Gabriel Osborne was 15 when he first arrived at Perth’s notorious Esther House.
Like other former residents, he claims he was confronted with shocking practices.
Residents who were there for mental health treatment or drug and alcohol rehabilitation allege they were subjected to gay conversion therapy and exorcisms. Some say they were baptised against their will and suffered severe psychological and emotional abuse.
After he turned 16, still at Esther, Osborne remembers realising that most of his welfare payment was being diverted straight to Esther.
The system Esther was using to have early, guaranteed access to his Centrelink payment was known as Centrepay.
“Over 80% of my payment was given to the Esther Foundation and I had no access to my online accounts,” he said. He remembers feeling completely isolated from the outside world.
“I think this is a part of the control.”
Osborne says Centrepay had a huge impact on the residents, including those who tried to run away.
“We didn’t know how to use online services and we didn’t have our ID,” he says.
“The staff at the Esther Foundation or the police would be looking for us to force us back. We didn’t have any money or a phone, we had no idea how to get our money back into our control, and when you are escaping abuse it is the last thing on your mind.”
The intention of the Centrepay system is to allow welfare recipients to voluntarily quarantine some payments to ensure they can cover essentials such as rent, electricity and clothing.
But a Guardian Australia investigation has revealed how the system has been left open to exploitation, and is facilitating profound harm to vulnerable groups.
The disturbing allegations against the now-closed Esther House are well known, the subject of investigations by Crikey and the ABC in 2022 and ventilated most recently in a parliamentary inquiry in Western Australia.
The ultra-religious drug and alcohol rehabilitation service, which took in vulnerable residents in WA, has been accused of subjecting them to gay conversion, exorcisms, unwanted baptisms and psychological abuse.
In late 2022, the WA inquiry heard allegations and complaints about Esther spanning from 2004 to 2020, including “emotional and psychological abuse, coercive and extreme religious practices, LGBTQA+ suppression and conversion practices, culturally harmful practices, medical complaints, family alienation, physical restraints and assaults, and sexual assault”.
The inquiry found “unacceptable practices” occurred at Esther and that there was an environment where they could “occur and go undetected”.
But what is only now emerging is the central role the Centrepay system played in propping up the organisation.
No money, no phone and no hope
About 281 residents of Esther House were on Centrepay.
In interviews with the Guardian, four former residents say they felt forced on to the payment system and had their bank cards taken away from them, effectively putting them under Esther’s financial control.
One claimed she was taken to a Centrelink office and told not to speak as Esther staff signed her up to Centrepay. The residents, who were then teenagers, say they had no idea what they were agreeing to.
They say they did not know how much of their welfare payment was being taken by Esther or what was being done with it.
Sarah, who did not want her real name used, says residents who did not comply with instructions in other circumstances suffered severe consequences, and as a result she felt obliged to sign up.
“You’d lose the right to see family, for a month to three months,” she says. “You’d lose rights to any privileges, to phone calls, going out, privacy.”
Carissa Bonn, who was at Esther for seven months for court-ordered rehabilitation, says she also felt forced on to Centrepay and that she never saw a cent of her welfare money from that period.
“We would have been kicked out otherwise,” she says.
“I’ve never seen any of it, ever.”
Bonn says she was keen to make the most of her time in rehabilitation when she arrived at Esther, but was not prepared for what awaited her. She alleges staff subjected her to exorcisms; that she was baptised against her will in the Swan River; and that she was told to ignore a wound because there was “no pain in Jesus’s name”.
She says her experience there was worse than prison, and the trauma from her time there still lingers.
‘I want to know where my money went’
The former Esther House resident Lucy Lorenti says she remembers clearly the day she went to Centrelink.
She says she was taken to the South Perth Centrelink by Esther staff and told not to speak as she was signed over to Centrepay.
“We just had to sit there and they signed over our payments to Esther,” she claims.
No one from the Centrelink office raised any concern, she says.
The money was ostensibly to pay for lodging at Esther House. But Lorenti and other survivors have questioned where their money was going.
“I want to know where my money went,” she says. “We were getting food from Foodbank, from OzHarvest and SecondBite and all that.
“Those rentals that we were living in, one of our Centrelink payments would have covered that. And they had us all in bunk beds in those houses and sleeping on the floor, sleeping in carports, sleeping on lounge room floors.”
The now defunct organisation received a $4m grant from the federal government, announced by Scott Morrison after a site visit in which he praised the foundation’s work.
The then board of the Esther Foundation issued an apology in March 2022, after survivors spoke to media outlets, including Crikey and the ABC.
“Over the past few weeks the Board of the Esther Foundation has heard accounts in the media from several women who have been through our rehabilitation program,” the board said. “Hearing these personal stories and allegations has been extremely distressing and confronting to us, as the conduct they describe does not reflect our vision or purpose. We sincerely and without reservation apologise to these women and any others who have been hurt or have experienced abuse in any form.”
Senator’s concerns
The 2022 WA inquiry did not explore the use of Centrepay in its report.
But the federal Labor senator Louise Pratt, who has led parliamentary scrutiny of the Esther Foundation and other unregulated private health facilities, has interrogated the system’s use by Services Australia.
At an estimates hearing on 15 February last year, she told Services Australia she had met former residents of Esther House who had told her “they were denied the ability to try to get their Centrelink payments back under their own control”.
“It has since closed, but I am really concerned about this as an example of how people can be abused and have their financial rights abused, and how Centrepay could be complicit in subjecting people to human rights abuses because of that financial relationship between the abusing institution, the resident and Centrepay,” Pratt said.
At a subsequent hearing in May, she repeatedly asked the department how many of the Esther residents were put on “nominee” arrangements, allowing a third party to control their welfare.
The department said it was unclear.
“It was put to me the kind of situation that someone who was experiencing harm in this organisation might face – that someone from Esther House, when they are the nominee, could be the one logging on and changing the deductions and that that person would be precluded from having access to their own records,” Pratt asked. “I find it pretty difficult to see how at your end you could have necessarily prevented that.”
The former chief executive of Services Australia Rebecca Skinner responded: “Sadly, things like that do happen. They do happen in a range of environments where people with the wrong conduct and intent can prey on vulnerable people, and sometimes that is difficult to identify.”
Lorenti says former residents at Esther were failed time and again. She and others are calling for reforms to the system to prevent misuse.
“The government had a duty of care and they really failed us. Esther had a duty of care and they failed us,” she says. “As some of the most vulnerable people in Perth, we were just failed time and time again.”