2025 SA Australian of the Year Professor Leah Bromfield

Australian Community Media

Meet Your Australians - 2025 SA Australian of the Year Professor Leah Bromfield. ACM is proud to be media partner for the 2025 Australian of the Year Awards.

Transcript

00:00Six in ten Australians have been abused or neglected.

00:06Six in ten, it's a national emergency.

00:09And we don't treat it like a national emergency.

00:12We don't really like to talk about it.

00:15My first memory in life, like too many Australian children,

00:20is of violence.

00:23And I'm a person with a disability,

00:27and when I was growing up, that meant that you were bullied.

00:32And so I just did so much to pretend that I was normal.

00:38I fell into the field of child protection,

00:41not really connecting my past to my present,

00:44but it makes me better at what I do.

00:47A really significant kind of early impact in my career

00:50is just seeing the issue of cumulative harm

00:54being recognised in our laws.

00:57That sounds very academic, but what it actually means

00:59is that kids who are experiencing chronic abuse and neglect,

01:05there was a legal way that we could intervene

01:09to protect those children.

01:10Later in my career, I was really lucky to be appointed

01:16as a professorial fellow for the Royal Commission

01:18into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.

01:21I was able to develop the research agenda

01:24for the Royal Commission.

01:26We should be so proud of it as a nation,

01:29what that Royal Commission achieved.

01:32It shone a light on our dark history of abuse in institutions,

01:37enabling those stories to come out and change to be made.

01:41I'm proud of that.

01:43Actually, when you look back at the history of child protection,

01:46there's not a point where you can say that system was good.

01:50And it's not because it's filled with bad people,

01:53it's actually because it's a bad system.

01:55My ultimate goal is a transformed child protection system

01:59that is fair, that has heart, and that we can be proud of.

02:06That's not just rhetoric to me.

02:08I think it means that we have to be really brave

02:11to pull together the knowledge that we have,

02:14to transform the way that we approach

02:16the design of child protection systems

02:18so they can actually be helping systems,

02:21rather than systems of fear, systems of shame.

02:25We've got a lot of the answers already from the evidence.

02:28Some of what we need is the courage to actually apply that evidence

02:33and be prepared to really do things differently.

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