1
THE PRESIDENT’S ADDRESS
to the second session of the
52nd Synod of the Diocese of Melbourne
Tuesday 17 October 2017
TheMost Reverend Dr Philip Freier
Archbishop of Melbourne
I first acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nations, the traditional owners of this land on which we meet, and pay my respects to their elders past and present.
Welcome to this second session of the 52nd Synod of the Diocese of Melbourne.
And I commence with these words of prayer in the Woi Wurrung language that were first sung as a hymn at the Merri Creek School over 150 years ago.
Pundgul Marman, bar marnameek
Nerrembee borun, yellenwa nulworthen bopup Koolinner
‘O God, Lord God bless your Aboriginal people always’
I’m glad that we are meeting in the year of the 170th anniversary of the foundation of the diocese.Charles Perry, the first Bishop of Melbourne was consecrated in Westminster Abbey on 29 June 1847. With the passing of only nine years Perry presided over the first Church Assembly on 6 October 1856. Our synod is a successor to that first meeting. I wonder what he would have made of our Synod agenda with 17 bills for legislation and 5 days of potential sitting time? What would he have made of this great building in which we meet tonight? Hemust surely have struggled to imagine St Paul’s Cathedral being built only 38 years after his arrival in Melbourne during the time of his successor James Moorhouse.
GENERAL SYNOD
A significant part of our Synod legislative agenda arises directly from the historic decisions taken at the 17th General Synod of the Anglican Church of Australia that met in Maroochydore, Queensland over the period 3 - 8 September 2017. General Synod had a clear focus on legislation in the areas of Child Safety Standards, Redress and Episcopal Standards. Given that the General Synod only concluded one month ago, it has been a herculean task for all involved in bringing the legislation for us to adopt these General Synod measures. Thank you to Michael Shand, Ian Gibson and Ken Spackman along with those who have supported their work in making it possible for ours to be amongst the first synods to legislate for these important reforms.
It will become clear as we deal with the legislation in detail but our work consists in adopting the General Synod measures and in some cases modifying existing diocesan legislation to harmonise it with the arrangements agreed at General Synod. Additionally our business paper has separate but important amendments that improve our own legislation, especially as it concerns parish governance and church planting.
The decisions made at the General Synod were historic and unprecedented in the high level of support they achieved. General Synod was held as the work of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse draws to a conclusion.The final report is scheduled to be submitted to the Governor General on 15 December this year. One of the commissioners, Mr Robert Fitzgerald AM, addressed the General Synod both as a commissioner and as a person of faith. He did that in a persuasive and informative way. I expect that his personal involvement assisted the members of the Synod to make the historic and important decisions they did.
At the General Synod I spoke about the importance of Lament as a rich part of our theological tradition and its importance in helping us make a proper response to the painful story of failure to protect children that has been exposed in the Royal Commission. Creating space for lamentation is part of our diocese’s third strategic direction, about being open to the Holy Spirit in transforming lives to be mature in Christ.
This is what I said at the General Synod:
Lamentation is a proper response to the pain and shame of our failures. Whether in Jeremiah, Lamentations, Job or the Book of Psalms a similar emotional and devotional sequence from predicament to hope is evidenced. Central to Biblical lamentation is the conviction that God is trustworthy and faithful, showing mercy in the deliverance of Israel from oppression and is the God who shows the divine purpose in human history. True to the self-revealing character of God, God is true to his word, a word that has all the power necessary to accomplish God’s promise. The passion narrative gathers up, in the words of our Saviour, the whole salvation history of Israel as a new beginning is inaugurated for the whole creation.
Developing the theological tradition of lament will give us a different perspective to the one that arises from the conventional position of our societal values. For many in cultures like ours, in what we generalise as the ‘Western world’, radical personal autonomy is highly valued. This trends towards high individualism and low commitment to a responsibility for things that go beyond the immediate and the personal. It is no wonder that confidence in many aspects of how we organise society, from politics to institutions, are at an all-time low. Without a sense of our involvement in something bigger, and the responsibilities that this participation carries, assumed virtues like the common good seem alien or antiquated. Lament takes us from this restricted sense of self to a larger one that is framed by the great moments of salvation history; creation, redemption and the consummation of all things in Christ.
