BishopAccountability.org

Turning a blind eye to child sexual abuse

By Hedley Thoma
Australian
August 02, 2017

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/inquirer/turning-a-blind-eye-to-child-sexual-abuse/news-story/6323817cbc0332be6a9d457072b4320d

Peter Hollingworth leaves a hearing of the ongoing royal commission.
Photo by Nikki Davis-Jones

Peter Hollingworth with the Queen and John Howard in 2002, the year of the Brisbane Inquiry.

When Australia’s ongoing $500 million Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse makes a legally binding finding that a governor-general, Peter Hollingworth, misled an earlier child sexual abuse inquiry about his ­direct knowledge and handling of a priest’s pedophilia, should anything happen?

Can taxpayer-funded entitlements of more than $500,000 a year for a vice-regal pension and other perks be withheld from someone found this year to have misled an inquiry at the time he held the country’s highest public office 15 years ago?

These are questions Malcolm Turnbull has been asked to consider for child sexual abuse sur­vivors. They are perplexed that the commission’s adverse findings in February this year went largely under the public radar but say Hollingworth should nevertheless be parted from a public purse that has paid out more than $6m for his pension and expenses since he resigned as Australia’s 23rd governor-general.

The historical context is key. During a term as governor-general that lasted just 23 months until he quit amid public opprobrium in May 2003, Hollingworth, the former Anglican archbishop of Brisbane, faced grave accusations about his role in an alarming series of child sexual abuse cases in the diocese. The perpetrators were clergy and teachers in the Anglican churches and schools while he was in charge for 12 years until 2001.

His supporters said at the time that he was unfairly hounded from Yarralumla in an emotion-charged political stitch-up. His critics and child sexual abuse survivors, who say he got off lightly with lifetime financial trappings of high office intact, want the Prime Minister to weigh the royal commission’s findings this year, which flickered briefly in a busy media cycle amid unrelenting focus on the Catholic Church and its Cardinal George Pell.

One of the survivors of the serial abuse in the Diocese of Brisbane — call him Wilson — points to the major abuse cases during Hollingworth’s leadership as archbishop to highlight striking similarities. Patterns of concealment or containment, misinformation to parents and the public, failure to alert police, keeping offenders employed and with access to children, and the fobbing off of victims are evident in the cases in Hollingworth’s diocese examined by the Supreme Court, the current royal commission and The Australian.

Wilson says this was unforgivable conduct, compounded in subsequent years when Hollingworth, by then ensconced as the Queen’s representative in Australia, misled what was known as the Brisbane Inquiry — an Anglican Church-sponsored investigation in 2002 that revolved around his and other clergy’s handling of cases of the molestation of children under his watch.

“I understand that Hollingworth is an old man. It will likely impact hard upon him to be properly stripped of his undeserved ­entitlements,’’ Wilson says.

“I do not ask for this action to now be taken in order to be cruel to the man. I have more empathy for him than he has ever shown to victims of abuse under his care.

“But it must be remembered that he was the architect of a culture that permitted abuse, cover-up and rewarded loyalty over integrity. He has admitted choosing to protect church assets knowing that it was at the expense of the lives and wellbeing of young children. Without him and the culture he endorsed, so many sex offenders could not have flourished in the diocese and operated with impunity.

“When exposed, he refused to acknowledge culpability, first denying that he ever had direct knowledge — this had been disproved by documents including letters written by himself. He maintained the culture throughout his entire reign including up to his departure and even into his role as governor-general with his (misleading) statements.

“The action I am requesting should have been taken 15 years ago. The fact that the right thing was not done at the time is not an argument against doing the right thing now.

“The impact of his misconduct while governor-general … has been to cause significant obstruction of justice for 15 years, ongoing harm and suffering to victims, and enormous expense to the taxpayer.

“Now at a time when working Australians are being asked to tighten their belts … it is untenable to allow this man such lavish and generous entitlements …”

The Brisbane Inquiry to which Hollingworth reluctantly submitted as a newly minted governor-general in 2002 was meant to be a circuit-breaker amid intense political and public pressure on the Anglican Church, the then prime minister, John Howard, and his new captain’s pick.

At the time, there was growing unease over Hollingworth’s management of pedophiles and their victims. He was in charge of the diocese and Anglican Schools Commission until his June 2001 elevation to be governor-general.

