A case involving a surgeon, Charlie Teo, has been well covered in the press, and it has generated responses well above warmth in surgeons I have discussed it with.

I here mention just three issues, because some touch on my consideration of similar processes in my profession by a regulator and the Judicial Commission.

First, the press says that former supporters of Teo ‘turned up in their dozens’ and gave him ‘a hero’s welcome’.  The press also says the accused briefs and thanks his supporters outside the court. 

That in my view was a colossal ego-driven misjudgment from a man charged with making ego-driven misjudgments.  It is hard to see how the tribunal might look favourably at this conduct.  When I was hearing a case at the Fire Brigade where dismissal was on the cards, the union wheeled in mum and the kids.  It was so blatant that it was embarrassing, and I told them to cut it out.  (I would not be surprised if now the union said that was inappropriate – or if the regulator agreed with it.) 

I can easily imagine a number of epithets crossing the minds of a panel of professional people faced with such an outburst of populism – and all of them would be against the accused.

I might also say that the views of Steve Waugh on Charlie Teo as a surgeon would be worth about the views of Steve Waugh’s GP on his capacity as captain of the Australian XI.

Secondly, the press says Teo said the risk of death of one patient undergoing a procedure was 5 per cent.  (He said that to a husband whose trust in Teo was such that he took contemporaneous notes – like a copper with a suspect.) 

I cannot speak for the medical profession, but I think it is wrong for lawyers to give odds or percentages for the outcome of litigation, which is a licensed form of lottery.  Perhaps I might refer to what I said in the book What’s Wrong?

On the other hand, civil litigation is more like a boxing match – if you put draws to one side, on average one out of two litigants has to lose. Now that does not mean that in every case, each party starts at even money. It is very, very dangerous and potentially misleading to try to assess odds or percentages in litigation – but common sense suggests that long odds are very rare in a two-horse race. There are also problems with odds in medicine. It follows that people like brokers, lawyers or doctors who give professional advice about risk have to be careful to do so sensibly. People who get so frightened that they are determined to take the course of least possible risk – by, say, burying their wealth at the bottom of the garden, or refusing to have surgery for any purpose – may not be acting in their own best interests.

And I might refer to a case I was in more than forty years ago.  Aggrieved aboriginals got a temporary injunction restraining Alcoa from proceeding with a billion-dollar project.  We were asked to assess their prospects – or Alcoa’s risk.  The plaintiffs faced alpine hurdles.  I said the Americans would want a quote on their risk.  I said the plaintiffs were about twenty to one.  The junior silk, Michael Black, QC, gave them a 5% chance.  The senior silk, Brian Shaw, QC, was, thank God, wiser than both of us.  He said we would say no such thing because it was vulgar, and it was misleading.  It was misleading because it suggested that there was some logic or science that made it reasonable to express risk in mathematical terms.  He said there wasn’t. and I agree with him.  I have avoided such quotes since, and I blush now to think of that one.  (The next week a horse got up in the Cup at more than 20 to 1.)

But if The Age report is correct, this case is worse.  ‘He [Teo] offered that for him a 5 per cent risk of death was very high.’  If that is his opinion, then Teo has a curious way of assessing the value of human life.

Thirdly, the regulator is not seeking to rub this surgeon out.  He is currently restricted by the regulator.  The Age says he is in effect banned because of the risk he poses.  He wants the restrictions lifted.  He can’t operate without the written consent of other neuro-surgeons, but those ‘who volunteered to supervise were told their malpractice insurance would not cover them.’

It is an old saying but true.  Lawyers don’t bury their mistakes.  We are talking about life and death.  More than that – we are talking about the dignity that attaches to human life.  This is not a time or place to pussy-foot or play games.

A magistrate has been stood down pending investigation into an allegation of misconduct.  He has form for a finding of ‘inappropriate’ behaviour by the Judicial Commission.  That led me to say:

He [the magistrate] has been taken out – publicly.  What does the punter think when he is reinstated?  ‘We had our concerns about him, but we have had a quiet word and he should be OK now.’

The High Court has said more than once that in disciplining a professional person, the issue is not the hardness of the case of the professional whose conduct is impugned, but the welfare of the public and maintaining high professional standards.  (One case is Ziems v Prothonotary of the Supreme Court of NSW [1957] HCA 46; (1957) 97 CLR 279 (2 July 1957)  There is another case to the same effect about a barrister rubbed out for overcharging.)

The conduct of this surgeon in the past shows that he poses a risk to the public if he is allowed to practise as a surgeon without at least the current limitations.  People whose business it is to assess such risks have declined to accept them even on payment of a premium.

The regulator will be charged with maintaining professional standards and protecting would-be patients.  On what possible basis could a regulator ask the people of Victoria to accept any risk at all that must inevitably arise if this man is allowed to go on as before the regulator imposed the current restrictions?  If the status quo holds, that is adequate.  But otherwise people will be at risk.

When I was a partner in a law firm, my secretary had one standing instruction – keep me away from the Thought Police.  That was my term for ‘management’.  I was there to practise law.  They were there to manage the business.  My attitude to management reflected that of a famous motion in the House of Commons – ‘the influence of the Crown has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished.’

