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A woman has described her daughter's distress and when she found her "screaming" in bed while under the care of an alleged pedophile nurse at a hospital in Tasmania.

Angela, a pseudonym, gave evidence at the second day of witness hearings at the commission of inquiry into the state government's responses to child sexual abuse in public institutions.

Her daughter, "Lillian", who lives with a disability and communicates using eye movements, hand gestures and devices, was a patient at Launceston General Hospital in her early teens.

There she was treated by James Geoffrey Griffin, who took his own life in late 2019 after being charged with child sexual abuse offences.

The accusations against Griffin were a major catalyst for the establishment of the inquiry, which will examine the handling of abuse complaints.

Angela indicated Griffin touched Lillian inappropriately without proper consent as part of a medical check. She also noticed Lillian had an "injury".

At one point, she arrived at the hospital to find her daughter screaming in bed.

"(She was) very distressed on the ward ... I've never seen her that distressed before. Something wasn't right. She was uncomfortable, She wanted to come home," Angela said.

Angela raised concerns about Lillian's treatment at a meeting with health professionals but they were "completely dismissed". She said no one from the hospital has reached out in the years since.

"They called me at one stage 'the girl with the ugg boots'. That's what they thought of me," Angela said.

Angela called child safety services about her daughter's treatment, saying she didn't know where else to go.

She later read about the allegations against Griffin, whom she knew as "Jimbo".

"Everything made sense from our last stay (at the hospital). It was a big shock. Everything that we assumed had happened, happened, and if not worse," she said.

"I feel like I've failed (her), one hundred per cent."

Angela said her daughter was "very distressed for a long time" after returning home from the hospital and her separation anxiety returned, making schooling difficult.

"I asked her if a man was bad. She said yes," she told the inquiry.

Angela said she planned to leave Launceston in coming years, adding her daughter would be happier elsewhere.

"She doesn't like going in there (the Launceston General Hospital). She starts yelling as soon as we get through the doors."

The inquiry on Monday heard from "Kim" who said her whole family had been "groomed" by Griffin, who invited her daughter to sleepovers his home after he treated her for an eating disorder at the hospital.

In October 2019, a month after initially being charged, four other women came forward with historical abuse complaints against Griffin between the 1980s and 2012.

The state government has already pledged to implement all the inquiry's recommendations.

Six weeks of public hearings are scheduled this year, with a final report due by May 2023.

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Economists are generally convinced the Reserve Bank of Australia will lift the cash rate at Tuesday's monthly board meeting, which would be the first increase in more than a decade.

There has been a marked turnaround in thinking on the interest rate outlook in the past week after inflation figures proved much stronger than expected.

Annual inflation jumped to 5.1 per cent and the more interest rate-sensitive underlying inflation rate surged to 3.7 per cent - well above the RBA's two to three per cent inflation target.

St George associate economist Jameson Coombs said the RBA cannot wait any longer to raise rates.

"Inflation is notoriously difficult to rein back in once the genie gets out of the bottle and last week's data is a sign the inflation genie is rearing its head," he said.

Financial markets are fully priced for a 0.15 per cent rise in the cash rate to 0.25 per cent and is expected to be followed by increases of 0.25 per cent in subsequent months.

But not all economists are on board with a move at this meeting, particularly in the middle of a federal election campaign.

"The RBA is independent and will no doubt act as it sees fit to achieve its mandate," HSBC chief economist Paul Bloxham said.

"But raising the cash rate 18 days before an election - the first hike in over a decade - would put the RBA right in the political mix."

He believes it would be better to move in June by 0.4 per cent to 0.5 per cent and by which time the central bank will have seen the latest wage growth figures on May 18.

The last time the cash rate was increased during an election campaign was in 2007, a poll former Liberal prime minister John Howard went on to lose after campaigning on lower interest rates under his government.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison is putting on a brave face, but Liberal campaign advertising points to rates historically being lower under coalition governments than Labor.

"The independent Reserve Bank should rightly decide where cash rates are set," he told reporters on the campaign trail on Monday.

But he said this wasn't about politics, it's about what people pay on their mortgages.

"That is what I am concerned about. I mean, sometimes you guys always see things through a totally political lens. I don't. And Australians don't."