In 2002, the Brisbane Inquiry, started by Hollingworth’s successor, Archbishop Phillip Aspinall, had none of the extraordinary powers of a royal commission to run forensic investigations without fear or favour, prise evidence under subpoena, hold public hearings, take testimony under oath and threaten lying witnesses with jail for perjury.

But despite its limitations and gentler, closed-door approach under Melbourne barrister Peter O’Callaghan QC and child abuse expert Freda Briggs (who died last year), the Brisbane Inquiry was not an abject failure. By late 2002, it had put Hollingworth, other key witnesses and a raft of important documents, letters and confidential correspondence with pedophiles, psychiatrists and victims on the record.

This trove of evidence did not disappear in the ensuing years.

The preservation of the files, the openness of appalled witnesses and abuse victims, the discovery of more material not previously presented, and subsequent investigations by sex abuse survivors including Wilson were a gift for the royal commission years later.

The ongoing royal commission examined the Brisbane Inquiry’s material, then went further to make its early 2017 finding that as Australia’s serving governor-general, The Right Reverend Dr Peter John Hollingworth AC OBE had been misleading in 2002 about his direct and documented knowledge of pedophilia by an Anglican priest.

He misled the Brisbane Inquiry in 2002 about his contact with people who had brought the molestation to his personal attention in the 1990s. He had knowledge of expert advice about the likelihood of further abuse, but he permitted the serial-offending priest, John Elliot, to continue.

It can be seen that his misleading of the Brisbane Inquiry 15 years ago had the effect of distancing himself to make it appear he knew less than was the case.

The current royal commission has a mandate (it is part of its title) to investigate “institutional responses to child sexual abuse”. It made its findings about Hollingworth after collecting the evidence including from the Brisbane Inquiry, testing witnesses, and questioning him under oath.

Survivors of the abuse say that if Hollingworth’s misleading of the Brisbane Inquiry had been a finding of that inquiry in 2003 (instead of by the royal commission in 2017), his appointment might have been immediately terminated at the time for misconduct in office. Instead, he quit in May 2003, triggering the financial rewards that routinely go to appointees.

It was a forced resignation. The cumulative impact of him having lost the confidence of the opposition, senior figures in the ­Coalition and ordinary Australians had made his position impossible by late May.

People close to Hollingworth say he has never recovered from it. They say that after a lifetime of community service, he paid an extraordinarily heavy price for lamentable decisions over pedophilia.

Shortly before he went there was a finding from the Brisbane Inquiry (which he rejected at the time as unfair) that as archbishop he had exercised very poor ­judgment in his handling of Elliot. There were revelations from a civil case of shocking sexual assaults of girls by a boarding master at Toowoomba Preparatory School, in a scandal now the subject of a motion picture, Don’t Tell.

There were also Hollingworth’s media statements as governor-general about child sexual abuse, including to the ABC’s Australian Story in which he said a 14-year-old girl having sex with an adult priest, Donald Shearman, was “not sex abuse … my information is rather that it is the other way around”. And there were untested allegations, which he stren­uously denied, that he had raped a woman on a church camp. She subsequently committed suicide.

In the 14 years since he moved out of Yarralumla, taxpayers have paid more than $6m for his pension and other expenses. Documents released under Freedom of Information by the Department of the Prime Minister to Wilson in June show the yearly cost to the public purse to lease Hollingworth’s Melbourne CBD office, excluding the $100,000-plus for the staff who work in it, totals more than $140,000 a year.

A lifetime pension for his brief stint at Government House is about $300,000, indexed for inflation. Hollingworth remains a bishop with Holy Orders.

When the royal commission was in its infancy, Wilson lobbied it quietly to conduct public hearings to examine Hollingworth’s role in multiple cases in the Diocese of Brisbane. Wilson says the limited investigations that ensued only scratched the surface.

This is backed up by the royal commission’s own findings that the Diocese of Brisbane had attracted more child sexual abuse complaints, by a significant margin, than any of the other 22 Anglican dioceses across Australia. Brisbane drew one-third of complaints. The worst decade for offending was the 90s, during Hollingworth’s leadership (1989-2001). There were shocking clusters of events involving lone perpetrators and dozens, perhaps hundreds, of child victims, mostly boys. The mishandling under Hollingworth of each successive crisis did not fundamentally change over the years.