On similar grounds, I avoid any entry into what are called ‘culture wars,’ or any stuff about ‘woke’, or ‘cancel culture’, or the like.  It is peddled by people of small minds and eager appetites for moulah.  It’s a bit like reading history from the Left – another word I try to avoid – when you just switch off when the word ‘masses’ looms into view.

I may have to rethink all that. 

Recent reports in the press tell of a magistrate being ‘counselled’ for making a comment in court about rape that was found to be ‘inappropriate’.

This morning’s Age has a report of proceedings against a controversial surgeon.  The case has enough meat in it to make dilating at the periphery unnecessary.  But in what was obviously a life and death moment, there is evidence that the surgeon used language that was fruity and urgent.  The headline reflects what the report says were the terms of the complaint – surgeon’s ‘language inappropriate.’  I don’t know if counselling is one of the remedies if the complaint is made out, but loss of the surgeon’s ticket almost certainly is.

The same paper had a report of a testy interchange between two senators, Simon Birmingham and Penny Wong, two of our more sensible politicians.  Birmingham wanted Wong to say whether comments by Kevin Rudd were ‘appropriate’ and if he had been ‘counselled.’

That is to say, a prominent former Minister of the Crown asked a current Minister if she thought that comments of a former Prime Minister were appropriate and whether he had been counselled.

What are these people on about?  Are they running a bloody government, or a posh kindergarten headed by Emily Post?  And if God is unavailable, whom will they get to counsel Kevin Rudd?

I will have something further to say about the Judicial Commission and the powers it asserts to deal with inappropriate behaviour by judges.  Up until now, our judges have not been subject to direction from an arm of government – because it is basic to our way of life that the judiciary must be quite independent of the executive arm of government.

But these straws in the wind are alarming.  One thing we learn from history is that if you cede power to the government, it is bloody hard to get it back.  The repeal of abolition stands out on its own.  The emergency tax that Pitt introduced purely to deal with Napoleon was a tax on income. 

I can’t speak for doctors, but there are times when a lawyer has to be firm.  That is more so when the lawyer runs a court or tribunal.  Your approach as a lawyer to a client may be one thing for the Chairman of BHP, another an uppity entrepreneur, or a timid widow taking on a banking sphynx, or a ludicrously foul-mouthed builder’s labourer physically threatening a terrified employer sitting at the back of the Federal Court. 

You can if you like burble on about ‘client autonomy’.  You may even talk of ‘democracy’ – but mine was of a very ‘guided’ kind.  I see no real alternative if someone is putting at hazard their name, fortune, sanity, or liberty. 

And I would be surprised if doctors don’t have the same experience when the stakes are very high.

I hesitate to think how often my conduct as a lawyer or presiding member of a tribunal would have been challenged as being inappropriate.  It could have been like confetti.

Three post-scripts.

According to The Age, the surgeon has been briefing the press outside the hearing.  That is inappropriate.  Viscerally.

Steve Waugh bowled up to lend support to the surgeon.  That was inappropriate.  And it may well have been unhelpful.  When I was hearing a case at the Fire Brigade where dismissal was on the cards, the union wheeled in mum and the kids.  It was so blatant that it was embarrassing, and I told them to cut it out.  I would not be surprised if now the union said that was inappropriate – or if the regulator agreed with it.

Finally, did it occur to Senator Birmingham when inquiring about the appropriateness of the conduct of a former Prime Minister, that he had recently served under a Prime Minister who had great difficulty in understanding just what the word ‘inappropriate’ may mean?

Passing Bull 347 – Thought Police

When I was a partner in a law firm, my secretary had one standing instruction – keep me away from the Thought Police.  That was my term for ‘management’.  I was there to practise law.  They were there to manage the business.  My attitude to management reflected that of a famous motion in the House of Commons – ‘the influence of the Crown has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished.’

On similar grounds, I avoid any entry into what are called ‘culture wars,’ or any stuff about ‘woke’, or ‘cancel culture’, or the like.  It is peddled by people of small minds and eager appetites for moulah.  It’s a bit like reading history from the Left – another word I try to avoid – when you just switch off when the word ‘masses’ looms into view.

I may have to rethink all that. 

Recent reports in the press tell of a magistrate being ‘counselled’ for making a comment in court about rape that was found to be ‘inappropriate’.

This morning’s Age has a report of proceedings against a controversial surgeon.  The case has enough meat in it to make dilating at the periphery unnecessary.  But in what was obviously a life and death moment, there is evidence that the surgeon used language that was fruity and urgent.  The headline reflects what the report says were the terms of the complaint – surgeon’s ‘language inappropriate.’  I don’t know if counselling is one of the remedies if the complaint is made out, but loss of the surgeon’s ticket almost certainly is.

The same paper had a report of a testy interchange between two senators, Simon Birmingham and Penny Wong, two of our more sensible politicians.  Birmingham wanted Wong to say whether comments by Kevin Rudd were ‘appropriate’ and if he had been ‘counselled.’

