The royal commission into institutional child sexual abuse, and those who failed to respond to it, announced by the Prime Minister yesterday will run well beyond the next election; indeed, may well run beyond the election beyond that.
A similar inquiry in Ireland, albeit with a wider remit to examine all forms of child abuse within Irish institutions, took 10 years. One of the outcomes is likely to be a steady drip of horrific stories and nightmarish recollections of people whose childhoods, indeed entire lives, were ruined by abuse and by the refusal of those in authority to either prevent it or acknowledge their suffering. By affording a sympathetic environment for survivors who want to tell their stories, a royal commission will per se bring a measure of comfort regardless of its eventual report.
Abuse survivors have been calling for a royal commission for a decade or more, so it has hardly arrived in a rush, but the government moved with unexpected speed given senior members were dismissing a royal commission late last week. Once Tony Abbott, who was dismissive even of the need for an apology for Catholic child sex abuse in 2008, admitted the desirability of an inquiry that did not target his church alone, there was no further political hurdle to the government taking action. Even the Catholic hierarchy had backflipped and were welcoming the inquiry by the time it was announced.
There will be some holdouts and deadenders, of course. One conservative commentator is already talking about a “witch-hunt”. But the inquiry is likely to be a transformative event. The Irish inquiry permanently altered, and diminished, the role the Catholic Church plays in Irish society.
Anyone who has witnessed the progress of major Australian royal commissions, especially those at a state level, will also be aware that it is impossible to predict the course of the inquiry before it starts, which is one of the reasons major parties are reluctant to initiate them. Terms of reference are the only way politicians can control them; once they are up and running, it is impossible to rein them in.
Those of us who expected major party politicians to be dragged slowly to such a decision, if they ever reached it, must admit to being wrong: recent revelations and the sense that the full story would never be exposed without a significant change of approach have clearly motivated MPs on all sides to look beyond their traditional reluctance to resort to royal commissions.
One calculation would have been that this issue is not going anywhere: there will be a steady stream of further revelations regardless of whether there was a royal commission, each one begging the question of why a national approach wasn’t being taken. Better to embrace a royal commission now than look as if they’d been dragged unwillingly to one in a month’s time, or next year.
For once both the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition looked leader-like on an issue that needed it. This minority government and the Parliament that produced it may never be well-regarded by voters, but its legacy for hundreds of thousands of Australians affected by child abuse is likely to be a positive one.
Sorry Bernard, to many of us it is not a political issue, but the exposure of a cancer that has been lingering in closeted communities where the standards of nurturing and protectiion of our young and developing community members has been abused.
Both Aggott and the PM should be congratulated for acting, the shame we must endure is the decadel tardiness to act.
My worry is that the terms of this Royal Commission will be so wide that there will be no real outcome, and none of the perpetrators will end up with a criminal conviction. But of course the Politician will be able to declare that they can’t discuss it because they don’t want to compromise the Royal Commission. Perhaps my judgement is blurred because I don’t trust politicians
“[H]undreds of thousands”?
I hope that this is an exaggeration.
JRAPQQ: Your mistrust of politicians, whilst entirely admirable, should in no way allow you to trust the so-called men of God. Already Father Brennan-Lateline ABC last night-has stated he would rather go to jail than allow what’s said in the confessional, by a perpetrator, to be disseminated.
And in Victoria the Premier, Ted Baillieu, has already capitulated to the Catholic church by exempting it from mandatory reporting.
While the Prime Minister deserves praise for her courageous decision on the child sex abuse scandal, the unfortunate reality is that this RC will lead to nothing. The Catholic Church is just too powerful, too wealthy and supported by too many vested interests. They have a history or perpetrating the most horrific crimes for seventeen centuries, they always got away with it and they will continue to do so. It’s a shame because that is another false expectation for the victims and this will only add to their suffering.
The systematic abuse and rape of the most vulnerable in our society is an institutional problem. Even if a very small proportion of these crimes were committed by members of any other institution the heads and leaders of that institution would be standing before the courts now, they would be jailed for a very long time and the institution would collapse. Not so with the Church. There is no way that the cardinals and the bishops, who as the leaders and managers are the real culprits and ultimately responsible for these monstrosities, will ever be brought to justice. And what about the Pope, does anybody think that the Pope, as the global CEO of this organization, will ever respond for these crimes and systematic cover ups?
George Pell is already signalling what are his expectations; the Church will be cleared of any wrong doing and vindicated as a victim of what he called “selective reporting”. That is exactly what will happen, ten years from now or even more. The politicians, the police, the journalists will come and go, but the Catholic Church will stay. They will achieve this result with yet more cover ups, character assassination, harassment and massive payouts. And also because they still control around 20% of the voting population. This is just a walk in the park for an organization that tortured and burnt hundreds of thousands of innocent people at the stake, committed genocides all around the world and wiped out entire cultures and civilizations.
This immunity is intrinsic to their existence and essential to their survival. Organised religions can’t be treated as any other organization because they can’t stand up to any reasonable scrutiny. They have a direct line to the imaginary friend in the sky!