TWO COUNTRY COPS
I believe we must do everything we can to make sure that what has happened in the past is never allowed to happen again.
Julia Gillard, 2012, announcing the creation of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse
In 2012, two things happened in the Australian media that lobbed grenades into the Church’s power structures and, in the process, straight at the nation’s most senior Catholic, George Pell. They both concerned country cops who could no longer bear the burden of picking up the pieces of child sexual abuse in their districts.
The first cop put together for the first time a series of suicides, principally in Pell’s home town of Ballarat. The second was a police officer from New South Wales who came forward with what he knew. He had nothing really to do with Pell, but would change the life and Church of the Cardinal.
On 13 April 2012, The Age’s investigative team splashed on page one a story which shocked anyone unfolding the broadsheet with their morning coffee. ‘Confidential police reports have detailed the suicides of at least 40 people sexually abused by Catholic clergy in Victoria, and have urged a new inquiry into these and many other deaths suspected to be linked to abuse in the church,’ the story began. The leaked police report the newspaper had obtained was written by Ballarat detective Kevin Carson, who had been for decades investigating the likes of Father Gerald Francis Ridsdale and the paedophile Christian Brothers of Ballarat’s St Alipius.
Carson, who was not quoted in the story, was weary of, with his collegues, finding bodies with slashed wrists in baths, prising men out of cars crashed in single vehicle accidents, cutting down blokes on ropes, attending at the homes of mothers and wives and brothers and sisters who would wail at the loss of their loved one. He and some of his Ballarat colleagues were sickened by the silence of the Catholic Church. The victims who had survived this torrent of abuse in that town and in Melbourne were calling for an urgent inquiry into the Church. The story featured a series of photographs of those who had died and quoted Dr Vivian Waller, the dogged lawyer who represents probably more victims of abuse than any other solicitor in Victoria, saying any inquiry would discover an ‘epidemic of abuse’.
This story would go on, some years later, to spark an ugly series of events, but when it landed, it forced then-Victorian Premier Ted Baillieu to act. Four days after the story was published, Baillieu announced a parliamentary Inquiry into the Handling of Child Abuse by Religious and Other Organisations in Victoria. Survivors at the time were happy that finally someone, somewhere, was going to investigate the obfuscation, the corruption that they had borne the brunt of. The inquiry was chaired by a no-nonsense Liberal non-Catholic, Georgie Crozier. Her deputy was Christian Brothers–educated Frank McGuire, the member for the working-class electorate of Broadmeadows. The inquiry was not limited to the Catholic Church, but its report, Betrayal of Trust, said the majority of the evidence heard related to the Church’s parishes, schools and homes.
Later that year, on 8 November 2012, the comments of another country cop impelled another politician to finally call the Royal Commission that survivors had been demanding. The second country cop came from another ferociously Catholic diocese, Newcastle. His name was Chief Inspector Peter Fox. The politician was the first female prime minister of Australia: Julia Gillard.
Peter Fox was a 30-year veteran with the force and he went rogue, writing a letter to NSW Premier Barry O’Farrell, and appearing on an interview with the ABC’s Tony Jones on Lateline. He spoke of the rampant culture of sexual abuse by clergy and the cover-ups by the Church’s Newcastle Diocese.
It was a stark interview. Fox, in a dark suit and burgundy tie, sat and gave Jones a horrific catalogue of things that he knew.
‘I think most people would be absolutely crumpled up in tears to hear it,’ Fox began. ‘Whether you’re the Premier of New South Wales or you’re just somebody sitting back watching this on TV tonight, it’s got to move you. It can’t but move you. It’s terrible.’
Fox, who had been collaborating with Newcastle Herald journalist Joanne McCarthy—who later won the Graham Perkin Australian Journalist of the Year Award for her work in this area—wrote to O’Farrell that day: ‘I can testify from my own experience the Church covers up, silences victims, hinders police investigations, alerts offenders, destroys evidence and moves priests to protect the good name of the Church.’
It was the sort of thing that at that time, you would almost never hear a police officer go on television to say without the approval of his bosses. Fox had no such approval. He made some alarming allegations about police colluding with the Church—ultimately the NSW Special Commission of Inquiry set up immediately after the interview aired found that those could not be substantiated. Margaret Cunneen, the silk appointed to oversee the inquiry, ultimately found that Fox was not a credible witness because essentially, like many whistleblowers, he’d become clouded with emotion and lost objectivity. It was a bruising experience for Fox.
However, many of the Fox allegations about the Church would be stacked up by Cunneen. Not just that, it was glaringly apparent that what was going on in the Newcastle Diocese was but a microcosm of what had taken place in dioceses across the country—and none more than the diocese that made Pell—Ballarat—and the archdiocese that Pell remade in his name—Melbourne.
Within three days of Peter Fox’s first appearance on Lateline, basically as soon as she got back from an overseas engagement in Bali, Prime Minister Gillard announced a Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.
‘Australians know … that too many children have suffered child abuse, but have also seen other adults let them down—they’ve not only had their trust betrayed by the abuser but other adults who could have acted to assist them have failed to do so,’ Gillard told reporters. ‘There have been too many revelations of adults who have averted their eyes from this evil. I believe we must do everything we can to make sure that what has happened in the past is never allowed to happen again.’
It was perhaps to be Gillard’s most lasting legacy—one that could not be substantively peeled back by successive governments from the other side. ‘At a time when we were being hammered in the press for no matter what we did,’ her Deputy Prime Minister and Treasurer, Wayne Swan, tells me, ‘Julia was determined to do the right thing. She did not flinch or agonise, she just did it.’
