Peter Gogarty made the call after leaked documents this week by detention centre staff revealed more than half of 2000 incident reports between 2013 and 2015 were about children, although they represented only 18 per cent of the Nauru centre’s population.

It also followed confirmation three human rights groups sent legal advice to royal commission chair Justice Peter McClellan in July last year that it can look at the response of the Australian Government and contractors to child sexual abuse allegations from Australia’s detention centre on Nauru.

“The Federal Government should immediately broaden the terms of reference for, and if necessary extend the time available to, the current Royal Commission so that it can examine in an independent and forensic way what is going on in Nauru,” Mr Gogarty said.

“If, as it claims, the Federal Government has nothing to be concerned about and nothing to hide, it should welcome the opportunity for the royal commission to say so.”

In June last year Mr Gogarty, Hunter child sex survivors Bob O’Toole, David Owen and Graham Rundle, and Audrey Nash whose 13-year-old son hanged himself while a student of a notorious Catholic child sex offender, said Australia’s treatment of asylum seeker children meant history was repeating itself.

“Have we learnt anything from the royal commission? This isn’t about stopping the boats, or blaming the parents, or any of that. It’s about how we treat children once we’re responsible for them,” said Mr Rundle, 64, who was sexually, physically and emotionally abused at a Salvation Army children’s home.

On Friday, the ninth day of evidence at a Newcastle royal commission hearing into the Anglican church, the Human Rights Law Centre, the Council for International Development and the Australian Council of Social Service released their legal advice to Justice McClellan.

Human Rights Law Centre director Hugh de Kretser said the royal commission could not travel to Nauru but it could “compel the Australian government and its contractors in Australia to provide evidence and answer questions about how it has responded to child abuse allegations in the centre which it established in Nauru”.

It released the legal advice after the 2000 leaked documents were released this week that included incident reports of children at risk. UNICEF Australia director Nicole Breeze said despite work by the government of Nauru to improve its child protection framework for all children on Nauru, including asylum seeker children, “it is very, very difficult to keep children safe in the current environment”.

While the Australian Government repeatedly responded to sexual abuse allegations involving asylum seekers on Nauru by saying it was up to Nauruan authorities to respond, Ms Breeze said the country’s child protection capacities were still “evolving”.

UNICEF has worked with the Nauruan government to develop child protection legislation that was only passed two months ago, and did not include mandatory reporting of child sexual abuse. The capacity of police to respond to child protection allegations was not yet “robust enough” so that “there are challenges to the safety of children”, she said.         

Mr Gogarty said the treatment of asylum seeker children on Nauru was a moral issue for all Australians, and a test of the moral leadership of all politicians.

“The Institution responsible for the current Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Abuse, our Commonwealth Government, is knowingly putting children in harm’s way every day,” Mr Gogarty said.

“It knows that children have been sexually, physically and emotionally abused for years in an institution which it funds. It knows that those children are in that position entirely because of its own policies. It knows that there is every likelihood that today and tomorrow and for an indeterminate future, this abuse will continue.

“The Government is pretending this is not happening, and to the extent that it acknowledges that something might be happening, it either blames the victims, or suggests that someone else is responsible.

“This type of response is exactly what the royal commission was set up to examine.”