That is to say, a prominent former Minister of the Crown asked a current Minister if she thought that comments of a former Prime Minister were appropriate and whether he had been counselled.

What are these people on about?  Are they running a bloody government, or a posh kindergarten headed by Emily Post?  And if God is unavailable, whom will they get to counsel Kevin Rudd?

I will have something further to say about the Judicial Commission and the powers it asserts to deal with inappropriate behaviour by judges.  Up until now, our judges have not been subject to direction from an arm of government – because it is basic to our way of life that the judiciary must be quite independent of the executive arm of government.

But these straws in the wind are alarming.  One thing we learn from history is that if you cede power to the government, it is bloody hard to get it back.  The repeal of abolition stands out on its own.  The emergency tax that Pitt introduced purely to deal with Napoleon was a tax on income. 

I can’t speak for doctors, but there are times when a lawyer has to be firm.  That is more so when the lawyer runs a court or tribunal.  Your approach as a lawyer to a client may be one thing for the Chairman of BHP, another an uppity entrepreneur, or a timid widow taking on a banking sphynx, or a ludicrously foul-mouthed builder’s labourer physically threatening a terrified employer sitting at the back of the Federal Court. 

You can if you like burble on about ‘client autonomy’.  You may even talk of ‘democracy’ – but mine was of a very ‘guided’ kind.  I see no real alternative if someone is putting at hazard their name, fortune, sanity, or liberty. 

And I would be surprised if doctors don’t have the same experience when the stakes are very high.

I hesitate to think how often my conduct as a lawyer or presiding member of a tribunal would have been challenged as being inappropriate.  It could have been like confetti.

Three post-scripts.

According to The Age, the surgeon has been briefing the press outside the hearing.  That is inappropriate.  Viscerally.

Steve Waugh bowled up to lend support to the surgeon.  That was inappropriate.  And it may well have been unhelpful.  When I was hearing a case at the Fire Brigade where dismissal was on the cards, the union wheeled in mum and the kids.  It was so blatant that it was embarrassing, and I told them to cut it out.  I would not be surprised if now the union said that was inappropriate – or if the regulator agreed with it.

Finally, did it occur to Senator Birmingham when inquiring about the appropriateness of the conduct of a former Prime Minister, that he had recently served under a Prime Minister who had great difficulty in understanding just what the word ‘inappropriate’ may mean?

Political correctness? -Doctors and lawyers – Birmingham and Wong

Among the dingoes and coyotes infesting the internet is a crowd called Avast.  They are I think run out of India.  They are blood sucking crooks who get into your computer like cancer.  Then they bombard you with black boxes and invitations to dance.  About two months ago, I finally got rid of them.  Now I am told I have resubscribed.  So, I advise them:

 I have not sought and do not seek any further contact.  I have made this clear in the past.  Please notify me immediately that any such decision has been reversed.

Easy.  The reply says that mailbox is not monitored.  There will be no reply.  The alternative of course does not work.

We need to find ways of stopping and punishing crooks like this.

Avast – internet crooks.

Let’s take personality out of this. 

Let’s say Betty was in her mid-seventies.  Her cancer – four melanomas, two in the lungs and two in the stomach – was in remission, and the heart seemed OK after one attack, but the emphysema was incurable.  And wearing. 

With those blots, she could not take chances with Covid.  If it did not kill her, it had to shorten what was left of her life. 

In late 2021, Betty thought she would test her travelling capacity and rediscover her love of sea travel by booking a three-night trip from and back to Melbourne on a Cunard ship.  That seemed ideal for her purposes and cost less than $A1000. 

She thought it was for February 2022.  But it was for the next year – 2023!  No worry, that will give the Covid issue time to settle.

But it didn’t, and in late 2022, Betty checked with her GP.  His advice was unequivocal.  The risk of that kind of travel was too great for Betty in her condition, and she should cancel. 

Betty put that opinion to the Oncology Department at her treating hospital in Melbourne – a world leader in that field of medicine – and they replied as follows:

Happy with the below, however I have to disagree with not getting into ICU. We would push for you to be admitted if need be.

Maybe book somewhere in Australia for now – cruises would have to be the highest risk for any infectious disease!

The opinion of that hospital was not to be waved away.  Melbourne claims to be the sports capital of the world.  The same goes for the study and treatment of melanoma.

So, Betty emailed Cunard saying she would have to cancel.  This was just before Christmas.  The reply said that there would be a cancellation fee of about 40%. 

But they could not cancel in response to an email – Betty would have to ring them to do that on the phone.  That was obviously the Cunard robots in action – it’s normally the other way round, Betty thought.

This was just another robotic pestilence.  Betty took a deep breath.  Here we go again.

Then, early in the new year, when Betty rang to effect the cancellation – notice of which she had given – she was told that in the interim the robots had just about doubled the cancellation fee.  Betty was mildly put out, and was told she could seek some kind of compassion.  Could she provide a certificate from the GP?

Betty wondered if that was appropriate in view of the piddling amount involved and her fifty plus years in the law, including thirty years in the service of Her Majesty, hearing and determining issues of some moment between people and the Crown.  And her GP had just gone down with Covid. 

