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.
Tragic? The human race was just another little cosmic joke. The premise that humanity could have saved itself when there was so much easy money to be made for the already uber rich is ridiculous. A mouse getting between a dog and it’s bone? No contest.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/01/magazine/climate-change-losing-earth.html
Your links Prologue “Why did we do this to ourselves?”
The answer will always be greed. Greed & ignorance.
Money wins, we lose.
https://www.facebook.com/worldeconomicforum/videos/599420610509039/
New Blogs Mr. Insider we seem to be 2 behind. Cheers
Later today. Busy boy with other deadlines looming and my nephew’s birthday in the middle.
Malcolm has joined Hillary and Kevin Rudd in the We was robbed of our Rightful Place camp.
They all simply look more foolish to me, and I suspect remind folks how lucky they were to be rid of them.
Of course it was possible that Turnbull could have beaten Shorten, but you would have to have been quite the optimist to think it a good thing, and you would have to believe that MT had learned from the debacle of his previous campaign.
And ScoMo — better or worse chance? The polls say worse. Much worse.
Be interesting to know, which we won’t, whether Pyne and Bishop would have stayed on if Turnbull was still there. I got the impression that Turnbull had been a reader of your columns when he said they got rid of him not because he would lose but because he would win. You had used the same line a few times re Rudd, and he had a better chance of winning than Turnbull.
I’d say Malcolm’s doing a pretty decent job on the Fibs right now.
His new style of non-capitulation suits him & the Labor party…..😄
take this to the bank….RCC aint voluntarily spending one solitary extra zac in ballarat
https://www.smh.com.au/national/victoria/emotional-video-by-wife-of-child-sexual-abuse-survivor-goes-viral-20190309-p512yj.html
Recessionberg and Scummo may be seeking to politicise a possible recession but they are also very clearly mismanaging the economy directly into one, either deliberately or unwittingly.
https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2019/03/anyone-australia-remember-recession-looks-like/
the QLD LNP caught out again promoting and defending Glencore for operating a multimillion-dollar shadow campaign to bolster demand for coal, run by political operatives at the C|T Group. talk about a get up? HAHAHA. the Fair dinkum hypocrisy of the cons is off the charts.
Did Recessionberg and morrison tell the nation “they have never had it so good this week” ?
To be fair it wasn’t a bad week, dimsayed. A weak effort. No surprises.
worst ever. Can expect nothing else from the QLD LNP.
https://www.theage.com.au/national/worst-ever-immigration-minister-asylum-seekers-jet-in-under-dutton-s-nose-20190302-p511d8.html
Hear hear JTI hear hear regarding smarsh. Darcy Short scored runs and took wicket in his 2, T20 appearance and was sent home to make way for smarsh., smarsh, handscombe and even khawaja are not the answer and never will be. Finch has been given the keys for life by hohns. So the WC starting line up if Australia was to pick the best would be Warner, Finch*, Short,Smith, Maxwell, Stoinis, Carey Cummins, Starc, K/J. Richardson, Boyce. With M.Kelly, C.Lynn, M.Wade, K/J. Richardson D.Sams, R.Meredith. The last 2 are smokey’s but have had good domestic seasons Sams for 2 years now in short form cricket. R.Meredith is quick and raw but would benefit from the exposure. But I know the best players will not be picked.
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/is-tony-abbott-s-time-up-20190304-p511kh.html
Don’t think he’s ever spent so much time here, expect more back flips between now and the election