Lamentation, rightly understood, brings us to the place where we own the responsibility of the Church for all of our history, the true history, in both its positive and negative impacts. It is in this way, by truth telling and standing under the judgement of God, that we learn together and can find ways of still celebrating the good as we continue to right the harm of the wrong. St John’s Gospel is very clear about the liberating power of truth – in fact John 8.32 “The truth will set you free”, is the motto of the Anglican Communion. On the way we have the blessing of knowing the encouragement of the good and the beautiful signs of that future, however, these will not be seen without an acknowledgement and restoration of the painful history of failure that has been the focus of the Royal Commission’s work.
In this synod address I will return to the idea of common good in world increasingly shaped by personal autonomy a little later.
Since we last met, Archbishop in Council has implemented an Interim Redress Scheme for the Diocese, designed to provide a simple and timely pathway for survivors of historic childhood sexual abuse. This scheme, now managed on our behalf by Kooyoora, the independent professional standards company, is increasingly becoming the mechanism by which survivors first engage with the Church to have their stories heard. I am pleased that we have mechanisms in place to allow those who have suffered abuse within the Church context to come forward, acknowledging that this is a deeply personal journey for them.Not all survivors yet feel able to do so.
I pay tribute to and thank the Royal Commissioners for their gracious and careful handling of these painful matters over more than four years. I have appreciated the opportunity to engage with the Royal Commission and to learn from its interim findings as to how our processes can be improved. Their legacy will be one of enabling a national conversation,shining a light that has penetrated a dark and shameful past. While this is difficult for all individuals and institutions to confront, we must do so, seeking forgiveness and lamenting the impact that has historically occurred in our name.
As you consider the legislative agenda for this Synod you will see that there is much legislation and that is the reasonfor us gathering a day earlier than usual.Even with this big agenda we are not yet at the end of the change process. This means that sometimes the call for clarity of processes and procedures cannot be as easily answered as each of us might like. The legislation for consideration from tomorrow night is significant. The protection of children within the national Church is vital and urgent. The range of measures to be adopted may appear daunting but I hope with careful explanation, members of Synod will understand why they are a necessary and essential next step.
The opportunity of participating in the Commonwealth Redress Scheme is also under active consideration and is the subject of discussion with the Anglican Church nationally as well as with other Christian Churches in Victoria and the Victorian State Government. The Royal Commission’s report on Redress and Civil Litigation has established a benchmark for good practice that is picked up in the proposed Commonwealth legislation for a National Redress Scheme. It has also permitted us to commence a systematic analysis of the likely future liability for redressin respect to child sexual abuseand to apply this information to our future financial modelling. Our auditors have already required that a$6.8million dollarinterimprovision be made in our accounts. The Melbourne Anglican Diocesan Corporation, the body charged with administrative oversight of Professional Standards and Redress commissioneda further, more complete, actuarial study that is just to handin draft form. This actuarial study has indicated that the interim provision of $6.8m needs to be more than doubledto an estimated provision of between $14 and $21 million. Historically we have covered redress payments, and out of budget professional standards administration, from our operating budget and this is one of the reasons, as these costs have increased, why our recent annual budgets have been under pressure. The actuarial study indicates it is possible, for several peak years in the near future, that our costs for redress payments and associated administration could reach $2m annually. Clearly this is an amount that is greatly in excess of what can be managed out of an operational budget of $13m and will need either the sale of property or loan funds or a combination of both to meet this responsibility. This is a significant challenge for our future budgeting and is something that we will look to the Archbishop in Council to resolve in the formulation of the budget that will be reported at the 2018 Synodand in the development of longer term financial plans.
It is also important for us as the Synod to grapple with the impact of the ‘new normal’ level of professional standards administration and compliance. The period from 2007 to 2012 saw a relatively stable cost structure for Professional Standards operational management in the order of $250,000 per annum. This includes response to complaints, preparation of matters to go before the Professional Standards Committee, Board and Review Board along with professional standards training and the provision of general advice. From 2013 to the present time this figure has doubled and in some years more than doubled. While some of this increased cost is attributable to the cost of preparing information required by the Royal Commission and some because of a higher level of complaints of historical abuse it seems likely that the new baseline for professional standards administrative costs will exceed $600,00 per annumforthe foreseeable future.
