Bishop John Harrower said the elite Hobart school should have offered a more compassionate reaction to a man known as AOA who complained of being abused in 1993.

"I personally would have wished that the school had have given an apology, a fulsome apology," he told the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.

Bishop Harrower choked back tears as he talked about his experience in dealing with victims of abuse.

AOA was abused by former headmaster David Lawrence in the 1960s, crimes for which the school apologised last month after years of refusing to do so.

In a 2002 letter, Hutchins' then headmaster William Toppin told AOA that the school's board "cannot now be held accountable for events that occurred more than a generation ago".

Bishop Harrower said he wanted the school to take a different approach.

"It's one of the things I would commend to be encouraging of institutions to look beyond our institutional survival and our fear of litigation - that someone's going to take us to the cleaners - to be concerned for one another as human beings," he said.

Mr Toppin told the commission that AOA's complaint should have been handled better, but said it was an issue for the board, and not the headmaster.

"This matter was not under my active jurisdiction in my time at Hutchins," he said.

Mr Toppin said the school was worried about how the complaint would be treated by the Mercury if it went public, accusing the newspaper of never letting facts interfere with a good story.

"[Hutchins] did not have and it has never had fair, unbiased reporting from the Mercury," he said.

In 1999, lawyer Michael O'Farrell told the school not to communicate with AOA at all as it would allow him to "grind his axe".

"I expect that continued correspondence will simply exacerbate the situation and provide Mr AOA with a tool by which to keep grinding," Mr O'Farrell, who is now the state's solicitor-general, wrote.