Wicked Riches

- Victims’ compensation rewards liars and cheats.

What a story! Our media was agog at the recent NSW police announcement that they had exposed a $1.3 billion scheme for making fraudulent child sexual abuse claims. All the major media outlets excitedly reported on this huge “claim farming” scheme which recruited former young offenders, prison inmates and school students to file fake sex abuse compensation claims. At one prison, a third of the inmates had submitted claims.

The investigation revealed 4,000 faked claims, with the many law firms involved paying the claim farmers a benefit of about $2000 for each claim. One group of claims farmers apprehended in the police raid was found to have 100 applications ready to go – so they missed out on $30 million through the police intervention.

Big numbers, shocking scandal. And a mighty blow to the feminist narrative claiming false rape claims hardly ever happen. Here’s solid evidence that they are absolutely rampant, particularly when it comes to raking in money from our shockingly slack victims’ compensation schemes.

Across the country we have victims’ compensation schemes which require absolutely no proof to achieve a payout. All that is needed is a quick trip to a police station to make a statement. As I have reported many times, most police are no longer investigating sexual abuse claims. The complainant’s statement is taken as gospel. And then our government bodies pay out.

Even if the matter ends up in a court, the woman is often given the payout years before any decision is made about the validity of the claim. And get this, she has no obligation to return the money if the court decides the evidence supporting it doesn’t stack up.

But if the accused man is found guilty, he has to repay the government for the victim’s payout.

What about the victims of false claims?

The most extraordinary thing about the whole claim farming scandal is that not one journalist thought to ask questions about the men being falsely accused.

The only mention in the media coverage was a press release from the Independent Education Union (IEU) stating that “claim farming” was a substantial problem in nongovernment schools. In 2017 Australia held a Royal Commission into historical sexual abuse in institutions, where shocking abuse was found to have occurred in some school settings.

It appears this may have inspired the claim farmers to target schoolteachers amongst the other men victimized by the false claims, with the IEU stating that claim farming was leading to “an unprecedented increase in historical sexual abuse claims in recent years.”

“A false claim of sexual abuse can have a catastrophic impact on an innocent teacher, their family, their colleagues and the school community. Fake sexual abuse claims devastate innocent teachers,” said an IEU spokesperson. “No one should have their lives ruined by criminals seeking to make money with lies.”

Following this brave effort to speak up for falsely accused men, the IEU suddenly went skittish, refusing to give any details of how many teachers have been subject to such allegations in recent years, let alone whether any of these accusations led to criminal prosecutions. I hear from teachers facing false allegations, both current and historic, and sadly the historic cases are particularly likely to end up with convictions. It is very hard to defend against a 30-year-old allegation involving children, even when there is very little supportive evidence.

Five years ago I wrote about our National Redress Scheme (NRS) for victims of historical institutional sexual abuse, reporting that after two years of operation over $500 million had been paid to 5,920 of 10,000 applicants then processed.

Lawyers cheerfully explained to me that it was a piece of cake filling in the online NRS forms, with just a few paragraphs required to hop the low bar required for the average payments – then running at around $84,000. One lawyer explained that if your old Rugby coach had been determined to be an abuser, “… there’s nothing to stop you saying the same thing happened to you. Get the accused’s name right, dates rights, and you’ll just sail through.”

There was a book published at that time – Child Sexual Abuse Inquiries and the Catholic Church – which examined at length the question of false claims to the NRS. The author, Charles Sturt research fellow, Dr Virginia Miller, compared national inquiries in Ireland, the US and Australia, analysing findings, methodologies and conclusions. Walker concluded the Australian Royal Commission, in particular, undervalued the need to safeguard against false claims, noting that 77% of the complaints of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church were made after the creation of redress schemes in the late nineties.

It’s a racket and everyone knows it. Lawyers across the country will admit to knowing cases where people pocketed money for sexual abuse from these schemes where it later was proved they’d made the whole thing up.

We have huge schemes, both state and federal, all funded with taxpayers’ money, designed to acknowledge the pain of alleged victims, with absolutely no concern about the truth of their allegations. As always, it is fuelled by “believe all women” ideology which is weaponised against men. Our governments cheerfully kowtow to the feminist line with absolutely no concern for whom ends up paying.