Putting both of these together we face the need to provisionfor very significant redress payments that could reach an annual figure of $2m and ongoing operational costs that exceed$0.6mannually. For reasons that will become clear as I continue this address there are other important demands on our capital base, effectively the property owned by the Melbourne Anglican Trust Corporation and it seems undesirable to me that these costs should simply be met byjustselling property and spending the proceeds of sale. In my opinion the options open to Archbishop in Council will probably need to includeconsideration of a levy oradditional charge to parish assessments at least over the peak years of the redress liability as determined bytheactuarial studies. This won’t be a decision that is taken lightly but it would be wrong for us to assume that the situation I have described can just be absorbed into our budget without impact. In fact the impact on budget is very significant. I have no doubt that we need to increase our amount of financial endowment or, in other words the proportion of our capital base that is producinggreater financial returns, to meet these and other important purposes. This will involve the sale of property where the proceeds are reinvested to return a yield able to fund the future financial demands we expect to face.
The State of Victoria was responsible for initiating Australia's most comprehensive investigation into domestic violence through the RoyalCommission into Family Violence that reported in March 2016. I was very pleased that Mr Tony Nicholson, the Executive Director of the Brotherhood of Saint Laurence served as one of the commissioners. Submissions were made on behalf of the Diocese of Melbourne by the Social Responsibilities Committee through the Think Prevent program that has been associated with the SRC since 2011 and now located in Parish Partnerships. It is also important to note that the Think Prevent program has engaged 26% of our parishes insome form of Think Prevent work, including33 parishesparticipatingin the Bystander Intervention Workshop. Additionally advice was received in September that a formal review of the Think Prevent program is being undertaken by the University of Melbourne in a project funded by the Victorian Minister for Multicultural Affairs. This evaluation will hopefully establish the evidential basis of this work and encourage its wider application. It is also important to note that the General Synod endorsed an apology for Domestic Violence and particularly, 'for those times our teaching and pastoral care has failed adequately to support victims and call perpetrators to account.’ Further approval was given for scoping a longitudinal study into the nature and prevalence of family violence within the Australian Anglican Church population.
I contrasted earlier the idea of the common good and personal autonomy. At their extreme the full development of one can easily be seen to diminish the other. Some members of synod will recall UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s view that ‘There is no such thing as society: there are individual men and women, and there are families.’ At the other end is the view of Karl Marx that ‘Society does not consist of individuals but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.’ At the very least we have within our intellectual history contending ideas about the relationship of the individual and the society within which each person lives. At least two public policy questions are unresolved in our society at present, same sex marriage and euthanasia. It is simplistic to reduce the arguments for and against to slogans but ‘freedom of choice’ and ‘what is good for society’ have emerged as themes during this past year. It may be relevant as well that in the long and drawn out processes to consider same sex marriage that the party political means of determining public policy have been suspended. This could only have the consequence, whether contrived or unexpected I do not know, of placing more burden on community level groups and individuals to debate the pros and cons. Such participants do not have the protections enjoyed by parliamentary representatives and it is not surprising that an ugly side of pushing the debate down into the community has emerged. One example that is close to home is the graffiti attack on our parish church in Glen Waverley this past weekend where vile threats and offensive messages were sprayed on the outside wall of the church. The examples of harm at a community level are many.
You know that I supported the earlier Plebiscite proposal to resolve the same sex marriage debate. I took this position on the basis that it had been the policy taken to the election by the government and would have had the advantage of being decisive and authoritative. This proposal was lost in the political processes of the federal parliament and we have ended up with a less authoritative opinion poll which seems to be now supported by all sides of politics. At some point our elected leaders have to embrace their responsibility and have a parliamentary debate on same sex marriage. It will be the worst of all worlds if once the opinion poll results are announced that we descend into a debate about the legitimacy of the poll, the proportion of the electorate who returned their forms and so on.
We have wasted valuable time that could have been spent on real community consultation about the form of the legislative changes to be debated. There are proper concerns to ensure that the balance of rights which includes the right to religious freedom is ensured in any bill for change that comes before the Parliament.
There is probably nothing else that is more personal and immediate than our own lives. It is hardly surprising that questions around the end of life elicit strong responses. As you will be aware I have not supported the proposals before the Victorian Parliament to legislate for euthanasia. I know that people have experienced intense personal trauma in witnessing the protracted death of a loved one, I have sat with many people including members of my own family at this very vulnerable time and know the experience of powerlessness that this time evokes. I know too that for others I have spoken too this has been a spiritually meaningful time where the liminal space between life and death has been a treasured opportunity for prayer and deeper trust in God.