Pell’s conviction casts the real story into the shadow

George Pell’s counsel withdrew his bail application today. Pell will be remanded in custody awaiting a sentence that almost certainly will include a long term of imprisonment.

This is one of the most significant moments in Australian criminal history, the conviction of a Roman Catholic cardinal for child sex offending. It has not happened anywhere on the planet.

Amid the shock and the superlatives, I fear this episode will place the real story in the shadow. What we have learned from the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses of Child Sex Abuse will be overwhelmed by the magnitude of Pell’s conviction. Victims will continue to be left as line items on a profit and loss statement. Those seeking compensation under the National Redress Scheme will continue to be put on hold.

Other guilty institutions will skate away.

The history is clear. In Victoria and as far as I can tell anywhere in Australia, no Catholic priest was charged let alone convicted of a child sex offence until 1979. That in itself is a damning statistic given what we know of the rampant pedophilia of outrageously prolific offenders like Monsignor John Day, Father Ronald Pickering and Gerard Ridsdale.

But it also speaks of failures elsewhere. Simply put, that level of offending could not occur without failures within law enforcement and more broadly across the criminal justice system.

What is known is that elements within the Victoria Police Force up to and including the Chief Commissioner at the time, Reg Jackson, conspired to prevent the criminal prosecution of Monsignor Day in Mildura in 1972.

Father Ronald Pickering fled the country. When his whereabouts became known, the process of his arrest in Great Britain and subsequent extradition back to Victoria was considered too costly. The man police darkly referred to as a “two (victims) a day man” was left to his own devices. Pickering remained in the UK in full view but somehow beyond the reach of the law until his death in 2009.

Many of Ridsdale’s crimes against children were not subject to any acceptable form of investigative rigour. In the 1980s, victims’ statements alleging Ridsdale committed the worst of his crimes were lost by police. Meanwhile other statements alleging offences of lesser gravity became the basis of his first prosecution (Ridsdale was the second priest to be charged with child sex offences in Victoria in 1989).

Whether it was a matter of ineptitude or something much worse is a matter that requires further investigation. If history tells us anything, it is that the Victoria Police Force is not especially curious about examining its historical failings.

What we do know is that where police won’t act, offending will escalate. It is a one-way ticket to a crime spree.

It is not difficult to understand. Convince an armed robber that he can commit his crimes without consequence, and he will not only continue to commit armed robberies, he will continue to commit more of them.

What happened in Mildura in 1972 told the clergy within the Ballarat diocese and elsewhere in Victoria that they were practically above the law. The clerics who preyed upon children would not be pursued. The clerics who were complicit or who chose to look the other way would not be held to account.

In this context, the number of victims grew from one to ten to a hundred and finally to the point where not even the authority and weight of a royal commission could keep count.  

The Mildura conspiracy effectively created an inducement to offend, a standing offer of immunity, extended to some of the worst child sex offenders this country has ever seen.

The protection of pedophile priests and complicit clerics undermines public trust and confidence in police in ways that more orthodox forms of police corruption do not. While morally indefensible, we can at least understand how police might be bribed to look the other way in the lucrative drug trade. How it was that police were protecting child sex offenders defies comprehension. And without public confidence, police cannot operate.

Unsurprisingly, the Victoria Police Force is yet to issue an apology for its role in this epidemic of child sex offending. It has barely acknowledged its culpability and quietly waits for all the fuss to die down.

The Royal Commission found that child sex offending was rife in all manner of institutions: religious and secular, government and non-government.

The Catholic Church was a principal offender but pound for pound no institution was worse than the Salvation Army. The principals of the dismal cult of the Jehovah’s Witnesses when presented with the sordid details of child sex abuse on their watch, found it beneath themselves to offer even an apology.

We need to look beyond the headlines. The real story here is not that one of the Vatican’s most senior men is set to go behind bars.

The real story is that the nation’s children, our most precious asset, were not valued. They were not protected.

The real story is, as it was before Pell’s conviction, that children were not believed. They were not believed by law enforcement, they were not believed in the courts, they were often not believed by their own parents.

Those who defend Pell today are acting in precisely the same way as the Catholic Church and every other offending institution has done in the past.

They are telling Pell’s victims (one who is deceased) “We do not believe you.”

After a three-year royal commission and a national outpouring of grief and sorrow, we have learned everything and nothing.  

This column first appeared in The Australian 27 February 2018.