeless, some of them can’t work, most of them can’t work full time. They sat through months of hearings, they read all the details of these cases and they come out the end and no heads rolled, nothing has been done?

The state government’s proven that it's not really capable of reforming itself.

ANGE:

So the commission of inquiry, despite having many flaws and as we've just talked about. It did have a pretty clear recommendation that Ashley Youth Detention Centre should be urgently closed. That report was published in September last year. What's happened since and why is it still up and running?

NICK:

Well, the date that Ashley is scheduled to close seems to go further out by the month, so now it's been pushed out to 2026 but as recently as two months ago, they were locking kids down 23 hours a day in Ashley.

There was a kid that got out after the commission of inquiry had finished, who had tried to commit suicide in Ashley. This is a kid that was younger than 15. The centre hadn't even told his parents.

ANGE:

About his suicide attempt.

NICK:

About his suicide attempts. They only found out when he got out. These sorts of things are still happening. It's completely ludicrous that this place still operates the way that it does.

ANGE:

We've been mostly talking about the Ashley Detention Centre, but it's far from the only example of institutional abuse and cover up of children in Tasmania. What can we say about the scale of the abuse and how poorly Tasmania has reckoned with child sexual abuse in its state?

NICK:

I mean. That's a very difficult and interesting question. I mean, I think if this was happening elsewhere, if it was in New South Wales or Victoria, we would never hear the last of it. For some reason it's been out of mind, out of sight.

The Tasmanian government and the bureaucracy. It's a very small world. Everyone knows each other. Everyone you know has a relative who works in some related department. For years there's just been a Tasmanian way of doing things. And I think it's become increasingly obvious that this is a very dangerous way of doing things, especially for children.

Every system that they have in Tasmania has failed. The police have failed on child sexual abuse. The Working with Children's office failed for years. There were people working with children who had working with children's checks that shouldn't have. You have an integrity commission that's completely toothless. It's laughable. So, you know, I think. It needs to change, something fundamental needs to change.

ANGE:

Nick, thanks so much for sharing your story and for your time today.

NICK:

Thanks very much, Ange.

ANGE:

You can read Nick Feik’s essay, The Rotten Core, in the current issue of The Monthly, which is on newsstands now, or you can read it for free, online at themonthly.com.au, where the paywall for the article has been lifted. This episode only shines a light on some of Nick’s reporting, his full essay paints I think an even more shocking picture of what has been happening in Tasmania. It’s harrowing, but I do think it's an essential reading.

If you or anyone you know needs mental health support, you can call Lifeline on 13 11 14.

For support related to child sexual abuse, you can call Bravehearts on 1800 272 831.

Children and young people up to 25 can seek help via the Kids Helpline on 1800 55 1800.

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ANGE:

Also in the news today,

King Charles’ planned visit to Australia in October this year, his first visit as Monarch, is in doubt following the announcement of his cancer diagnosis.

On Tuesday, Buckingham Palace revealed that King Charles would be stepping away from public duties while he undergoes cancer treatment.

And

The RBA has left interest rates unchanged, at 4.35 per cent, in its first decision of 2024.

I’m Ange McCormack. This is 7am. We’ll be back again tomorrow looking at the new era of the RBA, and the governor’s first press conference after that rate decision was made yesterday.

Thanks so much for listening.

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