Hollingworth an embarrassment rather than saviour

By GREG ANSLEY

Thursday played out as an extraordinary day in Canberra. As showers swept across a leaden Lake Burley-Griffen, two Governors-General and their wives sat down to begin life together in Government House, the grand vice-regal residence in Yarralumla.

Sir Guy Green, Tasmania's long-serving state Governor, had just been sworn in as Governor-General of the moment, appointed Commonwealth administrator through a hurried change of Letters Patent by Queen Elizabeth to serve at her pleasure for who knows how long.

Dr Peter Hollingworth had become Governor-General-in-limbo, a sort of Banquo still officially resident in Yarralumla, still drawing his salary of A$310,000 ($348,000) a year, but mothballed until the Victorian Supreme Court decides what to do about civil action for a rape allegedly committed four decades ago.

Ten minutes' drive away, in a parliament newly barricaded against terrorists, opposition parties banded together in the Senate to condemn Hollingworth for failing to remove a known paedophile from the ministry while Anglican Archbishop of Brisbane, and to castigate Prime Minister John Howard for not removing him.

"He is not worthy to hold the office of Governor-General [and] he should not be collecting his salary," said Labor Senator Kate Lundy. "The Prime Minister should be ashamed that he did not force Dr Hollingworth's resignation upon the release of [the Church report confirming his failure to act against a child-abusing priest]."

Howard, who selected the Governor-General, brushed aside the remarkable events. "I called on [Sir Guy] as a matter of courtesy at Government House this afternoon," he told Channel Nine's A Current Affair. "Life goes on. He'll be picking up Dr Hollingworth's programme and the show goes on."

Increasingly, in the eyes of many commentators, Howard could just have aptly used Ned Kelly's parting line on the scaffold: "Such is life".

There is a mounting view that regardless of the truth or otherwise of the dubious allegation that he raped a 19-year-old girl during a youth camp in the late 1960s, Hollingworth's continued tenancy of Government is damaging the highest office in the land.

His successor as Archbishop of Brisbane, Dr Phillip Aspinall, led an inquiry that found not only had Hollingworth allowed a known paedophile to continue working as a priest, but that contrary to statements made to the inquiry, the then-Archbishop knew the priest was a serial abuser.

Hollingworth had further decided not to take action against a fellow bishop who confessed to having sex with a 14-year-old parishioner in the 1950s and whose agonising story of a subsequently shattered life distressed the nation.

Confronted with the allegation last year on the ABC's Australian Story, the Governor-General compounded his difficulties by stating the bishop's actions were not sex abuse because he thought the girl was older than 14 and had led the priest on.

It was a monumental blunder. Hollingworth tried to claim he had misheard the question then, as outrage grew, apologised publicly and in a tearful private meeting with the woman.

For his critics, the incident encapsulated what they claimed as incompetence and lack of judgment sufficiently serious to disqualify him as vice-regent.

Further, the compounding row is seen as damaging to the office: three-quarters of the nation believe he should resign from a job whose prime function, in Hollingworth's words, is to "help interpret the nation to itself".

"There can be no more important task ... [than] to ask the question persistently, 'What kind of society are we seeking to build here in Australia in the 21st century and beyond'," he said the day after his appointment.

Australia is giving its answer.

"Effective performance requires considerable moral authority and broad community respect, including bipartisan [political] support," University of New South Wales Professor of Constitutional Law George George Winterton wrote. "A Governor-General who loses these qualities cannot perform the essential functions of the office, so that removal may ultimately be necessary."

Yet the Most Reverend Peter John Hollingworth, lifelong champion of the poor and oppressed, Australian of the Year, Father of the Year, a Living National Treasure, should have been the ideal man for the job.

There were quibbles about potential erosion of separation of church and state - "It would be patently absurd to disbar an eminent Australian by reason of the fact that he was an ordained minister or priest", retorted Howard - but his appointment was widely applauded.

Even republicans joined in. Said Greg Barns, chairman at the time of the Republican Movement: "He is a very fine Australian, the sort of person who could make a very fine president or head of state."

Born in Adelaide in 1935, Hollingworth was raised in the Melbourne suburb of East Malvern, where his middle-class parents struggled to put him through the elite Scotch College. He joined BHP as a commercial cadet before doing national service with the RAAF where, as secretary to the padre's office, he found his vocation.

From there, with hard work, it was all upwards: an arts degree and licentiate of theology at Melbourne University - later a Masters in social work - priest in charge at St Mary's in North Melbourne, and chaplain rising to executive director of the Brotherhood of St Laurence during a 25-year role with the Melbourne-based charity and advocate for the disadvantaged.

Along the way he married Ann, his physiotherapist wife, and fathered daughters Deborah, Fiona and Sarah.

