Leading Indigenous ‘No’ vote campaigner Warren Mundine reveals how his paedophile brother ripped his family apart – but denies it has silenced his stance against one of Australia’s most devastating evils

EXCLUSIVE

Indigenous advocate Warren Mundine says his family was devastated when they learned one of his brothers had molested five boys while teaching as a Marist Brother in Sydney’s south-west.

Graeme Mundine was jailed for these crimes and the 63-year-old is currently serving a community punishment order for indecently assaulting another boy at the same school.

Warren Mundine told Daily Mail Australia he did not know his brother – the youngest of 11 siblings – was a pedophile until he was arrested in 2018 and had not spoken to him for 20 years.

“He was charged, found guilty and went to jail,” Mundine said.

‘As far as I’m concerned, that’s the end of it. We don’t have any relationship and that’s it.’

Mr Mundine was a leading campaigner for Vote No in the Voice to Parliament referendum, along with Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, who has spent years lobbying for the protection of Indigenous children from sexual abuse.

Ms Price, the spokeswoman for the Coalition for Indigenous Australians, tabled a motion in the House of Lords last week calling for a royal commission into child sexual abuse in Indigenous communities.

She was supported by South Australian Liberal Senator Kerrynne Liddle.

Mr Mundine has not been as outspoken as Senator Price in his support for such an inquiry, but lashed out at the federal government when Labor and other MPs rejected the proposal.

“What a bunch of cowardly wonders,” he wrote on October 18 on social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter.

The Mundines are a fiercely Catholic family and Warren welcomed the Supreme Court’s unanimous April 2020 decision to overturn Cardinal George Pell’s historic child sex convictions.

“Cardinal Pell has been vindicated,” he wrote on Twitter at the time. “He is innocent of the charges.”

Mr Mundine told Daily Mail Australia his brother’s convictions had no impact on his relative public silence on the issue of child sexual abuse in Aboriginal communities.

“It had nothing to do with that at all,” he said. ‘I know when I talk about these things, some of the Twittersphere say, “Oh, but your brother…”.

“Well, that has nothing to do with me. That didn’t stop me from saying something. I haven’t spoken to him in over twenty years.

Mr Mundine said hearing of his brother’s crimes ‘rocked my family and it continues to this day’.

“It has been a devastating event for our family because my father and mother have made it very clear how they felt about these things,” he said.

Mr Mundine said he had spoken out about the sexual abuse of Aboriginal children in the past and would do so more in the future.

“I have been fighting for economic development for the past 10 years,” he said. “But these issues all work together.

“I’m going to be talking about this a lot more and working with Jacinta and Kerrynne Liddle to resolve these things.”

Graeme Mundine was sentenced in December 2018 after pleading guilty to four charges of committing an act of indecency and two charges of indecently assaulting a child under 16.

He was sentenced by District Court Judge Chris O’Brien to a prison term of up to three years with a non-parole period of 18 months for the offenses against five teenage victims.

Mundine’s crimes took place over four and a half years in the 1980s while he was a dormitory master and teacher at St Gregory’s College, a Marist school in Campbelltown.

Judge O’Brien found Mundine, who had married and moved to the Central Coast after leaving the Marist Brothers, “smeared the reputation of the religious order”.

“This was a serious breach of trust and abuse of power,” he said. ‘The perpetrator took advantage of the naivety and vulnerability of the victims.

‘Disturbingly, the events occurred when the victim sought guidance or support and instead suffered sexual abuse.

“The impact statements from victims were both powerful and moving.”

After leaving the Marist Order, Graeme Mundine was appointed inaugural chairman of the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Catholic Council.

He later led the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Ecumenical Commission within the National Council of Churches in Australia and the Aboriginal Catholic Ministry in the Archdiocese of Sydney.

Mundine was also a founder of Jarjum College in Redfern, a Jesuit school set up to educate indigenous children in the city.

In his sentencing remarks, Judge O’Brien recognized Mundine’s contribution to the Aboriginal community in the years after he stopped molesting children.

Mundine was supported in the Campbelltown courtroom by his wife, University of Sydney academic Gabrielle Russell, and two other family members.

While in prison, Mundine was interviewed by NSW Police about the 1986 sexual assault of another boy at St Gregory’s and was charged in April 2020, two months before he was due to be released on parole.

That new charge kept Mundine in jail for a week after his sentence expired, but he was granted bail in June to live with his wife on the Central Coast.

Mundine pleaded guilty in October and narrowly escaped another prison sentence when he was sentenced by District Court Judge Andrew Colefax in Campbelltown in December.

Judge Colefax said Mundine attacked the teenage victim while he was taking a maths exam.

“You told him to sit on your lap, which he did,” Judge Colefax said. “You then grabbed him by the chest and pulled him towards you.

“You rubbed his thighs and grabbed his penis on the outside of his pants.

“Your face came into contact with his face and you manipulated his penis for about two minutes before letting go.”

Mundine broke down in court as he apologized for his offence, which he described as a ‘serious breach of trust’.

“It’s a terrible thing,” he told Judge Colefax.

“After being in prison and meeting people who have been abused, you can see how much damage it does to people beyond the physical events that are happening at the time.”

Judge Colefax said Mundine, who was taught by the Marist Brothers, had moved straight from school to a celibate lifestyle ‘which is highly unusual for most members of the community’.

It was in that context that he committed ‘these terrible crimes against children’.

“He has left that world, he has grown up and has been living in a fully functional, heterosexual marriage for almost 20 years,” Judge Colefax said.

Imposing a three-year community corrections order (CCO), Judge Colefax said he would have sent Mundine back to prison if he had not already spent time in custody.

“Ideally, His Honor Judge O’Brien should have had this matter before him so that he could impose an appropriate sentence on you for the totality of your offending,” the judge said.

Mundine’s CCO order included completing 500 hours of community service and expires in December.