So, Betty passed on the comments of Oncology above, including the desirability of her having access to ICU, and the threat of this kind of travel to someone with her medical history.

But no – the robots were immovable.  Betty had to get a Certificate before the Support Team could give a ruling.  Over a few hundred dollars.

Not worth getting a ruling from the Tribunal Betty had presided over (for the other Betty, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II).  Better, perhaps, that Cunard keep the money, and Betty keep the experience.

And pass it on.

Being left at the mercy of the Support Team for ‘compassion’ could be unsettling for some.  Betty recalled the sign that hung outside Chancery in the 16^th century.

…the refuge of the poor and afflicted; it is the altar and sanctuary for such as against the right of rich men, and the countenance of great men, cannot maintain the goodness of their cause.

Before that, the English had Robin Hood.

Now dealing with Cunard might lead to a better understanding of living under Putin in Russia.  He got his start in a Support Team – that does, it is true, have an unattractive name and reputation.

Betty looked up the calling cards of Cunard and its owner.

Cunard

To sail with Cunard is to step into a world that revolves around you. A world of comfort, courtesy and attention to detail, where everything is just the way you like it.

Carnival Corporation – Vision Statement

At Carnival Corporation & plc, our highest responsibility and top priority is compliance, environmental protection and the health, safety and well-being of our guests, the people in the communities we touch and serve, and our shipboard and shoreside employees. On this foundation, we aspire to deliver unmatched joyful vacations for our guests, always exceeding their expectations and in doing so driving outstanding shareholder value. We are committed to a positive and just corporate culture, based on inclusion and the power of diversity. We operate with integrity, trust and respect for each other — communicating, coordinating and collaborating while seeking candor, openness and transparency at all times. And we aspire to be an exemplary corporate citizen leaving the people and the places we touch even better.

Our Mission

Together, we deliver joyful vacation experiences and breakthrough shareholder returns by exceeding guest expectations and leveraging our industry-leading scale.

Qantas et al revisited.

As bullshit goes, that is about par for the course now, but Betty thought that the reference to the health, safety and well-being of our guests was a real scream.

Betty has put the above in terms to Cunard on three occasions. Silenzio! If they drive their ships like they handle their mail, it could be a bumpy ride.

Some of the objections to the Voice proposal are troubling.

Here is one correspondent to the AFR.

The Australian people love and respect our Indigenous communities and want them to prosper.  Voters will not tolerate legislators persistently ignoring them.  Simply take a look at the Closing the Gap reports.  What a disgrace.  Nothing closing there after years of no meaningful action.  Parliamentarians should listen to voices in every electorate.  We do not need a special body, and we are not going down the path of becoming a race-based society.

The core of the argument appears to be that the proposed body is not necessary – we do not need it. 

That is curious, since the writer believes that our response so far shows that we persistently ignore indigenous communities, which we love and respect, and that that is a disgrace.  And to say that people have a duty to do something is no reason to oppose the creation of a body that is meant to facilitate the discharge of that duty. 

Finally, it appears to be suggested that the proposal will lead us down the path of being ‘a race-based society’.  Assuming that you can give some meaning to that phrase, why is it suggested that we are not there already, given the disgrace referred to above, and why will the proposal lead to that result?

Next, John Anderson likes to see himself as a wise elder – ponderous, but well-intentioned, and wise.

People who have genuine doubts and genuine questions [about the Voice] to ask are being shamed over an expectation to sign a blank cheque in relation to the rule book we all live by as Australians.  We’re being shamed into supporting something when we haven’t been given the detail.

The suggestion that people have not been given enough detail is not valid.  But let us assume that some proponents of the proposal are behaving badly by ‘shaming’ people.  That does not entail that the proposal itself is bad.  Otherwise, every church in the land would have had to shut its doors years ago. 

In truth, this is a simple case of playing the man rather than the ball, a habit that the speaker picked up in politics.  His website is a monument to complacent immodesty.

The inference I draw is that the objectors are moved by other considerations.

And as a matter of intellectual honesty, people objecting to the proposal should say why there is no need for it, or why they have a better plan.

Here is a letter in support of the proposal that the press did not publish.

Dear Editor,

When the English planted their jail on this continent, their commanding officer had instructions from King George III for treating with its first owners.

‘You are to endeavour by every possible means to open an Intercourse with the Natives and to conciliate their affections, enjoining all Our Subjects to live in amity and kindness with them.’

That did not happen.  On the contrary, new arrivals treated those already here cruelly and with contempt.  And later European arrivals continued that mistreatment for generations.

As a result, this nation is sorely wounded.

Many of all kinds now wish to put in our constitution a right of the first people to be heard in governing this nation.

I do not understand how those claiming the benefit of all that has followed the European accession here can say No to that request – at least not those who are responding reasonably and in good faith.

Since 1788, this land has seen winners and losers.  Do the beneficiaries really mean to deny the victims the right even to be heard?

Voice – objections – not Murdoch – Anderson.