The Australian sought an interview with Hollingworth to discuss the royal commission findings and his expressions, during his time in the witness box, of regret and sorrow over how he had let down child victims. He declined. In an email he said: “It is utterly untrue that I deliberately misled the Brisbane Inquiry or the royal omission. I have acknowledged errors of judgment in my handling of cases of sexual abuse and acknowledged struggling with my memory of discussions and documents from many years past, particularly when I had no access to documents to refresh my memory.

“I have also expressed my regret and made apologies with respect to these matters. But I have never deliberately misled, nor have I sought to cover up or protect paedophiles.”

Hollingworth accepts that he gave misleading information to the Brisbane Inquiry in 2002. But was he intentionally misleading? His insistence that he had not deliberately misled the Brisbane Inquiry was specifically not accepted by the royal commission earlier this year. His lawyers urged it to qualify its proposed findings by inserting the word “unintentionally” but the commission refused.

In another part of its findings adverse to Hollingworth, the commission found that it “must have been apparent” to him at the time that he was providing wrong information to the inquiry in 2002 during its investigative phase.

Hollingworth sent The Australian an article in which he was described by his solicitor Bill Doogue as “an exceptionally decent man who has given service to the community for almost the whole of his adult life”, and that he had been “extremely hard done by in the … royal commission and savaged by the media in circumstances that did not warrant it”.

Among other serious cases, the Brisbane Inquiry in 2002 looked at Hollingworth’s well-documented decisions — against expert psychiatric advice and after he had been advised of multiple offences on multiple occasions against multiple victims — to permit Elliot to continue in a small parish through the 90s.

The brother of one of the victims wrote to Hollingworth: “I know that you know of John ­Elliot’s activities and my brother’s case. What I can’t work out is why you, sir would harbour a man who you know has sexually assaulted children for years, by letting him have a nice job in a quiet town away from the vicinity of his disgusting crimes.’’

Hollingworth replied to the brother: “At the end of the day I made the judgment that he is now getting close to retirement and the disruption and upset that would be caused to the whole parish, as well as to him and his family, would be in nobody’s best interests.”

Hollingworth told Elliot in writing “no good purpose can be served in my requiring you to relinquish your pastoral responsibility as Rector of Dalby”; and “the matter which has exercised my mind most strongly is that your departure at this stage could cause unintended consequences that would make things worse for you and the Church”; and “the major difficulty is that in not taking disciplinary action, I and the Church could subsequently be charged with culpability while at the same time an act of removing you would place you in an impossible situation at your age and stage in life”.

In a handwritten note as Elliot’s retirement loomed in 1997, Hollingworth wrote beneath his formal typed letter: “Thank you John for your ministry and service to the Diocese. I’ll write further closer to the time of your retirement.”

In another letter two years later, Hollingworth, who by then had also granted Elliot an authority to officiate post-retirement, thanked him again for his further work for the diocese and added that it was “valued by all”. In this letter he confided his unease about the potential for “complaints against clergy with regard to possible insurance ramifications”. Hollingworth added that he did not wish to “raise any further anxieties for you”, but he wanted Elliot to be aware of “potential for legal action on the part of aggrieved individuals, some of whom may feel it is now open season to do so”.

Eventually, victims and their families (not Hollingworth or his clergy) went to police, and Elliot, who pleaded guilty, was jailed over numerous counts of the molestation and sodomy of boys going back decades.

When Hollingworth related the Elliot matter to the Brisbane Inquiry in December 2002 at a time when the damning letters from as recently as three years earlier had not been produced or found, his statement said: “Dr Hollingworth had no reason to believe that the incident with the (two brothers) was anything other than a single, isolated and distant occurrence.” Evidence including documents show this claim was ­always a furphy.

The May 2003 finding by the Brisbane Inquiry was that “no bishop acting reasonably could have reached the decision to continue a known pedophile in the ministry. There were no extenuating circumstances, nor can the board imagine any that could have justified his continuance”.

They were findings echoed by the royal commission when it went further in 2017, describing it as a serious error of judgment that failed to take into account the need to protect children. The commission noted that the diocese “agreed to cover (the whistleblowing victim’s) therapy up to the value of $500 on the condition that any notes taken during the session regarding his abuse were provided to the diocese”. The young man, whose evidence was preferred by the royal commission over that of Hollingworth, rejected the cursory offer. He funded his own therapy.




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