Minchin says his song about the cardinal, who is due to give evidence to a royal commission about child sex abuse that occurred within his parishes, is also about home

Tim Minchin has written a song about Cardinal George Pell, in which he lambasts Australia’s most senior Catholic cleric over the fact he won’t be returning from Rome to testify at the royal commission into institutional child abuse.

“It’s a really nice song, the chorus just goes ‘come home, Cardinal Pell / we hear you’re not feeling well’,” Minchin said at a press conference in Perth on Friday. “There’s also a bit where I call him a fucking coward.”

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Pell is due to appear via video link at a royal commission to give evidence about child sex abuse that occurred within his parishes. Victims were hoping Pell’s medical condition would improve so he could appear in person, but on Monday were told he was still too unwell to make the flight from Rome to Melbourne.

Minchin made the comments while promoting the Perth International Arts festival’s outdoor extravaganza, Home.

The Saturday evening concert will feature Minchin performing live alongside 500 Western Australian artists including John Butler Trio, the Waifs, the Drones and Gina Williams, with visuals by Shaun Tan and an appearance by Miles Franklin winner Tim Winton.

The Australian singer-songwriter said his song about Pell, which will “be on the radio in three days”, is also about home. “I think George probably doesn’t realise how much we want him here.”

The song follows 2010’s The Pope Song, written in response to Pope Benedict’s UK visit and alleged secrecy around child molestation in the Catholic church. It features more than 80 instances of the words “fuck” and derivatives thereof.

Currently based in Los Angeles, Minchin said although he was proud of being Australian, being away from the country had given him a bit of distance and a newfound “objectivity”. “When all you’re doing is reading the news from here you go, ‘oh, we’re arseholes as well’.”

He said there was “incredible good and incredible arseholishness everywhere” and what he was obsessed with was “a version of belonging and pride in your country and your culture that is something to be proud of but not something exclusive”.

He was critical of the jingiosm and nationalism that involves “draping Australian flags over necks” and claims of Australians being the best people in the world. “Aussies aren’t the best people in the world and Australia’s not the greatest country in the world because it’s a stupid thing to say, because the world’s much more complicated than that.”

Minchin said in the coming years he was planning to bring his family back to Australia to live, “purely because I want to be part of something that feels like home and feels like a culture that is my origin and that I belong to. And yet I find nationalism abhorrent.”

The Perth concert was about “trying to find identity without exclusivity, because identity and exclusivity have always been linked in every culture”. Australia was “our football team”, he said. “We want to prove we’re the best but that’s not what national identity should be. It should be about pride, without saying we’re better than anyone else.”

Famed for his wryly worded tunes, Minchin gave journalists a preview of the song he would perform on Saturday, which featured the lyrics: “this is my house, and it’s fine / It’s where I spend the vast majority of my time / It’s not perfect, but it’s mine.”

Home was created by UK-born theatre director Nigel Jamieson and musician and Noongar elder Richard Walley. When asked if it was difficult to marry the Indigenous and non-Indigenous concepts of “home”, Walley said it wasn’t thanks to the strength of the collaborations and their embrace of how Perth is today.

“No one is going to jump on boats and leave Australia, take buildings aways with them. So this is Perth, how it is today, and we celebrate that. We don’t say it’s a bad thing or a good thing, it is what it is.”

Walley said the concert sat in contrast to the tokenism evident in shows of the past, “Where you start off with a nice little welcome to country and after the welcome to country, ‘We thank you for that, now let’s get on with the real show’”.

“This is about infusing us together as a people, as a collective: it’s us as Noongars, it’s us as non-Noongars, it’s us as artists.”