AUSTRALIA
Red Flag
Louise O’Shea
We know that when Tony Abbott doesn’t approve of something, he is not backward in coming forward about it.
He’s made no secret, for instance, of his disapproval of refugees attempting to get to Australia by boat, Aboriginal people indulging their “lifestyle choices” in remote communities and women who access more than one maternity leave entitlement.
And that’s before we even get to the Islamic State, which Abbott has denounced as a “death cult” a whopping 346 times since last September.
But amid all this frenzied disapproval and moral righteousness, the abuse and sexual assault of thousands, if not tens of thousands, of children in Catholic schools, orphanages and churches, and the systematic cover-up of this abuse by the church hierarchy, fails even to rate a mention from that otherwise indefatigable moral crusader.
Asked whether he considered it morally sound for cardinal Pell to refuse to return to Australia to front the Royal Commission into Institutional Child Sexual Abuse, Abbott declined to express disapproval.
That Pell has been asked to face allegations that he offered bribes to silence sexual abuse victims, covered up priests’ crimes and failed to act on sexual abuse complaints appears to matter not a bit to Abbott who, in 2013, described the cardinal as a “fine human being” and “great churchman”.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.