The Pell haters are all at See

Complete Justice for George Pell Means Cleaning the Stables in Victoria

A man of dignity, suffering much as his life was all but destroyed and his reputation plundered, George Pell has chosen not to gloat and not to seek revenge. Not for Pell the hubris that was surely his due. Not the least sign of bitterness. Nor of revenge. Merely mild suggestions that the Victorian justice system, VicPol and the ABC might have a few questions to answer.

Pell's controlled and understated response to the sacking of Becciu conformed to his normal style of understated dignity. But observers in Australia would have also noted his hope that the "cleaning out of the stables" would reach from Rome to Melbourne.

The energetic and principled Victorian MP Bernie Finn, a staunch supporter of the Cardinal's, has advocated an independent inquiry into the whole Pell saga and in particular the conduct of the police and the justice system in Victoria.

It is to the Australian Church hierarchy's eternal shame that it has not been vocal in supporting Finn's call. Indeed, the Church hierarchy should be leading the charge. Then again, it wasn't exactly vocal during the Cardinal's 404 days in prison, preferring to fence-sit.

While ever Daniel "Kim Jong Dan" Andrews remains at what is left of Victoria's "helm", any reform of that State's justice system will be over his dead body.

Yet his dead body, at least politically speaking, may not be all that far away. The resignation of Andrews' Health Minister and the subsequent tirade against him in the press from his branch stacking former minister Adem Somyurek, which acknowledged what we already know – that Andrews is a meglomaniacal dictator posing as a well-meant, though thoroughly confused and out-of-his-depth, democratic politician – suggests that his own days may be numbered. Even former VicPol commissioners are now publicly slagging Andrews, "who thinks he is God". This, of course, we knew. What is different is that more and more people of public standing in Victoria are saying it out loud.

George Pell might just get his soberly expressed wish for the Victorian stables to be cleaned out, come November, when not one but two potential bombshells are due to go off. There is the McMurdo Royal Commission into VicPol corruption over Lawyer X, and then there is the report of the quarantine inquiry. Both are potentially political dynamite. Victoria, already staggering under house arrest and police thuggocracy and facing a crippled economy as a result of government bungling and hubris in the face of a virus it foolishly thinks it can "defeat", will be exposed this side of Christmas as nothing more than a corrupt, incompetent enclave which has become a total embarrassment to the Commonwealth of Australia.

There is still a long way to go for the supporters of George Pell to feel that justice has been done. Especially the justice that is owed Pell's false accusers. But, for the moment at least, it is the Get Pell brigade that is "all at see". And all at sea as well.

New Revelations and Old Networks

The Pell story may not end here, though. In fact, it just got a whole lot murkier.

Still begging to be investigated further are the likely but yet to be proven links between the Rome branch of the Get Pell team and the Australian branch. Any Australian investigative journalist worth his salt might be expected to be interested in that story. It involves millions of euros that seem to have found their way from the Vatican to an Australian bank account.