Today belongs to the survivors, to those remarkable people sitting in the Distinguished Visitors Gallery and to those who simply could not or chose not to be here today. This apology belongs to all of you. It is impossible not to reflect on the enormity of what you had to endure, not just as children but also as adults. The abuse stole your childhood but the pursuit of justice took decades of your adult lives. You should never have had to become investigators of the crimes that were committed against you in the past. You should never have had to become campaigners for the dignity that should have been afforded to you from the moment you stepped forward. You should never have had to persuade the State to investigate the crimes that were committed against you by the evil paedophile, Bill Kenneally. That was the State's responsibility; it was not yours. I have sat through and watched many State apologies from this Chamber and afar. Every commission of inquiry and every report into institutional failure begin with the same uncomfortable truth: someone, oftentimes many people, in the architecture of this State knew enough to act and chose not to. The failures in this case were not inevitable. The courage of children brought the opportunity to intervene, the opportunity to investigate and the opportunity to protect other children. Those opportunities were purposely discarded and the wrongs you suffered at the hands of an evil man were compounded by the complicity of this State in the indifference to his crimes. The greatest failure revealed by this report is that too often institutions appeared more concerned with protecting the authority of this vile person than with protecting children. I have often spoken in this House about restorative justice, but the absolute antithesis of restorative justice is the re-traumatisation of victims. Every time survivors had to tell their story again, every delay you have experienced, every door that was closed upon you and every year spent fighting for an investigation that should have happened decades earlier was not justice; it was the opposite of it. It was another injury inflicted upon you. Today's apology is the State's acknowledgement that when you needed it most, it failed you. I note some survivors have said today's apology should not be the only one. Their voices deserve to be heard because if today teaches us anything, it is that when survivors tell us what justice looks like, our first instinct must be to listen and act. The measure of today will not be in the words spoken in this Chamber; it will be in whether another child, another family or another survivor receives a different response from the institutions of this State when they come forward to tell their story. To every survivor I say, "Thank you". You carried the burden of truth while institutions and individuals within this State chose to burden themselves with protecting the reputation of a vile paedophile instead. History will remember which burden required the greater courage. Thank you to all of you.

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