But Swan was right about the hammering. Even at the time, some portrayed it as a distraction from the real issues, as policy on the run.
‘The dismal, populist and doomed quality of Australian governance has been on display this week with Julia Gillard announcing an in-principle royal commission into child sexual abuse, a panicked Tony Abbott falling into line and an ignorant media offering cheer upon cheer,’ The Australian’s Paul Kelly proclaimed in a column after the announcement. ‘This decision has plunged Australia into a multi-jurisdictional, multi-institutional, state-church, high-cost shambles where nobody knows how the massive expectations of victims can be satisfied.’
Kelly was also critical of Pell, whose press conference in reaction to the Royal Commission announcement he described as a ‘catastrophe’. ‘Pell is unable to project a convincing sense of compassion, reform and healing,’ Kelly wrote. ‘Pell looms as a huge liability in the institutional crisis now facing the Catholic Church in Australia.’
Pell had privately and publicly thanked Gillard for not confining the whole thing to the Catholic Church and said he welcomed the Royal Commission. But the press conference Kelly referred to was widely received as a car crash.
‘We think it’s an opportunity to help the victims; it’s an opportunity to clear the air, to separate fact from fiction,’ the Cardinal began. ‘We are not interested in denying the extent of misdoing in the Catholic Church.’
But. But. But. ‘We object to it being exaggerated, we object to being described as the “only cab on the rank”.’
Peter Blenkiron, an alma mater of Pell’s old school, St Patrick’s, who was abused by Brother Edward Dowlan, a serial predator who got pretty much every kid in Blenkiron’s class, was watching. ‘“The only cab on the rank”—he used a trucking analogy,’ Blenkiron says, his pale blue eyes widening at the thought of it. ‘He seems to have a mentality where he is completely dissociated from the impacts and his ability to look at the reality.’
Blenkiron’s friend Andrew Collins, a survivor of a shocking four abusers, says the cab on the rank analogy also misses the point. ‘Well yeah, they weren’t the only cab on the rank but they essentially legitimised all the other abuse, because if the clergy are abusing kids, it can’t be that bad.
‘If the police are aware that Father So and So is abusing kids, it can’t be such a bad thing, can it, if the highest moral authority on the planet’s doing it?’
Later in the press conference came Pell’s old trope: the siege mentality.
There is a persistent press campaign against the Catholic Church’s adequacies and inadequacies in this area that does not necessarily represent the percentage of the problem that we offer.
In other words because there’s a press campaign focussed largely on us it does not mean that we are largely the principal culprit.
I certainly very much regret the general smearing [that] “the church is covering up, the church has done nothing”. Because that’s not the case, it’s demonstrably not the case.
Had the Church done ‘nothing’? No, the Cardinal was absolutely right. Had the Church covered up? Yes. Again and again and again. In almost every diocese where paedophile priests roamed. What Pell would characterise as a ‘smearing’ would turn out to be an unabashed statement of fact. As the Royal Commission would later find, between 1950 and 2010, a staggering 4444 people alleged incidents of child sexual abuse to ninety-three Catholic Church authorities concerning 1880 perpetrators. The average age of victims at the time of the abuse was 10.5 for girls and 11.6 for boys. The average time it took for them to come forward was thirty-three years. And when they did come forward? Obfuscation. Cover-up. Excuses. Lack of empathy. ‘The statistics kept hitting me one after another, to be perfectly frank,’ the Truth, Justice and Healing Council’s Francis Sullivan told me in February 2017. ‘These are extraordinary numbers, they absolutely undermine our whole sense of what people are doing in religious life. They undermine our confidence in the whole vocation of the priesthood.
‘And for decades, inside the Church, individuals and leaders have known these sorts of numbers. And they haven’t, frankly, done enough, to demonstrate that they want the Church cleaned up.’
Sullivan told me that he was looking forward to the Commission being over. That day, he had fought back tears as he gave a statement. ‘You know, I’m a Catholic, I actually believe in the show,’ he told me.
‘Still?’ I said, looking at the crumpled man in front of me.
‘Still. And that’s pretty profound when you have to stand there and face what is such a hypocritical history.’
If Pell hoped that sorting the fact from the fiction would paint things in a more positive light for his Church, that would prove not to be. But back in 2012, he shot the messengers. The messengers seated in front of him in that press conference.
‘One question I think that might be asked is just to what extent the victims are helped by the continuing furore in the press over these allegations,’ he began. ‘The pursuit of justice is an absolute entitlement for everyone. That being said, to what extent are wounds simply opened by the re-running of events which have been reported not only once but many times previously?’
The Royal Commission was to discover many stories that had never been heard before. And of those that had, it was in the mountain of documents that the real truth began to emerge. The previously legally privileged material which showed the lengths that the Church and its lawyers went to, for instance, to stop Ellis from being compensated. Sometimes the tell is not so much in a single bombshell, but in the drip, drip, drip of bitchy asides, spectacularly insensitive legal letters, the revelations of just how much money went to lawyers in defending this whole damned mess and obstructing anyone who tried to get justice.
As Chrissie Foster, who will forever grieve the death of her daughter Emma and be responsible for the care of her other daughter Katie, says to me, all of the galling information that has since been discovered about the gross cover-up of the destruction of countless lives of little children would never have come out were it not for the fortitude of the victims, the fearlessness of the whistleblowers and the media who told their stories. Only that forced the politicians to finally act. Only that meant that there ever was a Royal Commission. When people from the Catholic Church complain, for example, that airing allegations against Pell constitutes a ‘trial by media’, they might remember that.