AUSTRALIA
Brisbane Times
April 1, 2014
Michael Pascoe
Cardinal George Pell is not normally mentioned in the same breath as Julia Gillard – it’s the other side of politics that has been much closer to him – but the departed Prime Minister and departing Archbishop of Sydney have something in common that should stand as a stark governance warning to every board and CEO in the nation: they’ve been incalculably damaged by abandoning principles.
Both were seduced by the siren call of the ends supposedly justifying the means, and therefore were prepared to do wrong that inevitably has come back to haunt them and damage the very institutions they were trying to protect.
For Pell, preserving the church’s assets justified the persecution of a damaged man, as detailed by royal commission hearings last week and masterfully summarised by David Marr. The final result is that the church sustained greater damage, its machinations exposed for ridicule, never mind blowing $1.5 million on the case. Pell leaves for Rome a permanently diminished figure.
For Gillard, hanging on to the Treasury benches and her position justified standing by Craig Thomson and running soft on union corruption long after the stench of Thomson’s actions put him beyond the pale. The Peter Slipper deal was done as a means of betraying a commitment to poker machine reform. And there was the little matter of a carbon tax.
And how did all that play out for her? Dumped by her party as leader, regarded as compromised by the majority of the electorate, Labor lost government without being able to cement its headline reforms, their future already uncertain, and left an opening for a royal commission that will prolong the labour movement’s woes.
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