A revealing example of corporate apology culture played out in Canberra on Monday, received with little fanfare, witnessed by a small group of journalists.
Before them, in an unenviable position, stood Cricket ACT chief executive Olivia Thornton. She was formalising her organisation's participation in the National Redress Scheme in response to recommendations by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.
Cricket ACT is a salient example of the scheme's necessity and limitations: for 15 years, a Cricket ACT coach whose paedophilia was known to colleagues had abused Cricket ACT juniors.
Leery of Redress's blunt categorisations of abuse and capped compensation figures, survivors of Ian King's degradations have already bypassed it in favour of civil litigation in the ACT Supreme Court, with more likely to follow.
The reports that flowed from Thornton's press conference were not just brief but almost invisible, for the pertinent details were never quite illuminated.
Asked if King was the only offender at the centre of claims against Cricket ACT, Thornton said: "I'm not in a position to say that."
Had Cricket ACT conducted internal investigations into the extent of King's offending? "I'm not in a position to say that," she said.
Had Cricket ACT lost a generation of players to King's abuse? "I'm not going to comment on that," she said.
Of greatest import, Thornton was asked whether Cricket Australia's assistance with its Redress membership indicated that it would also help Cricket ACT fund potentially costly civil litigation pay-outs.
"Again, I'm not in a position to answer that," she said. And so on.
Thornton was not in the employ of Cricket ACT at the time of King's crimes. She has inherited problems without easy solutions.
By fronting-up and making an announcement such as this one, she was doing the right thing; plenty of her more experienced contemporaries in sports administration consider it sufficient to address such complex matters via boilerplate press releases alone.
But survivors of childhood sexual abuse in Cricket ACT's junior squads naturally wonder: if the CEO is "not in a position" to answer straightforward questions that might put their minds at ease, who is?
'Flying together to achieve a common goal'
As the AFL and NRL's various scandals of recent years have shown, professional sporting teams and governing bodies can no longer rely on participants and fans ignoring the disconnect between the values preached by sporting bodies and the ones on display when injustices are revealed.
The centrepiece of Cricket ACT's recent centenary-year rebrand was a logo featuring the gang-gang cockatoo.
"The gang-gang is humble in its approach, loyal to its flock and finds strength in numbers by flying together to achieve a common goal," a Cricket ACT press release said.
Survivors say they have experienced no such loyalty. And it would oversimplify the complex legacies of their abuse to assume their goals are uniform.
"I just really struggle with their complete lack of awareness and empathy," one survivor of abuse in the Cricket ACT system told ABC Sport this week.
"The courts will decide the outcome regardless of how Cricket ACT and Cricket Australia conduct themselves and what they say, so why not just be human and pledge to do whatever they can to understand our problems before they compensate survivors and help them move forward?
"Of course they are committed to the National Redress Scheme — it's by far the cheapest option for them. The maximum amount available is $150,000, which is not easy to get and will go nowhere near making up for everything my family and I have lost.
"But beyond the legal and financial aspects of it, it seems they are just not really interested in understanding the situations survivors are in. Take the CEO hat off and ask what they would do if their own kid was abused.
"I'd be more than happy for them to come along to my next electro-convulsive therapy session or perhaps spend a day in the psych ward with me.
"They can't change what happened, but forget about budgets and finances for a minute. They're completely missing the human element of this."
'We certainly don't want to add to the distress and suffering that survivors endure'
It is easy to lose track of what was and remains at stake.
Between the late 1980s and at least 2004, King's abuse had devastating effects on the cricketing and personal lives of many boys who stepped onto Cricket ACT's talent conveyor belt — a system that produced international superstars Michael Bevan, Bronwyn Calver and Brad Haddin.
Likewise, in both the Victorian and Western Australian elite junior systems, abusive superiors preyed on untold numbers of young players.
Did Australian cricket lose dozens of star players to childhood sexual abuse? Quite possibly.
