A priest who wanted to get rid of a large number of pornographic video tapes tried to burn them before he eventually smashed them to pieces, filling three wheelie bins in the process, a royal commission has heard.
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The extraordinary account was given to the royal commission into child sexual abuse on Thursday afternoon by Michael Elliott, a former police officer who is now the Newcastle Anglican diocese's director of professional standards.
Mr Elliott – who was appointed to investigate child sexual abuse cases in 2009 – recounted how paedophile priest Peter Rushton told another priest, David Simpson, that he had a large amount of pornography he needed to get rid of.
In previous evidence, the commission heard this happened in 1998. The encounter was later relayed to Mr Elliott by Mr Simpson.
Mr Simpson agreed to destroy the offending material on Rushton's behalf and picked up "six bags full", Mr Elliott said.
"Simpson collected what he described as six travel bags full of videos, pornographic videos," Mr Elliott said.
"He said he started a fire at first but had some difficulty, given the volume of the material, and then he abandoned the fire and removed the insert, the paper insert from the video covers and opened them up.
"He broke up the video cassettes and unravelled the tape that was inside them and filled three wheelie bins full."
In other evidence, Mr Elliott said a number of significant church figures had worked against him in his efforts to improve the way the diocese handled misconduct or crimes by priests. At least some were still active in their efforts, as indicated by a letter written in April this year to the Archbishop of Sydney.
The letter was not displayed to the public gallery.
The commission has not heard how many cases of sexual abuse by priests have been investigated in the Newcastle diocese but Mr Elliott confirmed there were 36 "brown" or "yellow" envelopes, although at least three of these related to the one person, Rushton, who died in 2007 without being convicted.
But Mr Elliott referred to a substantially larger number, when he told counsel assisting the commission, Naomi Sharp, that he had not listed any of the files "that were not put into a brown envelope which, I think, totals around 73".
Mr Elliott said he was given the brown envelopes by Bishop Brian Farran.
He denied assertions that he had overstepped his mark as an investigator or compromised cases through information he had given to victims.