Award confirms monstrous lie

We all pay these crooks and shysters. But there’s another group who pay in a different way. Men like Adrian Grainger whose estranged daughter will turn 18 in 2027. That’s when she will receive a $10k payment as a victim of sexual abuse by her father. This alleged abuse was cooked up by her mother during a family court battle, and since then determined by three family court judges to have been fabricated. Yet the daughter will still receive that money which has been kept in trust since the mother made the allegations in a claim in 2015.

“Adrian Grainger” isn’t his real name. That was the name given to this aggrieved father by the Family Court as he fought his way through 13 years of hearings. The mother’s allegations against the father were not substantiated by police nor relevant child protection authorities. They were also rejected by three Family Court Judges and the District Court. In April 2015 Family Court judge Peter Tree found the child was not at risk of harm in her father’s care. “This child cannot grow up with the belief that her father sexually abused her or presents an unacceptable risk of sexual harm to her,” he said. “The evidence simply does not reasonably support such a conclusion.”

Some years later another judge, Michael Baumann found that Mr Granger was a “thoroughly decent human being” and that the child was not at “any risk of physical, sexual or emotional harm in the father’s care.”

Yet Baumann thought the then nine-year-old child’s negative views of her father had become so entrenched that it was not possible to move the child to her father’s care. The mother was awarded sole parental responsibility.

Ever since this woman applied for victims’ compensation for her daughter - without the father knowing – she’s been waving around the compensation payment as ‘evidence’ that Grainger abused his daughter.

Grainger, who is soon to qualify as a lawyer, decided to launch legal action asking the NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal (NCAT) set aside the decision to award his daughter the compensation on the grounds that she “was not a victim of actual abuse by her father and suffered no injury caused by him.”

The Tribunal determined he did not have standing to make the appeal because he wasn’t the original applicant for the award. Their decision included a telling statement that parliament had deliberately designed the scheme “to be a one-way scheme where in the first instance claimants obtain evidence to support their claims and in New South Wales that evidence is not tested against the accused or the convicted perpetrator.”

Too right it is one way! It is set up to reward liars, cheats and vindictive parents… anyone who claims to be an alleged victim of sexual assault. Even if the result is that a poor child is now to be told by the state that her father is a child abuser.

Grianger has been mounting a mighty campaign to stop this happening, corresponding with Victim Services, the Attorney General, the police, the Ombudsman…all to no avail.

As part of his lobbying, Grainger recruited assistance from Dr Mandy Matthewson, a clinical psychologist and senior lecturer at University of Tasmania. She provided evidence that the consequences to a child who believes they have been abused when they have not, are just as serious and damaging as the consequences of being abused. “These consequences in adulthood include depression, anxiety, trauma responses, poor self-esteem, feelings of guilt and shame, and increased alcohol and substance abuse. Adults who believe they were abused during childhood when they were not develop a confused self-perception, experience deep insecurity and fail to develop trusting relationships with others,” Matthewson wrote.

Mathewson mentioned 2021 research from Nola Webb and associates showing 74% of child sexual abuse allegations made in the Family Court of Australia between 2012 and 2019 were unsubstantiated. Out of these 74% of cases, 49% were genuinely believed by the parent making the allegation, but their belief was mistaken. 23% of these unsubstantiated allegations were deliberately misleading allegations.

Grainger is very clear about why he continues to fight against the compensation being awarded. “The award, if my daughter should receive it, will reinforce in her mind the false narrative of the mother that I abused her as a child. That, in itself, is psychological abuse of a child, and it is being facilitated by the NSW government.”

Such cases are to be found across Australia. It is shocking that not only are these women receiving no punishment for making damaging false abuse allegations but they get to keep their ill-gotten gains, compensation paid by our governments for events that never happened.

A dismal postscript to this story is Grainger’s ex-wife has recently relocated overseas with the child. She originally left Australia with the child covertly during Covid and then decided to remain there permanently. A Hague Convention case ensued, and she was ordered to return the child to Australia – an order she defied a number of times. In 2022 the mother retrospectively applied to the Australian Family Court for permission to relocate overseas with the child, which was granted last year. So, the mother was given permission to return to the UK, having successfully alienated the child from Grainger after allowing no contact for almost a decade.

To take the cake, a journalist called “Amanda Gearing” recently posted the following item about Grainger’s case on LinkedIn

Our world is full of these malicious loony tunes happy to target innocent men. And a receptive audience keen to believe them.