Yesterday it was about women forced to give up babies for adoption. And Aboriginal children removed by the state. Or British slum children sent to the colonies so that they might have a better chance at life.

There have been major inquiries which have allowed victims to bear witness to their sufferings and expose some of the perpetrators. There has been individual and collective shame, followed by efforts to help victims and to bring some "closure". There have been official apologies in federal and state parliaments. Some victims have sued. Some villains have gone to jail.

The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse is discussing compensation schemes for victims. It will almost certainly recommend such a scheme.

It will not be the first to do so for people failed by the state. Compensation was recommended for stolen children, for victims of forced adoptions and the child immigration scheme. None have yet come through. When (not if) we begin a national accounting for the needless cruelties inflicted by politicians, public officials, contracted-in prison guards and foreign vassals, on asylum seekers, there will also be calls for a general compensation scheme. The citizens of tomorrow, in a judgment of the citizens of today, will probably also call for the repeal of laws effectively giving immunity from personal suit to all of those involved. I hope they succeed.

That's only scratching the surface of possible compensation for large groups of people we, or our ancestors, plainly let down. Behind the horror of knowing that thousands upon thousands of young Australian girls and boys were sexually abused by teachers in schools, and in orphanages and children's homes, and sporting, cultural, ethnic and religious bodies, is understanding that these are but the tip of an iceberg.

Inquiries give victims a platform and a chance to tell their story. An opportunity to put their case on a public record. Some of those who let them down acknowledge it, and express their shame and regret. Recognition can straighten the shoulders. One cannot undo what happened. But one can admit, recognise, help in repairing obvious damage and put in place actions to stop it happening again. It is perfectly reasonable that there will be talk of compensation and reparation, and the case for it is good.

The trouble is that commissions of inquiry considering the justice of the cases are not appropriation bodies. It's not their money. They do not have to ration scarce resources against an array of pressing needs.

Victims, certainly in the abstract, deserve compensation. But in practice governments are not going to put more money into welfare. Anything victims are to get must come from other welfare areas, including competing classes of disadvantaged people such as the unemployed, disabled or the aged.

If $1 billion were to go into a compensation scheme for victims of institutional sexual abuse, for example, it would have to be paid for by cuts of at least $1 billion from welfare benefits. And who is to say that compensation could be limited to a mere $1 billion? Perhaps they deserve $10 billion. Perhaps a scheme would draw many unexpected victims into making claims. Perhaps to a tribunal given to becoming more and more adventurous about who could make a claim, and for what damage.

Inquiries are not well equipped to determine the relative justice of such needs. Nor are they necessarily well equipped to say who should be in or out, or whether compensation should go according to the gravity of the injury inflicted or the lasting damage suffered (very different things).

Must all claimants "prove" their claims, perhaps in adversary courts? If the perpetrator was not a public servant but a Salvation Army officer, a Jewish rabbi or a Catholic priest, should state compensation be limited to topping up what can be extracted from such people or their employers?

These are not new questions. They arise whenever there is a groundswell of empathy and sympathy for people let down by the institutions of the day. We all agree that something must be done, without much idea of what that something should be. We feel it must be so manifestly compassionate and generous so that we can go back to comfortably forgetting about it.

All World War I diggers are dead but Australia has not yet finished looking after their widows, nearly a century on. A century from now, we may be still paying for the consequences of official and institutional neglect not only today and in the past but as a result of decisions we make over the next few years.

We have not yet closed the gates on victimhood. There are right wingers who speak of a victim industry, of people blaming their life's failures and disappointments on membership of some self-identified class. Perhaps such a victim mentality exists. But self-described victims must take their place in a line behind any number of long-identified and manifestly disadvantaged groups, obviously bearing the burdens, and the physical and psychic scars of bad treatment.

The biggest groups of victims have come out of and remain within the Australian underclasses. The troubles that befell them could have happened, and did, to people of any class and station. Not only poor girls got pregnant, were put in care, or were physically or sexually abused. But the very poor had fewer choices, fewer places to run, fewer opportunities to make it in spite of all of their handicaps. Such people are by no means the loudest complainants, and certainly not the most articulate. But they are the ones who most obviously show that petty economies, neglect, mismanagement, indifference and a blind eye never save the state a cent.

Soon we will have calls for compensation to child victims of physical abuse, including floggings and beatings, officially inflicted. Their stories will be hard, for anyone now under 50, to credit. But everyone older knows.

Australians once lived in a far more brutal age. It finished more recently than some might think. The sexual abuse inquiry has dealt only casually with physical abuse of children by teachers, welfare officers and others. It has been relevant only when it has been accompanied by sexual abuse.

But there are thousands of young Australians, never actually sexually molested, who bear the physical and emotional scars of beatings and abuse.

Even many of those not personally involved in doling out such routine violence were aware of, and effectively colluded in, it. Catholic parents may have been truly innocent about the extent of sexual abuse of their children by religious brothers; they were well aware of most of the physical brutalities. Welfare authorities and cops well knew of the physical horrors of children's home, and the casual sadism of many of the women and men running them.

The self-conscious lovelessness and punishment motif of institutions for orphans, pregnant unmarried women and neglected children reflected a victim-blaming disapproval by officialdom, civil and religious. But it also tended to reflect general views in society. Likewise with many ideas about the intrinsic hopelessness of Aborigines, thus thought to permission insensitivity to their rights and dignity.

The survivors of this culture of brutality, punishment and cold, hate-filled Christian charity have not yet had their day in the sun.