But the loss of a cricket career is a glib hypothetical when placed next to the checklist of life-altering problems commonly faced by survivors: mental and physical ill-health, dysfunctional relationships and divorce, addiction, violence, truncated and destroyed careers, plus myriad other daily anxieties and indignities.
Some survivors point out that if negligence by Cricket Australia or the state associations had led to, say, the loss of a limb, the path to apology and compensation would be straightforward. Suffering the invisible scars of abuse, they say they feel trapped in an endless battle against ignorance, disbelief and faceless corporate enemies.
Having benefited richly from the by-products of a tainted talent pathway, Cricket Australia is now facing unprecedented pressure to not just fulfil moral and legal obligations to survivors, but manage what amount to existential threats to its member states and territories.
This week, Cricket Australia chief executive Nick Hockley told ABC Sport his organisation continued to "urge" those state and territory associations that have not joined the National Redress Scheme to do so, but could not force their hands.
Asked whether Cricket Australia would provide financial assistance to Cricket ACT should civil litigation claims end in costly compensation pay-outs, Hockley would only say: "CA has provided legal support to Cricket ACT to help with the management of claims."
"While we understand some survivors may pursue claims through the legal system, we believe it is important to provide certainty to survivors through the National Redress Scheme.
"We have always considered this issue to be a matter of the utmost importance and continue to work to support survivors as best we can. We certainly don't want to add to the distress and suffering that survivors endure."
Like Thornton, Hockley is among the first generation of sports executives tasked with offering something beyond symbolic gestures in response to past injustices.
Asked whether Cricket Australia needed to consider a strategy similar to the AFL's concussion fund, Hockley said such ideas have already been raised in national strategy discussions.
"We have raised the possibility of states and territories contributing towards a central fund," Hockley said.
"However at this stage each entity has chosen to address claims themselves, albeit with our advice and support."
'Our position has always been to not hide from these things'
Is it realistic for the leaders of sporting organisations facing potentially ruinous lawsuits to compartmentalise their strategies into business and personal responses?
For cricket, there is actually an example directly at hand in the form of the West Australian Cricket Association (WACA) and its chief executive Christina Matthews, a plainspoken and empathic leader whose organisation joined Redress voluntarily and at the first opportunity, long before Cricket Australia was dragged reluctantly into the fold.
Through the 1970s and 80s, the WACA's elite junior squads were infiltrated not just by Ian King, but other prolific child abusers in David Harkess and long-time WACA junior development officer Roy Wenlock, the latter of whose offending was the subject of a West Australian parliamentary inquiry.
Another WACA junior coach's name was removed from a perpetual shield after an abuse allegation by a former player.
Matthews has personally met with survivors. One, who has since settled his complaint with the organisation, told ABC Sport Matthews had exuded warmth and compassion — something he had not always received from playing contemporaries who knew his story.
Paradoxically, the WACA's liabilities seem to have been limited by the same macho culture of silence that might have prevented abuse problems being addressed in the first place.
"Our position has always been to not hide from these things, and to try and make the process as less painful as possible for the victim," Matthews told ABC Sport last year.
For the WACA, striking such a difficult balance has been an admirable achievement in the face of financial problems not dissimilar in scale to Cricket ACT's. It has shown that cricket can indeed do better — and in the years ahead, it seems likely that it will need to.
This week, another former Cricket ACT junior star shared a series of recurring laments among the dozens of men whose childhood ambition to wear a baggy green cap was used against them by Ian King.
"For many years I thought I was the only one," he told ABC Sport.
"But it's come to light that there had been many, many more before me. It made me wonder: why wasn't he stopped earlier? Why wasn't I warned? Why did people look the other way? This wasn't happening in the 1960s, it was happening in the 2000s.
"As I get older and start to unpick the damage caused, a bigger question appears. How can I approach this organisation which breached my trust? How can I trust an organisation that's taken so long to sign up to the National Redress Scheme?
"How can I be confident they won't breach my trust again?"
Do you have more information about this story? Contact Russell Jackson at jackson.russell@abc.net.au
