FORMER Anglicare Tasmania director Phillip Aspinall ignored allegations of sexual abuse by an Anglican priest, a royal commission has heard.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse heard Bishop Aspinall, now the Archbishop of Brisbane, ignored a man, identified as BYF, when he told him he had been sexually assaulted by Anglican priest Garth Hawkins.
BYF said he was sleeping on the loungeroom floor with a number of other people in the rectory where Hawkins lived in 1981 when Hawkins said he had a big bed and someone could share it.
The inquiry heard Archbishop Aspinall "volunteered" BYF, then aged 18, to sleep in the bed with Hawkins.
BYF told the inquiry Archbishop Aspinall, a fellow member of Youth Synod, was aged in his 20s at the time.
He said he had previously told Archbishop Aspinall he felt Hawkins had made sexual advances towards him.
The inquiry heard BYF reluctantly slept in the bed, where he was sexually assaulted by Hawkins.
"I couldn't believe it after I had told Aspinall of my concerns, that he would deliberately send me to Hawkins' bed," he said.
BYF said he told Archbishop Aspinall in 1982 that he had been sexually abused by Hawkins, but said Archbishop Aspinall had dismissed and ignored his concerns.
In 2004, Hawkins was convicted of sex offences against six boys, including BYF, in 2003, and convicted of a further sex offence against a different boy in 2004.
In her opening address, counsel assisting the royal commission, Naomi Sharp, said Archbishop Aspinall had a different recollection of events to BYF.
Under questioning from Archbishop Aspinall's lawyer, Peter Davis, BYF said Archbishop Aspinall had denied he knew about the abuse when he contacted the church to report the abuse in 2002.
Responding to Mr Davis' suggestions it was someone other than Archbishop Aspinall who had "volunteered" him to sleep in Hawkins' bed, BYF said the memory was "seared into his brain".
"That's why I was abused, because of Archbishop Aspinall," BYF said.
"He put me in that bed."
Archbishop Aspinall is expected to give evidence to the inquiry, which will examine the response of the Anglican Dioceses of Tasmania, Adelaide, Brisbane and Sydney and the Church of England Boys Society to allegations of child sexual abuse perpetrated by those involved in or associated with CEBS.
The inquiry heard BYF, a former junior leader of the Anglican Church affiliated CEBS, was also abused at the hands of another paedophile priest, Louis Daniels.
BYF stayed at Daniels' house after a Youth Synod meeting in 1980 when the abuse took place.
Daniels flipped a coin to see which boy would sleep in his bed and BYF was the "lucky" one, he told the inquiry.
He said Daniels put his hand down his pyjama bottoms and touched his genitals.
Daniels was convicted of child sex offences against one boy in 1999, and convicted in 2005 of child sex offences against a further 10 boys, including BYF.