AUSTRALIA
The Australian
MARCH 07, 2015
Gerard Henderson
Columnist
[Gerard Henderson is executive director of The Sydney Institute.]
WHEN he was the Catholic archbishop of Sydney in late 2012, Cardinal George Pell welcomed then prime minister Julia Gillard’s decision to establish what became the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.
He did so on the understanding that the Catholic Church would not be the only cab on the rank.
And so it turned out to be. Over the past couple of years, the royal commission has heard evidence of past child sexual abuse within the Catholic Church, to be sure.
But also within Anglican and other Christian churches, the Salvation Army and sections of the Jewish community along with state government institutions.
Despite the evidence that child abuse has been a blight on virtually all sections of Australian society, the ABC has tended to focus its attention on the Catholic Church in general and Pell in particular.
This despite the fact that Pell was one of the first leaders in church or state to address the matter when he established the Melbourne Response, soon after taking over as Catholic archbishop of Melbourne in 1996.
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