Andrews fights anti-Pell culture war into the grave

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews. Picture : NCA NewsWire / Nicki Connolly

Not for the first time, Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews was unable to contain his antipathy on Thursday towards Cardinal George Pell and the robust Christianity he represented.

For a political leader who normally rejects hypothetical questions, Mr Andrews elaborated at length on a hypothetical point – why he would not be offering a state funeral for the cardinal, who died from a cardiac arrest on Tuesday after a hip replacement in Rome.

“I couldn’t think of anything more distressing for victim survivors,” Mr Andrews said, playing to the radical left that wants Christianity banished from the public square. “These things are usually offered and there will be no offer made. I think that would be a deeply, deeply distressing thing for every survivor of Catholic Church child sex abuse. That is my view. And I will not do that.”

It was hot air and Mr Andrews knew it. No request has been made and Cardinal Pell, who had not lived in Victoria for more than 20 years, will be buried in St Mary’s Cathedral, Sydney, after a requiem mass.

Mr Andrews’ performance was in keeping with his reaction in April 2020 when the High Court, 7-0, quashed Cardinal Pell’s five convictions on historic child sex abuse offences for which he served 13 months’ jail, mainly in solitary confinement with little access to the sacraments. After the High Court judgment, Mr Andrews issued a brief statement. “I have a message for every single victim and survivor of child sex abuse: I see you. I hear you. I believe you,” he said.

His apparent indifference to the fact that a gross miscarriage of justice had been remedied, and his underlying message of a “presumption of guilt”, were extraordinary. Mr Andrews should have been more concerned about explaining how such a miscarriage of justice came about. Plenty of questions needed to be answered. These included why the police went after Cardinal Pell in Operation Tethering in 2013 when they had received no complaints about him, why such preposterous charges were allowed to proceed and why Victoria Police decided to charge him despite the state’s Office of Public Prosecutions twice returning briefs of evidence. Nor did the High Court’s overturning the split decision of the Court of Appeal upholding the cardinal’s convictions engender confidence in the Victorian justice system.

Former Australian Catholic University vice-chancellor and constitutional lawyer Greg Craven rightly has taken issue with Mr Andrews’ refusal to engage with concerns about the Victorian judiciary’s handling of the case. “Premier Andrews is always telling us what he respects, but apparently it doesn’t include the rule of law,” Professor Craven said. Such an injustice must not be allowed to happen again, as Chris Merritt wrote on Thursday.

For a man ready to lecture others on kindness, Mr Andrews showed little of it when Tony Abbott visited Cardinal Pell at the Melbourne Assessment Prison in December 2019. Mr Abbott and Cardinal Pell had been close friends for years. It was “shameful, absolutely shameful”, Mr Andrews pontificated, discarding 2000 years of Christian teaching about visiting prisoners.

The real issue is ideology. That became clear during the controversy last October over businessman Andrew Thorburn’s forced resignation as chief executive of the AFL’s Essendon Football Club after 30 hours in the job. He had to go because he was chairman of a small Christian church whose website contained sermons likening abortion to concentration camps and stating that acting on same-sex ­attraction was a sin.

Asked at the time whether people with religious ties should apply for public roles, Mr Andrews said: “They might want to have a think about whether they should be perhaps a bit more kind-hearted, a bit more inclusive.” There was no evidence that Mr Thorburn was not inclusive. Nor is Mr Andrews, especially to Christians such as Cardinal Pell with the temerity to express a view in the public square.