The challenge of a five-year Royal Commission

By Frank Brennan
Eureka Street
September 8, 2014

http://www.eurekastreet.com.au/article.aspx?aeid=41948#.VA2EFfldWSo

The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse has been granted its sought two-year extension. It will run for five years. That is appropriate. I predicted on the night Julia Gillard announced the commission that it would take five years to do its work.

I am still worried about this extended federal royal commission – and that is not because I am a Catholic priest afraid of what the commission might discover in the bowels of my Church. I have long been an advocate for State assistance to the Church in this area, concerned that the Church could not do it alone. All church members, and not just the victims who continue to suffer, need light, transparency and accountability if the opaque injustices of the past are to be rectified.

With the Commission's case study last month into the Melbourne Response, much of the media focus was on Cardinal Pell, as it was during the case study on the John Ellis case. For some time, many Australians, myself included, had wondered how Cardinal Pell was not in a position when an auxiliary bishop in Melbourne between 1987 and 1996 to know much, if anything, about the extent of child sexual abuse by his clergy and to do much, if anything, to address the issue.

On 21 August 2014, Cardinal Pell told the Royal Commission that, prior to his becoming Archbishop in August 1996, he 'had no knowledge of any criminal behaviour that was not being dealt with' and that he was 'not even sure to what extent (he) would have been privy to matters that might have been criminal but were being dealt with by the Vicar General'. He told the Commission, 'I wasn't in the direct line of authority before I was Archbishop. I was an Auxiliary Bishop with no responsibility in this area.' In his written statement to the commission, he said, 'When I took office (as Archbishop in 1996), it was my view that the arrangements in the Archdiocese for responding to and assisting victims of child sexual abuse were insufficient to ensure a compassionate, effective and consistent response. I thought there needed to be clearly documented procedures for dealing with complaints.'

So he had quickly come to know there was a very major problem, when before he was oblivious and seemingly lacking in curiosity. He went on to state: 'I was very conscious, around the time that I became the Archbishop of Melbourne, that there was a growing awareness of the issue of child sexual abuse, and of the fact that such offences had been committed by clergy and Church personnel. There was understandable attention being paid to the issue in the media and in public debate.'

This evidence highlights two problems. First, there was the institutional problem of clericalism that infected the Catholic Church at least until 1996. A bishop as competent as (now) Cardinal Pell was able to be oblivious to the problem and to lack curiosity about how it was being handled in his archdiocese even though he occupied for nine critical years what most of us would see as the position of 2IC – second in charge. He was after all not just any auxiliary bishop.

As an auxiliary bishop, he was already a member of the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and thrice appointed Vatican Visitor to various overseas seminaries. It is not too worldly to observe that he was always known to be going places up the Catholic hierarchy, and he has. He was seen by the Roman authorities as one of our best. He was the Vatican's Australian 'go to' bishop.

Second, there was the broader societal problem that in those days such oblivion was not restricted to high ranking, ever promoted clerics. As a community we did not know enough about the issue, and we did not do enough to respond. It was not just the Catholic bishops. The Royal Commission with time to conclude its task in a timely manner should be able to help the Church and the whole Australian community in its commitment to truth, justice, compassion, and healing.

This brings me to my longstanding fear about a national inquiry of this sort in our Australian federation. Justice McClellan and his fellow commissioners have to do more to bring the states and territories to the table and to get real buy-in by all governments. The mainstream media have been very neglectful of this part of McClellan's challenge.

This last week, we have seen the disastrous consequences with another royal commission which failed to take account of the role of state governments. The Royal Commission into the Home Insulation Program produced a report which is a dog's breakfast. The mainstream media has been oblivious to the report's glaring shortcomings, focusing more on the party politics of the blame game.

That royal commission concluded that the Commonwealth when administering the program should not have relied on the states to implement their own occupational health and safety laws, their own employment training requirements or their own building regulations.

The Commissioner, Mr Ian Hanger QC, reported, 'To rely on the State and Territory regimes to police their respective workplace health and safety laws seems to me to have been misguided, as those regimes are largely reactive. That is, when an incident happens the workplace health and safety regulators or electrical safety regulators investigate, report and, if appropriate, take enforcement action. What was, in my view, required of the Australian Government with the HIP (Home Insulation Program) was the provision of some preventative measures to attempt to mitigate some of the obvious workplace health and safety risks endemic to the HIP.'

And yet, the Commission went on to suggest that the Commonwealth should have considered having the states, rather than the Commonwealth, implement the whole program.

The regrettable deaths of the four young men working on the Home Insulation Program were the result of problems in administration at the Commonwealth and State levels and in delayed, poor communication between Commonwealth and State officials, especially in Queensland where three of the four men worked and died.

In reaching his bizarre conclusions, the royal commissioner received little help from government. He observed: 'With very few exceptions, the public servant witnesses chose not to make any submissions. Quite extraordinarily, in my view, the Commonwealth chose not to make submissions when given the opportunity to do so. It made some desultory submissions in reply to the submissions of the pre-existing insulation business owners and the State of Queensland.' A royal commission set up to investigate only the Commonwealth Government, especially when receiving inadequate co-operation from the Commonwealth Government, was bound to provide an inadequate and flawed report.

When investigating child abuse, the Commonwealth royal commission needs to be very attentive to, and scrutinising of, state governments, especially their police forces and their child welfare departments. They are the key agencies which intersect with institutions where child abuse has occurred or is likely to occur. Justice McClellan will not be able to provide a national blueprint for the future protection of children unless there is real and forced buy-in by the states.

The omens are not good. When the most appalling instances of child sexual abuse by a South Australian public servant came to light last month, the South Australian government moved immediately to set up its own royal commission. The South Australian commission is to report on many matters including:

• The assessment, by relevant authorities, of persons who work and volunteer with children in the custody and/or under the guardianship of the Minister;

• Management, training, supervision and ongoing oversight of persons who work and volunteer with children in the custody and/or under the guardianship of the Minister;

• The reporting of, investigation of and handling of complaints about care concerns, abuse or neglect of children cared for in the custody and/or under the guardianship of the Minister.

These are the very matters within Justice McClellan's federal remit – agreed to by all governments, including South Australia (see the terms of reference). There was not the national political will to insist that the corrupted South Australian agency be subjected to the same national spotlight as has been, and quite rightly, Cardinal Pell.

McClellan now has the time and the money to do a comprehensive report. State police forces and state child welfare agencies must be put under the national spotlight, and state governments need to make detailed submissions as to how they can improve their agencies for the protection of children. Otherwise McClellan risks becoming another Hanger.