Child abuse victims deserve more than the commonwealth's excuses
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”.
