Child abuse victims could be bullied again under a Catholic Church compensation scheme proposal, lawyers say.

The church has proposed a mandatory, government-run scheme where institutions that employed child abusers would pay victims’ compensation.

The scheme would provide compensation for past medical expenses, loss of earnings, pain and suffering, and the cost of counselling services.

But Australian Lawyers Alliance president Andrew Stone said the proposed scheme was “extremely flawed”.

“For a start the church clearly wants the scheme to operate with limits on victims’ access to the benefit of a lawyer,” Mr Stone said today.

“Abuse victims may still need to prove ‘abuse’. However there is no matching offer for the church to give up its own lawyers and not to use the full power and wealth of the church to argue over liability to pay claims.

“That is exactly the sort of bullying behaviour that occurred in the past.”

The Catholic Church’s Truth Justice and Healing Council chief executive Francis Sullivan said the scheme needed to be non-adversarial, low cost to claimants and provide compassionate and fair compensation for victims.

Mr Sullivan said there would be no time limit for bringing a claim under the scheme, with capped, indexed payments determined in line with community standards.

But Mr Stone said he was wary of capped payments based on community standards.

“In the past they have applied appallingly low caps to their internal redress schemes which they have established,” he said.

“Their perception of community standards unfortunately doesn’t really seem to match the community.”

The child abuse royal commission will hold two weeks of public hearings in Melbourne, starting on August 18, to look at abuse allegations in the Melbourne archdiocese and the Catholic Church’s Melbourne Response complaints handling process.