These were the years that stamped Hollingworth on the national conscience. Tough, courageous and dedicated, he ran a church with perpetually open doors, befriended the poor and homeless and tackled the rich and powerful on their behalf.

In 1984 he wrote a scathing open letter to Labor Prime Minister Bob Hawke, fuming at the national disgrace of one child in five living in poverty in one of the world's wealthiest countries. Three years later Hawke responded with his bold, if doomed, promise that come 2000 no child would suffer poverty, backing the pledge with a A$600 million ($673 million) family package.

At the brotherhood he directed social services and, later, youth and children's services. He wrote three books drawn from his heart and the street: The Powerless Poor, in 1972; The Poor: Victims of Affluence? in 1975; Australians in Poverty, in 1979, with reprints in 1981 and 1983.

His work was recognised with an Order of the British Empire in 1976, and again with his appointment as an Officer of the Order of Australia a decade later.

Hollingworth appealed to the left because of his stand on social issues and to conservatives because in his heart he was one of them, motivated by natural empathy and religious beliefs rather than ideology.

He knew how to work systems and people. The tall, handsome man was urbane and charming. He was at home equally on the street, at parish tea parties and in the cocktails and boardrooms of the big end of town.

But the first, niggling signs of change began emerging in 1985, when Hollingworth was appointed Bishop of the Inner City.

The first murmurings began to circulate of arrogance, of autocratic rule intolerant of criticism or dissent, and of equivocation in his advocacy of such touchstone issues as a formal Government apology for the stolen generation of Aborigines and the ordination of women priests - failures that led to bitter defeat in his bid to lead the Anglican church in Australia.

His insistence on formality, the trappings of office and ritual became a source of frustration and derision. Hollingworth insists on being addressed as "Dr"; his doctorate is the honorary Lambeth doctorate of letters, conferred by the Archbishop of Canterbury and traditionally not used by its recipients.

In 1994 a Brisbane church survey reported the widespread perception that institutional values were more important to Hollingworth than advocacy for change.

Sensitivity became hypersensitivity. Appointed Archbishop of Brisbane in 1989, Hollingworth threatened to sue a student whose thesis on his administration contained criticism as well as praise.

In Canberra as Governor-General, he established a personal chapel in Government House and complained at the noise rowers made as they trained on Lake Burley-Griffen.

But it was in Brisbane where the biggest changes appeared. Maggie Helass, a social activist who had worked with South African Nobel Prize-winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu, told Sydney Morning Herald Good Weekend writer Jane Cadzow she had been attracted to Brisbane by the prospect of working with Hollingworth on a kind of social offensive.

"But after the first year or so he began to realign his interests," she said. "Rather than being confrontational with the politicians he began to work the cocktail parties."

It had been a difficult move from Melbourne to Queensland, and the administration of a huge diocese, covering 150 parishes reaching from the border with New South Wales to Bundaberg in the north and across to the Northern Territory in the west - 540,000sq km and more than 650,000 nominal Anglicans.

"I used to wake up in the morning crying and go to bed crying," Ann Hollingworth said of her early Brisbane days in author Susan Mitchell's book Public Lives, Private Passions.

Hollingworth, who described the post as the biggest challenge of his life, told Australian Story: "This was a quantum leap from where I'd been before. On the one hand you've got to be the father in God, the chief shepherd, the spiritual leader. On the other hand you're in the engine room. You can't escape the business about administration. I'm not a details person. I go for the big sweep."

At least in part, this was Hollingworth's downfall. Aspinall's report - even while condemning him for "untenable" lapses of judgment - noted the scale of the job and the complexities involved, and absolved him of a number of key allegations.

Certainly none of this was apparent to Howard when Hollingworth, by now an astute and ambitious political operator, moved into his circle as chairman of the National Council for the Centenary of Federation and, later, as a personal appointee to the Republican convention, where he equivocated in debate and abstained in the vote.

When the scandal broke, just ahead of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Queensland, Howard stood by his man, supporting Hollingworth's refusal to quit.

But stubborn determination to stay is taking its toll. Ann Hollingworth compares the ordeal to being pelted with stones.

Hollingworth is pained and confused. "I felt bewildered," he told Australian Story. "It surprised me, because there's been a lot of vitriolic reaction, and Ann often says to me, 'What is it about you that some people find so difficult?' I wish I knew, because it's sad and it's hurtful and I didn't mean it."

Like his supporters, Hollingworth believes he is the target of a witchhunt and a conspiracy of child abuse activists. A year ago he compared himself to Good King Wencelas, the Christian 10th-century king of Bohemia murdered for preaching in a pagan land. More recently he likened his torment to the trial of Jesus by Pontius Pilate.

And he apparently continues to trust in divine purpose. A close friend told The Australian, "He believes God wants him to stay on and face his critics and overcome them in love and openness". But in secular Australia, politics - not God - will have the final say.