A tutor at Oxford said that teaching Hitler and Stalin was draining and best done rarely.  I feel like that with Timothy Schnyder and his work on evil in history.  It’s like watching Othello: you know it ends badly, and you know every little twist – down to the strawberries dyed with the blood of virgins on the hanky.  If God was on duty, he was in a dreadful mood

Maggie Haberman is a very fine reporter for The New York Times. Her book on Trump, Confidence Man, oozes the professionalism of its author.  It also has a fine sense of theatre and balance. 

But that dreaded inevitability can be wearing.  Did this man ever do anything that was right?  Was he sent by God to expose every weak seam in the American people?  Or was he just there to prove that God is a fraud?

We know the story.  Here are passing impressions that came to me on reading what is a very fine and necessary book.

Shakespeare’s Richard III was born ugly – and he keeps getting worse.  He has learned to descant on his own deformity.  Nothing will stand in the way of his defying fate and spitting at God.  He is loathed as a toad, but he knows how to sway the crowd.  His deceit with men of God could make grown men cry – while he giggles perversely. The thought of his getting into bed with a woman could make grown men sick.

 He never has a friend, and he can turn on anyone, even in his family.  His physical deformity is matched by the moral – he has no conscience at all, and he is blind to the whole world except when it might be of use to him.  He is therefore a black hole in his realm.  The most evil creature of this playwright then, he is given killer lines.  ‘I am myself alone.’  ‘I am not in a giving mood.’

Since, we are told, there is nothing new under the sun, we might reflect on what the Cambridge critic, Tony Tanner, said about the this evil character

… .one of his Satanic privileges was to inveigle the audience into laughing at evil…. But he is a completely hopeless king….In no way is Richard representative of his society – he is an aberration, a monster, a permanent outsider   [But] Richard manipulates an already fairly rotten world.

Compton Mackenzie was one of the last English men of letters.  He wrote about the chaos, misery and hell at Gallipoli.  He spoke to one of the lucky men who survived the landing.  He said that a zany message kept running through his head on landing.  ‘We lost our amateur status that night.’ 

That’s how anyone felt on entering into the Trump White House.  A mad house with a preposterous family menagerie that Groucho Marx had prefigured in Freedonia.   The murderous regime in Saudi Arabia knew that Christmas had become general and universal when Mr Cellophane – the opaque son-in-law – hauled into the view of the Crown Prince.  And then Bibi embraced the Donald, and the whole world threw up. 

Mr Cellophane was tasked, as they say, with bringing peace and goodwill to all mankind, and reforming the penal system.  His qualification for the first was that he was a student property developer with papa Donald.  His qualification for the second was that his papa had done time for fraud.  It’s called keeping it in the family.

And then the Strong Man – who could never get past page one of Atlas Shrugged – fell in love with another strong man, who murders in his own family, and then he fawned on the last of the Czars.

And although he gets sick at the mere mention of the word ‘germ’, Trump was worse than useless dealing with an epidemic.  His flock in full MAGA regalia took it all out on someone who knew what he was doing.  It is inviting injury to know more than the Donald, and since the reverse is impossible, life anywhere near him is precarious.

It was I think the psychiatrist K D Laing who said that if you put on a front long enough and hard enough, you end up with nothing of what you started with. It is the same with reality in the world of the Donald.  It has just gone.  All that is left is what appears to and pleases him.

And woe unto them who say so.  A very long time ago, Alexis de Tocqueville noticed a worrying trend in the then quite young American nation.

As the American participates in all that is done in his country, he thinks himself obliged to defend whatever may be censured; for it is not only his country which is attacked upon these occasions, but it is himself.  Nothing is more embarrassing in the ordinary intercourse of life than this irritable patriotism of the Americans.

But no one was prepared for the descent into cowardice of the whole Republican Party.

 Is there, in fact, such a party with rules, governance, a constitution, and a platform?  Who is its leader?  How?  In what other nation on earth could a one-time president, who is seeking to run again, but who claims to be the present president anyway, sit skulking like a Mafia Don in a temple to bad taste in the Southern sun?

Maggie Haberman reports that in one of his occasional flirtations with reality, Trump says he likes things to be complicated so that his course may be harder to follow. Darwin referred to a man who knew his dog had a wolf in his ancestry in just one way- ‘by not coming in a straight line to his master when called’.  The wolf is another predator that gets hunted – although that hunt is of a different order to that which Trump complains of.

Trump could never have got elected in nations with the Westminster System.  He could hardly have even sought preselection. Trump admitted evading military service and not paying tax.    (Before the Conquest, the Dooms of Canute made ‘neglect of army service’ [fyrdwite] an offence against the king.)  No party would have admitted a candidate with so many associates ending up in jail.  Nor could he be appointed a director of a public company or hold any public office above that of janitor.  Trump could not endure sitting in parliament, and he would not last one morning being questioned in it.

If we think of people holding office as ministers of the Crown, the two terms that come to mind are duty and dignity.  Trump knows nothing – nothing – about either.  It’s not just that you would not trust him in any public office.  No parent would leave their children in his custody.  And where does that leave faith in the governance of American business?

We will never assess the damage that Trump has done to the standing of the United States.  People in London, Berlin, Paris and Sydney warm to and look up to America.  We have misgivings about guns, medicare, the Puritans and Evangelicals, and what passes for God over there.  Indeed, we think they are more than a little mad on each.  None of us would wish to live there. 

