Now that Hollingworth is a private person one can feel sorry for him as an individual person. HE HAD A BAD RUN. No doubt he is now going through a private hell. The wounds are deep. They will need a lot of licking in a dark space.
Tragic story really.
A tragedy caused by a character flaw is my understanding. It is not about giving a few bad interviews when Governor General as the Prime Minster tried to argue on the ABC 7.30 Report. It goes much deeper than that.
Nor is it just about ambition and the fall from power.
Hollingworth just didn't get the sexual politics in all of this:----it was a bad judgment to both defend pedophiles rather than the victim, and to see his priests seduced by 14 year old Lolitas. he could see that he slipped when he looked back in response to a public outcry, but he kept on expressing the old mindset and digging himself deeper and deeper into the mud. A character flaw.
And Hollingworth had such a promising start to public life with all the early work done for for the poor, the under-privileged, or the disadvantaged when in Melbourne with the Brotherhood of St Lawrence. He understood social justice of poverty but not sexual politics.
It is a character flaw that meant no compassion for the vulnerable and innocent in sexual politics. Even if he did shift from liberal social justice type to Conservative in the decade iin Brisbane, he should have retained compassion for the suffering of the vulnerable and the innocent.
And then you read the witch hunting stuff like this or this initiated by all the nasty republicans and feminists who love a good burning. But its really public opinion that is the problem----the emotional, hysterical mob baying for blood.
Its all a bit like reality television. All contrived political froth and bubble. And its on the lefty side as well. Have a look here and here.
What the Crean interview on Lateline shows is the great difficulty the Labor Party has in introducing ethics into politics---saying that Hollingworth is wicked, or that he's behaved in a depraved or shameful way----is way off key. It was unconvincing hence the wrigggling.
Hollingworth more a case of being judged to have dirty hands rather being wicked.
This tries to make sense of the tragedy that has occured. Angela says that the problem lies in Hollingworth:
"....living of a [priestly] vocation that should have precluded him from accepting the office in the first place. That's the real tragedy of the Hollingworth saga."
I don't quite get Angela's account of tragedy myself. If the tragedy is to be sourced in accepting the office of Governor General, then the tragic narrative unfolds due to the tensions between the priestly vocation and the public office of the liberal state. Angela suggests that Hollingworth was judged by the ethical standards of a priest when he was a Governor General, and as the Governor General he did not, and could not, live up up to those standards. He was found wanting by the public---- and righly so says Angela.
Is that it? But what then are the ethical standards of the priestly vocation? And are there no ethcial standards for public office?
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at May 27, 2003 10:51 AM | TrackBack