Former prime minister Tony Abbott’s address at the funeral of George Pell was a masterclass in several traits we’ve come to associate with his time in public life.
During his time as PM, this publication called Abbott “Australia’s most powerful sycophant”. Guy Rundle wrote that Abbott belied his reputation as an assertive and singular political thinker, and in fact was the exact opposite: “a sycophant by nature who seeks out opportunities to please those more powerful than he by being more ardent in pursuit of their interests than they ever asked him to be in the first place”.
This trait was in full flow when recently Abbott saw off one of his heroes — “In short, he’s the greatest Catholic Australia has produced and one of our country’s greatest sons … That’s the heroic virtue that makes him, to my mind, a saint for our times”. He continued, via Kipling:
If character means to trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting too; if it means bearing to hear the truth you’ve spoken, twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, George Pell was the greatest man I’ve ever known.
There was also his strange, joyless sense of humour:
And as I heard the chant [from protesters outside the church], ‘Cardinal Pell should go to hell’, I thought, ‘Aha! At least they now believe in the afterlife.’
Perhaps this is St George Pell’s first miracle.
On a day for reflection, Abbott could summon no thoughts as to why survivors of abuse at the hands of the Catholic Church might not want to send their well-wishes to the departed cardinal — who a royal commission in 2017 found was “conscious of child sexual abuse by clergy” as early as 1973 and had failed to act on complaints about priests.
Abbott’s gag at their expense called to mind his wink to ABC presenter Jon Faine when talking to a pensioner who identified herself as a sex worker, or his wish that Julia Gillard would “make an honest woman of herself”.
Most directly, it brought back the joke Abbott made about former NSW Liberal leader John Brogden, who had resigned in 2005 after being found in his office with self-inflicted wounds: Abbott quipped that if the Liberal Party made a certain policy switch, “we would be as dead as the former Liberal leader’s political prospects”.
And so, to great applause, Abbott saw off his spiritual guide with a mixture of sycophancy and strange, cruel humour, leaving one to wonder, yet again, if he’s not reading the wider mood of the country — or if he simply doesn’t care.