But the world needs America.  Now Trump has blown the whole shebang sky high.  And the bad agents are acting accordingly.

But for some reason the phrase that keeps coming back to me is that of Pascal.

When I have occasionally set myself to consider the different distractions of men, the pains and perils to which they expose themselves at court or in war, whence arise so many quarrels, passions, bold and often bad ventures, I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber. 

Finally, there is one unanswerable indefensible quality.  Trump cheats at golf.

US – Trump – Maggie Haberman

George Pell died with two stains on his character.  He had acquiesced in conduct of those under him that caused awful misery and death among those who trusted men of God and those above them.  Then he engineered a scheme with clever lawyers to deprive the victims of compensation.

Each failing came from a felt need to protect the Church.  The victims would just have to take a hit for the team, as they say.  But this is no time for humour, however black.  The notion that the individual can be sacrificed for the group, or a belief, is the venom that underlies those regimes that we loathe.  And the lives of real people were ruined and then lost here as a result of dark acts of men of God.

These moral failings also show how the thinking of an otherwise rational person can be distorted – not by faith, but by allegiance to another world, and another regime.

It is therefore revolting that at Pell’s funeral, a former prime minister and a current archbishop went out of their way not just to evidence but to celebrate and embrace these failings.

The occasion was too big for the Church for the victims to be mentioned.  So, they weren’t.  They got the Pell disdain even after his death.

And all history and logic went clean out the window, with all of humanity and the Sermon on the Mount. 

Abbott said that Pell was ‘the greatest Catholic Australia has produced and one of Australia’s greatest sons’, but a man ‘made a scapegoat for the church itself’.  He said Pell’s prosecution was a ‘modern-day crucifixion’, and pondered aloud about canonisation.

This makes the tribalism of the Old Testament tribes look innocent.  Do other tribes in Australia carry on like that – or only those that still burn with Celtic resentment at the mere mention of the Protestant Ascendancy?  Or those that protest against the white invasion?

Any doubts about Abbott’s state of mind have now been resolved.  It is appalling to think that this man was our prime minister. 

He prefigured his own immolation by giving the protestors and a camera a look of the kind that Mussolini fired at the masses on the March to Rome, or that Pilate bestowed on his prisoner after the crowd shouted for Barabbas.

The prelate cannot claim to be uneducated, so his descent into Wonderland may be some kind of marvel. 

He said Pell did ‘404 days spent in prison for a crime he did not commit’, despite a ‘media, police and political campaign to punish him whether guilty or not’. 

Neither the prelate nor I is God.  We don’t know what passed between him and the man who gave evidence against him.  But the High Court did not proclaim innocence, much less grant absolution, for that or anything else.  It is just shabby sleight of hand for people who should know better to use one legal conclusion in one case to deflect from unchallengeable findings against Pell in respect of sustained moral failings over years.

The prelate said that Pell ‘had a big heart too, strong enough to fight for the faith and endure persecution, but soft enough to care for priests, youth, the homeless, prisoners and imperfect Christians.’  The reference to youth is a sickening untruth.

But then the prelate gave it all away when he spoke of what really drove Pell.  He said Pell ‘served his church: shamelessly, vehemently, courageously, to the end.’  That he did.  And we know the frightful cost.

And it is a blot on our humanity that these people can talk as brutally as this.

Then Pell was compared to Richard Lionheart.  That English king is remembered as a Crusader.  He made war on the Saracens.  In a state of fury one day, he murdered two thousand Muslim hostages.  Was this a good reference for the people of Australia in 2023?  How far from where this mass was held is the nearest mosque?

Here is Churchill on that English king:

Little did the English people owe him for his services, and heavily did they pay for his adventures…In all deeds of prowess as well as in large schemes of war, Richard shone…He rejoiced in personal combat, and regarded his opponents as necessary agents in his fame.  He loved war, not so much for the sake of glory or political ends, but as other men love science or poetry, for the excitement of the struggle and the glow of victory …. [he] understood that the Crusade was a high and sacred enterprise, and the Church taught them that in unseen ways it would bring a blessing upon them…Thereafter the King, for the sake of Christ’s sepulcher, virtually put the realm after sale.

Richard failed to take the sepulcher, and his ramson nearly bankrupted his realm. 

How does such a Lionheart stand in the teaching of the preacher who stood on a mountain side and told us that the meek shall inherit the earth?

Pell – Abbott – Archbishop – moral guilt – fairy tales.

There were two items in the press today about typing people.  The first was a droll note in The Guardian about how silly it may look if people took offence at being referred to as members of a group.  Some French people thought it was hilarious.  It can be – but it can also be wounding.  I sent the note below with a relevant extract from my last book.

The second item in The Sunday Age was anything but droll.  People in Melbourne have imported a play about people of colour.  The paper says of the play: ‘It’s sharp and funny, filled with biting social commentary and, in this iteration staged at the Malthouse, powered by stellar performances by Chika Ikogwe and Iolanthe.’  The Melbourne producers want it to be reviewed only by people of colour.  For what I regard as good reasons, The Age declined to review it at all.  Elizabeth Flux politely said why.