An initial rate increase of 0.15 per would add around $45 per month to repayments on a $500,000 variable mortgage, but would rise by around $350 per month if the cash rate rose to 1.25 per cent by year end as some economists are predicting.

Before the RBA board meets, the weekly ANZ-Roy Morgan consumer confidence survey is released, which will capture the impact of last week's inflation figures and the prospect of higher interest rates.

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Humanitarian organisations are working to evacuate more civilians from the devastated Ukrainian port city of Mariupol, but hundreds of people remain trapped in the Azovstal steel works, the last stronghold of resistance to the Russian siege.

A first group of evacuees was due to arrive in a Ukrainian-held town northwest of Mariupol on Monday. But Russian forces resumed shelling the steel works on Sunday as soon as the buses had left the plant, a city official said.

People still stuck there were running out of water, food and medicine as Russian forces hemmed them into the industrial complex, whose network of bunkers and tunnels has provided shelter from weeks of Russian bombardment.

"The situation has become a sign of a real humanitarian catastrophe," Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said.

Intense Russian bombardments were also hitting towns in eastern Ukraine on Monday, causing severe damage, a regional governor said.

On the international front, EU energy ministers were due to hold emergency talks on Moscow's demand that European buyers pay for Russian gas in roubles or face their supply being cut off.

While the EU has imposed heavy economic sanctions on Russia in response to its invasion of Ukraine, the issue of Russian energy supplies has posed a dilemma that threatens to crack the united front.

The Russian military is now focusing on crushing resistance in Ukraine's south and east after failing to capture Kyiv in the early weeks of the war, now in its third month.

Its assaults have flattened cities, killed thousands of civilians and forced more than 5 million to flee the country. Mariupol, on the Sea of Azov, has become emblematic of the brutality of the war and the suffering of ordinary people.

Russian President Vladimir Putin's forces are now in control of nearly all the city, linking up Russian-held territory to the west and east.

Around 100 civilians evacuated from the Azovstal steelworks were due to arrive in the Ukrainian-held city of Zaporizhzhia, 230 km northwest of Mariupol, on Monday.

"For the first time, we had two days of a ceasefire on this territory, and we managed to take out more than 100 civilians - women, children," President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in a nightly video address.

Footage from inside the steelworks showed members of the Azov regiment helping civilians though rubble and on to a bus.

But hundreds remain trapped inside. One older evacuee accompanied by young children said survivors were running out of food.

"Children always wanted to eat. You know, adults can wait," she said.

Russia last week said it had decided against storming the steel works and would instead blockade it. But sporadic bombardments have continued.

"Yesterday, as soon as the buses left Azovstal with the evacuees, new shelling began immediately," Petro Andryushchenko, an aide to the Mariupol mayor, told Ukrainian television.

The International Committee of the Red Cross said it was taking part in the evacuation operation along with the United Nations and Ukrainian and Russian officials.

Moscow calls its invasion a "special military operation" to disarm Ukraine and rid it of anti-Russian nationalism fomented by the West. Ukraine and the West say Russia launched an unprovoked war of aggression that threatens to spiral into a much wider conflict.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Sunday Moscow only wanted to guarantee the security of pro-Russian Ukrainians in the east and was not demanding that Zelenskiy surrender as a condition for peace.

"Our aim does not include regime change in Ukraine," Lavrov said in an interview published on his ministry's website.

Ukraine's military said on Monday Russian forces were trying to take over the eastern town of Rubizhne and prepare an assault on Sievierodonetsk.

Luhansk region Governor Serhiy Gaidai said three people had been killed by shelling over the past 24 hours.

The heaviest clashes were taking place around Popasna, to the west of the Russian-held regional capital. The shelling was so intense they could not even collect the bodies, he said.

"I don't even want to speak about what's happening with the people living in Popasna, Rubizhne and Novotoshkivske right now. These cities simply don't exist anymore. They have completely destroyed them."

Moscow is pushing for complete control of the Donbas region, where Russian-backed separatists already controlled parts of Luhansk and Donetsk provinces before the invasion.

In Russia, two explosions took place on Monday in Belgorod, a southern region bordering Ukraine, governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said.

The cause of the blasts was not clear but the Kremlin has accused Ukraine of making cross-border attacks.

© RAW 2022