ACT Stand Up For Survivors
Title: The ACT has made a historic decision. What about survivors elsewhere?
Author: Louise Milligan
Publisher: ABC News
Date: 31Oct2025
“I think it’s a good day, but let me put it this way: if this was a trench in Ukraine, we’ve put a foot forward in the right direction, but we’ve got to go back to our trench and fight another day. We just need to finish this.”
The war that survivors like Michael Franco have been fighting does not have any guns or bombs — its weapons are legal technicalities devised by fancy law firms employed by wealthy institutions, and its victims are exhausted adults who were abused by people they trusted when they were little kids: men of god, scout masters, sporting coaches.
The first victory in this war is the passing in the ACT parliament on Thursday of legislation which will overturn the High Court’s decision in Bird v DP, which found that the Catholic Church’s Diocese of Ballarat could not be sued for vicarious liability for the actions of one of its priests.
The priest, the logic went, was a volunteer, effectively employed by God and not the church and therefore the church could not be responsible for harms allegedly perpetrated by him on a five-year-old boy.
That decision devastated the survivor community around Australia and threw into doubt hundreds of cases against institutions by victims of abuse.
For Full Article Visit:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10-31/act-bird-defence-survivors-canberra-nsw/105939314