To be fair, Ruby, you're talking about 1988-89 as if it were actually 1888-89.another thing is that the lawyer is judging what happened in 1988-89 by present day standards re child abuse. So if the elders want to come across as credible they need to focus on what little info re child abuse was available in Australia then.
Australia may be a British colony, a former home to excluded convicts, but surely the nation isn't so backwards in its approach to ethics and morals that child abuse was once seen as being as trite as stealing a loaf of bread.
We're dealing with universally reviled practises that are, according to the evidence on display, treated in the same way as theft or "fornication" between two consenting adults.
Australia is a developed nation with penal codes, you can't possibly be arguing that the Watchtower in that land didn't fully understand how harmful and appalling the abuse of children is and that somehow the religious organisation didn't know how to create policies and guidelines to protect its adherents and the community at large.
Sadly the JW elders in these cases are the ones who are being put on the stand to defend both themselves and the polices decreed upon them by the WTBTS headquarter's religious and legal departments.
But just because these men refused to think outside the religious box they've chosen to place themselves in doesn't mean they shouldn't be held to account by better educated men and women.