AUSTRALIA
The Age
Opinion
Barney Zwartz
Parliament’s committee is secretive, evasive and doing the minimum it can get away with.
IT SEEMS the parliamentary inquiry into the churches’ handling of clergy sex abuse has learnt at least one thing from submissions about the Catholic Church: how to operate in as much secrecy as it can manage while apparently doing the minimum it can get away with.
Its public examination in the two hearings – one a half day – it has managed since the inquiry was called in April is not even a once-over lightly, it is a hovercraft floating above the surface: shallow, short, shocking.
The longer this inquiry goes on – or rather doesn’t really go on – the more questions arise. But they hang in a vacuum, because the committee chaired by Georgie Crozier will not even explain why it won’t explain. In this deliberately engineered information vacuum, it is hard to work out whether this is sinister, or incompetent or merely bureaucratic.
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