Two things.

First, the people putting on the play want to exclude people on the basis of their colour. They are doing this to achieve a political purpose.  In doing so, they are indulging in the very evil that they protest against.  And they are damaging the cause they seek to advance.

Secondly, this nation faces this year what I regard as a very simple issue on how to deal with a problem that we have in dealing with people of a different colour.  There are many unpleasant people out there who will try to dredge opposition to a measure we badly need from any source of division that they can find.  This kind of thinking is blood to a tiger for the Murdoch press.

Here is the comment on the other – and related item – and from the book.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/jan/28/ap-issues-clarification-over-its-advice-not-to-use-term-the-french

I can see both sides on this.

It is just a fact of life that group labels are often used for people the speaker looks down on. 

I commonly refer to the ‘French’ and the ‘English’.

With different levels of attachment.

And then you might refer to the Serbs, Irish, gays, Presbyterians, idiots, Jews, elites, or blacks – and the world falls in.

Presumably the French think they are above all that stuff.

Unless, perhaps, you ask what contribution ‘the French’ made to Hitler’s war aims.

The problem is that a label assumes members of a group share an apparent common denominator – and that is demeaning.

Extract from book follows.

The vice of labelling

Some years ago, a woman at Oxford, en route from the reading room to the dining room for breakfast, was heard to say: ‘I have just been described as a typical Guardian reader, and I’m trying to work out whether I should feel insulted.’ A discussion about the meaning of the word presumptuous then followed.

There is no law or custom that says we should apply a label to people – or put them in boxes, or in a file, or give them a codename. There is also no law that we should not. But most of us can’t help ourselves. So what?

Well, most of us don’t like being put into boxes. That is how we tend to see governments or Telstra or a big bank behaving toward us. Nor do most of us want to be typed. When someone says that an opinion or act of yours is ‘typical’ of you or your like, they are very rarely trying to be pleasant.

Most of us just want to be what we are. You don’t have to have a university degree specialising in the philosophy of Kant to believe that each of us has his or her own dignity, merely because we are human. We are not in the same league as camels or gnats. If I am singled out as a Muslim, a Jew or an Aboriginal, what does that label add to or take away from my humanity? What good can come from subtracting from my humanity by labelling me in that way?

So, the first problem with labelling is that it is likely to be demeaning to the target, and presumptuous on the part of the labeller. In labelling, we are detracting from a person’s dignity. We put registration numbers on dog collars, and we brand cattle, but we should afford humans the courtesy – no, the dignity – of their own humanity.

The second problem with labelling is that it is both loose and lazy. If you say of someone that they are a typical Conservative or Tory, that immediately raises two questions. What do the labels ‘Conservative’ and ‘Tory’ mean? What are the characteristics of the target that might warrant the application of the label?

In this country, at the moment, the terms ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ hardly mean anything at all – except as terms of abuse – which is how ‘Tory’ and ‘Whig’ started in England. These terms are now generally only applied by one side to the other. Not many people are happy to apply either of those labels to themselves. The categories are just too plastic and fluid.

Similarly, in Australia the labels ‘Liberal’ and ‘Labor’ hardly stand for any difference in principle any more. At the time of writing, on any of the major issues in Australian politics, what were the differences in the policies of those parties that derived from their platform? The old forms of name calling between Liberal and Labor mean nothing to our children – absolutely nothing. These old ways are as outmoded as name calling between Catholics and Protestants. And there is some common ground in the two shifts: very many people have lost faith in both religion and politics. The old tensions or rivalries just seem no longer to matter.

Unfortunately, and notwithstanding the obvious problems we have just referred to, labelling is not just common but mandatory in far too much political discussion in the press, and certainly for shock jocks or those who make a career out of working TV chat shows. While some people naturally thrive on conflict – Napoleon and Hitler were two bad cases – some journalists in the press engage in conflict for a living. These people rarely have a financial motive to respond reasonably, much less to resolve the conflict. To the contrary, they have a direct financial interest in keeping the conflict as explosive as possible. It is notorious that controversy feeds ratings and that bad news sells newspapers.

If you put up an argument to one of these people who live off the earnings of conflict, the response will very commonly involve two limbs – a personal attack on you (the Latin tag for which is ad hominem), followed by some labels, which are never meant as compliments. For example, if someone dared to query the rigour of the government’s policies toward refugees, a predictable response would be ‘What else would you expect from someone who subscribes to the ABC? How would you like these people to move in next door?’ There is no argument – just vulgar abuse. The disintegration of thought is palpable, but a lot of people are making a handy living out of it – and not in ways that do the rest of us any good.

There is commonly a third problem with labelling: it generally tells you a lot more about the labeller – some would say the sniper – than the target, and the answer is rarely pretty. And if you pile cliché upon label, and venom upon petulance, the result is as sad as it is predictable. You disappear up your own bum.

