AUSTRALIA
Eureka Street
[with video]
Moira Rayner November 12, 2012
A Royal Commission is or should be a rare sight. A Royal Commission is a short-term, immensely powerful ‘star chamber’ set up by the executive. They should be few, because governments shouldn’t be allowed to force people to give evidence, possibly incriminate themselves and be exposed to public obloquy, without compelling reason.
There is such reason, and the blood has been crying out for justice for far too long. Adult survivors of sex crimes against them as children, by men who presented as the personification of God, have seen their assailants protected by the institutions they worked in. They and their advocates were finally backed up, surprisingly by police. It takes the force to confront the misuse of force.
It started with the Victorian Police Commissioner’s submission to the feeble Parliamentary inquiry established by Premier Baillieu this year. He was scathing about the local Catholic Church’s obstruction of police investigations and its staggeringly complete failure to report known paedophile priests.
Then Peter Fox, a senior Newcastle police officer, went public and, in his own words, ‘threw away’ his career by demanding a Royal Commission into these cover-ups. When he was, instead, handed an inquiry into the response to reported sex crimes in his own district, the ensuing public disgust became politically necessary to assuage.
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