AUSTRALIA
The Guardian
Adam Brereton
@adambrereton
The moment when things went wrong for victims of child abuse in Australia was a very precise one. In the 1990s, Jeff Kennett, then premier of Victoria, met with George Pell, who was at that stage the Catholic archbishop of Melbourne. According to Pell, Kennett told him to “clean this [child abuse] thing up and there won’t be a royal commission”.
Kennett told The Age last year that he was “reassured that George said ‘yes’, he’d get stuck into it … it’s not for me to sit in judgment … of whether the response was adequate or not”.
We know what the church’s action was: Pell took matters into his own hands and set up the Melbourne Response in 1996. In doing so, he went out ahead of the rest of the church which, we know from the commission, was in the process of developing a more integrated, national version of what would become its response to abuse, Towards Healing.
By being unconcerned with the quality of the church’s response and leaving it to its own devices, Kennett made a serious mistake.
His response laid bare a question that the commission is now grappling with: do we believe the state has a moral duty to care for its vulnerable citizens, or not? Of course, many don’t believe that governments should “sit in judgment” on matters that are properly the domain of the private sector, civil society, or the impersonal order of the market.
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