Institutions dealing with child abuse will be paralysed if there is a three and a half year wait for a federal inquiry's final report, a prominent Catholic lawyer says.
Father Frank Brennan, who is professor of law at the Australian Catholic University, says the effects of a two-year extension sought by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse have not been taken into account.
In its interim report on Monday, the commission said it would need a two-year extension until December 2017, and an extra $104 million.
Fr Brennan said on Thursday the Catholic Church, as the main organisation under the commission's scrutiny, had spent years trying to develop protocols to deal with sexual abuse.
"(But) what we have heard from the commission so far would seem to be that the Catholic Church protocols are not worth the paper they are written on," he told AAP.
"Presumably we have to wait three and a half years to get an answer (on) what is the workable protocol; that terrifies me."
He also said it worried him that state police and welfare departments already lacking resources to deal with abuse cases have to resource themselves to deal with the commission.
"This means there are less resources available to deal with current problems."
He said he agreed there was no better way to uncover systemic failures than looking at institutional behaviours through the prism of historical abuse cases but was worried it would take five years.
"I just do not think there has been sufficient account taken of the cost of the paralysis of institutions" that are dealing with abuse and will be waiting for the commission to report.
In an article published in the online journal Eureka Street Fr Brennan wrote the commission was setting up unreal expectations of compensation among victims.
"The commission is clearly anxious to expand the realm of vicarious liability, much in the way that the courts in the UK and Canada have done, however there is little point in asking witnesses about this, let alone asking church leaders.
"It is not a matter for the commission. It is a matter for the High Court."
The legal issues need to be separated out from "the political and media maelstrom" which accompanies a commission of this sort, he argued.
"Royal commissioners may have extensive legal powers of inquiry but they have very limited capacity to influence outcomes."
He said a federal commission was "an inefficient way" to deal with some of the issues like state agreements on child protection laws.
The commission needed to clarify what it actually had power to change or recommend, and to focus "its activity more on looking for lessons rather than apportioning blame for the past so that procedures might be improved in future," he said.
The royal commission declined to comment.
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