A Nazi in the ranks and the end of Pell

New Politics: Australian Politics

Dominic Perrottet claims that he was naïve and didn’t really understand the consequences of his actions of wearing a Nazi costume to his 21st birthday party but, to put this in context, Perrottet is 40 years old, which means his 21st was held in 2003 – and at that time, he was a member of the Young Liberals, he was in his third year of university, and any reasonable person with half a brain would realise that wearing a Nazi costume to their 21st birthday party is probably not the wisest thing to do, especially if you’ve got political aspirations.
But this has got nothing to do the costume itself: it’s more to do with political payback and who’s going to lead the Right faction of the Liberal Party after a likely election loss at the NSW state election in March.
George Pell died last week – conservative MPs and mainstream media, especially News Corporation have lauded Pell as a “saint of our times” and running reams of favourable coverage about how he was persecuted for his beliefs when he spent 18 months in a Victoria jail. But George Pell was not a hero at all.
He failed to report child sexual abuse in Ballarat, he practiced that long held Catholic tradition of moving offending priests from one parish to another, he wasn’t interested in listening to the victims of child sexual abuse, there were a number of allegations of historical child sexual abuse that never made it to court – Pell was found guilty of child sexual abuse in Victoria, before the high court overturned the decision 18 months later – he was also a climate change skeptic, and wanted to reduce the role of women within the Catholic church.
George Pell was a seriously flawed character and signified everything that is wrong with the Catholic church in Australia and it would have been better if his supporters acknowledged this.