Let us take one label that became prominent in 2016 right across the Western world. There has been a lot of chatter, or white noise, about ‘populists’. Who are they? One of the problems with this word is that people who use it rarely say what they mean by it. If you search the internet, you will find references to ordinary or regular or common people against political insiders or a wealthy elite. These vague terms don’t help – to the contrary. What do they mean? Is dividing people into classes a good idea in Australia now – or anywhere, at any time? If it is simply a matter of the common people wresting control from a wealthy elite, who could decently object? Is this not just democracy triumphing over oligarchy?

Populus is the Latin word for ‘people’, with pretty much the same connotations as that word in English. Do populists, therefore, appeal to the people for their vote? Well, anyone standing for office in a democracy does just that. The most famous political speech in history concludes with the words ‘of the people, for the people, by the people’.

But ‘populist’is not used to describe everyone standing for office. It is used to refer to only some of those, and the difference seems to be in the kinds of people who are appealed to and the way in which that appeal is made.

So, what kind of public do populists appeal to? Those who use this word say that the people appealed to are anything but the ‘elite’ – those who have got on well in life because of their background or education, or both. In both the United Kingdom and the United States this feeling about the elite – which might look like simple envy to some – is linked to a suspicion of or contempt for ‘experts’. People do, however, tend to get choosy about which experts they reject. (This rejection does not extend to experts who may save their life in the surgery, or at 30,000 feet, or their liberty; but it may explain the curious intellectual lesion that many people of a reactionary turn of mind have about science and the environment.)

Another attribute of the public appealed to by populists is that they have often missed out on the increase in wealth brought about by free trade around the world and by advances in technology. These movements obviously have cost people jobs and are thought by some experts to be likely to cost another 40 per cent over the next ten years.

A third attribute of those appealed to by populists is said to be that, in their reduced condition, they value their citizenship above all else, and they are not willing to share it. They are therefore against taking refugees or people whose faith or colour threatens the idea of their national identity.

Now, if folk who use the word populist are describing politicians who appeal to people with those attributes, they may want to be careful about where they say so. The picture that emerges is one of a backward, angry and mean chauvinist failure. That picture is seriously derogatory. If that is what people mean when they refer to populists,then it is just a loose label that unfairly smears a large part of the population. The term does then itself suffer from the vice of labelling that we have identified.

So, we would leave labels with George Bush Senior, who said that labels are what you put on soup cans

Labels – people of color – black and white – excluding people by color – the Voice – Murdoch press – The Age.

You might find it hard to imagine that some members of the press see themselves as victims of some form of injustice or oppression, but some do. 

There are people who not only believe that George Pell was unfairly treated, but that they have been as well – and just because of their subscription to one religious denomination.  They go further.  They see George Pell as a victim – and somehow or other they share the pain.

This is curious, as it is a perfect example of conduct that their colleagues make a habit, if not a living, out of denouncing.  It’ s called ‘identity politics’. 

I have often wondered what’s wrong with people who have a common interest – such as farmers, plumbers, country women, or coal miners – coming together to advance their interests.  But some in the press see something sinister in this – even though that’s what they get together for every day.

It is curious for another reason.  George Pell and the church he stood for are criticised – that is the soft word – for regarding the church as more important than the victims of its abusive priests.  Whose conduct George Pell chose to overlook.  In the interests of the church. 

But that is precisely the attitude that the vocal defenders of George Pell evidence nearly every time they open their mouths.  People come and go, but the rock of the church abideth forever.

This is not just sad.  It is disgraceful.  Many, many lives were ruined.  Far too many were lost.  People killed themselves.   Because George Pell thought that it was in the interests of the church that he look the other way. 

And now others of that ilk say the same.  With a kind of smarmy contentment, as if they have been vindicated.  And not one word for the families of those who killed themselves, or the many who were defrauded of their compensation by George Pell, and the crafty lawyers who have since retired from the scene.

The mockers of Jacinda Ardern may not quite see themselves as victims, but they have something in common with the supporters of George Pell.   They are aging white males who have not achieved much in life.  Their role is limited to commenting on others.  And when someone succeeds, as this woman did, they show an ugly jealous bile.

Meanwhile, their dark, brooding employer sits out of the light in America, and collects buckets of dollars – and wives.

Pell – Ardern – hypocrisy – lawyers – jealousy.

This letter was not fit for the press.

Your piece (‘Inside Crikey’s plan to monetise the Murdoch defamation claim’) shows that the inanity of hearing libel actions in the Federal Court has reached new heights.

Your report says that Murdoch fils alleges that the publisher ‘created a scheme to improperly use the complaint by Murdoch about the article for commercial gain.’  Thirty times.  In sixty pages.

Did they split the infinitive every time? 

Are they serious?  The Murdoch family is filthy rich because its members have acted improperly for commercial gain.  (But the judge might ask what ‘improperly’ means.)

I have only been at it for fifty odd years, but any claim for libel that exceeds three pages shrieks that it’s bullshit.

And my taxes are being spent on relieving a spoiled child from a mild allergy.  So, the court ushers may hand out smiley koala stamps to any bystander who can keep a straight face.  While the rest of us wait glumly for the next version of War and Peace.

AFR – Murdoch – Federal Court – Libel.