The institutions involved – in most cases exactly the same ones – have done little pro-active about the victims. The brutal era did not end by the will or the goodness of the institutions. Bishops, teachers, social workers, and ministers of the Crown did not suddenly wake up and decree it must stop. Were we waiting for them, we would still be doing so. Instead society became sick of corporal punishment and the culture of impersonal violence and disregard for the rights and dignity of children that it symbolised. Australia had reached a standard of living that could no longer openly tolerate, or overlook, such dirty little secrets. The change of approach was forced unwillingly on the guardians.

It is, of course, entirely typical that a good many Australians yearn for a return of the days of official violence, corporal discipline and imposed "respect". The shock-jock audience seems to blame all of the evils of modern society upon its absence. Others sneer at the inquiries, joke about the culture of victimhood and, as often as not, make it clear to underlings that they are to pay, at best, only lip service to modern views on the subject. It's been particularly obvious in middle and senior ranks of police and the services, in spite of the efforts of a few, such as General David Morrison.

For the good old boys, and not a few women, a good many "manly" virtues, including self-reliance, courtesy and knowledge of one's place in the order of things were instilled in those who could "get over" such adversity – a reason why such conspicuous survivors themselves became in turn enthusiastic brutalisers, or apologists for brutalisers, of succeeding generations.

As we think of where compensation claims might go, we must also remember that we know – have long known – that there are five or six Australian children who have been abused in their own homes for every child who was ever sexually abused in a school, an orphanage, a Boy Scouts group or a sporting club. Is there to be compensation for them too?

Sexual abuse is, and always has been, as Australian as apple pie. Until about 1940, it could be – perhaps in some official circles was – regarded as some awful exceptional conduct occurring only among depraved isolated families. But by 75 years ago, all of the welfare authorities around Australia were regarding it, and associated incest, as a primary social problem. Indeed the fear of sexual abuse in or near the family home was a major reason for a sudden explosion of welfare removals of children, said to be neglected or "in moral danger".

But here, all too often, we see some of the damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't dilemma so often facing the even conscientious welfare workers, now as much as then. All too often children removed "for their own good" were thrown from a frying pan into the fire. They needed protection, but were made even more vulnerable to abuse, in environments with even fewer checks and balances. There are good stories of foster care. But there are dreadful stories of dreadful abuse and neglect. Many children's homes were worse than jails, with the inmates not only entirely at the mercy of their custodians but almost entirely without any champions or protectors, something that could usually have been found about their homes.

One can be confident that a future inquiry would hold that the "system" failed such children, whether or not they ended up in institutions, or whether or not people with some duty of care – such as doctors or teachers – did anything to protect children.

The state did not approve or encourage the original sexual abuse, as carried out by parents and grandparents, siblings, uncles, aunts, cousins, neighbours, friends of the family, drinking mates of Dad, local shopkeepers, tradesmen and others frequently in the living environment. As often as not, particularly in the poorer slums of our cities, vigilant welfare officers and cops were on the lookout for just such abuse. But neither the state, nor community institutions, including churches, were really doing anything much to prevent abuse or, when they saw it, to act in the interests of victims. First was a culture of disbelief, particularly if the person accused was any sort of authority figure. Second was a culture of denial, and tendency to think that all of the onus was on a victim to "prove" something wrong had occurred. Third was, and, particularly in some Catholic circles is, a very strong tendency to believe the victim must have done something to tempt the perpetrator or to somehow deserve what happened.

If then, finally, something had to be done (a point reached much more quickly if the household was of the underclass, such as an Aboriginal family, a house of unmarried adults, or "no-hopers" on welfare), it was generally the victim, not the perpetrator who was removed from the scene. Punishment was a one-way street.

Should we make perpetrator organisations, such as the churches, pay any compensation? At first instance, many, including the Catholic church used shameful legal stratagems to wriggle out of their moral responsibility for abuse under their care. Most have now been shamed out of that, but it is, as yet, far from clear that compensation, or rehabilitation schemes, will be generous and open-hearted. Perhaps government needs to co-ordinate its contributions, voluntary and involuntary, and perhaps, given the appalling and unconscionable stewardship demonstrated by virtually all of the bishops over many years, churches should be made to put in a continuing contribution by loss of some, or all, of the tax-free status of religious organisations.

But with or without contributions from churches, charities and associations, state and federal governments are at fault. They are at fault for the acts and omissions of public servants, past and present, either in inflicting abuses, in covering them up, or in failing to put in place ways of protecting those under their immediate charge.

But the state – right up to the politicians – is also at fault for failures of public trusts to look particularly to the needs of the vulnerable, especially children. At law, for example, the Minister for Immigration is the guardian of children in our concentration camps. He could hardly be unaware of how much he is failing in his legal, as well as his moral, duty to them. If, once, someone forgot to tell him, Paul Finn in the Federal Court once spelled it out and no there could be no doubt.

Likewise, state welfare ministers, and, probably, Attorneys-General, have a personal and legal responsibility of stewardship and guardianship for children, and mentally ill people, put in the care of the state. Not one, so far as I am aware, has been cross-examined by an inquiry about how seriously that obligation was taken.

The surest compensation for those still labouring from the consequences of neglect and abuse would be the feeling that their sufferings were acknowledged and that as a result, new generations would not suffer in that way. Plus professional care, as far as possible at the expense of perpetrator institutions, for psychological problems.

But it would be too much to expect that this is yet in place, that we have learned much, or that the abuses are no longer happening. When we read the latest report of such an inquiry, at an orgy of hand-wringing, empathetic gestures and sincere looks, we should understand that we only hope things will improve.

The Stolen generation of today, for example, is many times the size of the stolen generation of the 1950s, or 1960s. It's all for their own good, of course. The balance sheet, 40 years hence, will be far more in arrears, in real terms, than now, far bigger than the moral bill we contemplate, but do not pay, for victims of the past. What public policy makers must contemplate is whether a small investment now might head this off.