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Allegations
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Wellington: The cadet
abuse issue is not settled, the former army sergeant who sparked the inquiry
says. Ian Fraser has been
contacted by former cadets furious that the report by former High Court judge
David Morris had played down the seriousness of what went on at the Waiouru cadet
school between 1948 and 1991. Mr Fraser said:
“There’s a lot of anger at the army’s homing in on the claim that there was
no culture of violence, when their own documentation contradicts them on that
point. They feel it has been watered down.” The Government on
Friday issued a formal apology to the family of Grant Bain, the cadet shot
and killed in 1981. They had sought an apology and compensation for many
years. Defence Minister Phil
Goff said he deeply regretted it had taken so long to investigate the
shooting. “I wasn’t even in
Parliament but mistakes were made and I apologise formally, on behalf of the
Government generally, for that,” he said on TV One. “That is an absolute
apology.” Mr Fraser said the
apology was a good move, but “at the same time as they are saying sorry they
are trying to minimise the damage. It was acknowledged
there was insufficient supervision in the cadet school, and that cadets were
largely unsupervised at night. The claim that regular
force staff were not involved was “duck shoving”. The army set up the school
and ran it. “They cannot run away from their responsibility here.” The shooting death, the
suicide of another cadet, the death of a cadet who died jumping off the back
of a truck and of another in a stolen Land Rover all clearly demonstrated a
culture of violence. He could not believe
there was no collusion between the police and the army over the decision to
charge Grant Bain’s killer, cadet Corporal Andrew Read, with careless use of
a firearm rather than manslaughter. “It must have happened.
It’s OK to say errors of judgment were made, but lumping it all on a now dead
police sergeant and saying it was his error of judgment — how convenient is
that?” Timothy Rabbidge, who
was in charge of the school in 1981, when Grant Bain was killed, said there
was “an awful lot of bullying” at the camp. Meanwhile, Wellington
lawyer Roger Chapman, who has filed a $400,000 lawsuit on behalf of an abused
former cadet, challenged Mr Goff’s statement that the statute of limitations
could be a problem. “The way the statute of
limitation works is that the time for lodging claims is suspended if you are
under a disability, and often in this kind of situation people are psychiatrically
seriously damaged and people are not capable of taking action,” he said. |
