The collapse of good judgment

What goes through the mind of a convicted paedophile who hangs out at the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Historical Abuse in State Care as if he’d be welcome? More to the point, what goes through the mind of his partner, a member of the commission’s survivor advisory group? Did anybody else know his background?

Commissioner Paul Gibson learned in May that the man had criminal convictions. A more curious person in that delicate setting might have asked a few questions about the nature of the convictions. Instead the man disclosed the fact in August, and the minister responsible for the inquiry, Tracey Martin, seems to have found out this week. She declined to express confidence in the commission. To put it elegantly.

Some survivors may pull out of the inquiry, seeing the lapse in the commission’s judgment as a breach of their trust, and a shadow has fallen on Mr Gibson’s handling of the matter. The now indignant survivor group found out through media.

Chairman Sir Anand Satyanand resigned earlier this year, and leaves in November. An inquiry ‘‘ambassador’’ faces charges by the Serious Fraud Office, and a facilitator has been removed due to allegations of domestic violence.

There is an ominous echo here of what happened in Australia and the UK, where they’ve been struggling with revelations of sexual abuse in all the usual places, religious and otherwise.

The UK inquiry had its first two chairs resign, each within roughly a year, after complaints they were too cosy with people and organisations they’d have to investigate. One turned out to have an indirect link to a peer falsely accused of child sex abuse. Next they tried New Zealand judge Lowell Goddard, a complete outsider, who was soon accused of taking too much time off to travel and holiday.

At which point the largest victims’ group involved quit, describing the inquiry as a

‘‘debacle’’ that ‘‘lurched from disaster to disaster’’. A new chair took Goddard’s place.

Hopefully our inquiry won’t continue to lurch in the same embarrassing way, in a time of continuous embarrassments here and overseas. What was Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau thinking, for example, when he put on blackface three times – that we know of – as a young man who’s still a young man, actually, just older? The cringe-making photographs were bound to appear in public one day, but he seems to have been living in a fog of forgetfulness and subsequent good intentions.

There was a time when smearing your face with black shoe polish made you a bit of a dag, especially if you mimicked a fake Southern black accent while you were at it. But that was a time when people of colour knew their place at the back of the bus, and the British colonies, governed by people of a paler hue on the paint chart, brought civilisation to darker-skinned people who seemed to be forever standing under English flags, smiling, saluting, and looking ever so awfully grateful.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson harks back to those times, when the upper classes produced duffers like him by the ton in the posh schools Britain’s Labour Party wants to abolish. They all learned Latin and Greek, but the UK supreme court has ruled against the clever trick of closing down Parliament with Brexit imminent.

I’m reminded of the time in my own very minor private school when I had the bright idea of using carbon paper to speed up writing 100 lines as punishment. That bossy prefect had no sense of humour either.