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.

….is the Premier of New South Wales.  No small matter, or easy job.  He succeeded Gladys Berejiklian, whom I admired.  She went out in a way that was sad – even by our suburban standards. 

Dom lacked charm.  He looked more like a Baptist than a Mick, but then I decided to send those prejudices back to the 50’s.  My daughters wouldn’t know the difference between a Mick or a Prot, and could not care less.  That’s as it should be.  There are few relics of that old hate left – although they’re up and about just now.

And then Dom started doing things that made sense.  And then a guy who knows all about this, Paul Keating, said Dom was OK and was actually doing something. 

He and Andrews form a coalition.  I am probably less worried about the former than the latter.  (If anyone can spot a policy difference between the two, you get a smiley koala stamp and a box of Jaffas to roll down the aisle at the flicks.)

Now it appears that Dom put on a Nazi uniform when he was 21.

That was bloody silly.  It’s what we call a faux pas.

But you don’t get sacked for a faux pas. 

Life would not be worth living if you did.  You might as well hand yourself over to the Moral Police of the Persians.

Just look at that bloody idiot in the royal family who gets bathed in lucre for washing his family’s dirty linen in public.

But people are writing to the press screaming for Dom’s blood. 

What mistakes didn’t they make at that age?  What is it about our psyche that makes our minds so small and our hearts so hard that we move to strike as soon as someone better than us stumbles?

Well, one thing we do know.  These stone-throwers do not subscribe to the teaching of the son of a carpenter, who consorted with the fallen and the rejects among us.  Rather, they adhere to that school of political divinity that says as soon as you can see money, politics, or blood on the table, the Sermon on the Mount goes clean out the window.

Has the person been born who believes that by that silly act, Dom Perrottet, the good Catholic family man that he is, endorsed Adolf Hitler?

It is very sad.  Boys mature later than girls.  We all did silly things at that age – shocking even. 

I managed to spend a night in the slammer at Prahran for being D and D (drunk and disorderly) after giving the wallopers some cheek after some boozy university function. 

It was OK.  Mac and Norma were away, and the dog didn’t tell tales.  The sergeant on the desk at dawn said the ten bob I had would go the bail, and I assumed that went into his pocket.  Until some years later, when I had to disclose any priors to the Supreme Court on admission.  I got Robert Heathcote of ABL to phone the court.  He nearly wet himself laughing.  Convicted and fined one pound.  I still owe His Majesty ten bob. 

So, I disclosed that to the court, and that was that.

(I was lucky.  That station had a very bad name then.  Especially if the window you accidentally fell from was the one above the fire hydrant.)

Are the vigilantes so clean that they are merely pains in the arse?

And now, some real rats are coming out. 

According to the internet, Jim Chalmers went to Catholic schools before university, at one of which he wrote a thesis ‘Brawler Statesman: Paul Keating…’ 

Will Jim give it to Dom down the front, as was the wont of the subject of his thesis (the man who endorsed Dom)?  Not on your bloody Nelly, Mate.  Jim holds his nose, and slips the stiletto in right in the middle of Dom’s back.

For all of the rest of us who want our communities to be more tolerant and more inclusive … I think this will be a factor that people will weigh up … in March.

That’s really gutless on a few different counts.  I can just about hear my late friend Jack Hedigan, QC, as real and fruity a Mick silk as I have known, asseverating from between grinding pursed lips, with a little bubble on one corner – ‘Just look at yourself ….!  Willing to wound, but afraid to strike….!’

Mr Chalmers is not just any Minister of the Crown.  He is the Treasurer of the Commonwealth of Australia.  He must be a man of impeccable integrity and clear of the dirt that besmirches what passes for politics here.  Caesar’s wife country.  And he just falls flat on his face in the gutter in what the NRL and he know as a cheap shot.  And what the AFL calls a coat-hanger.  From behind.

He should be ashamed of himself.

But these things don’t change.  Our greatest poet wrote of kings deposed.  One king might fairly be said to have asked for it, but the usurper was shiftiness personified.

Though some of you, with Pilate, wash your hands,
Showing an outward pity, yet you Pilates
Have here delivered me to my sour cross,
And water cannot wash away your sin.

That brings us to the real story.  Judas. 

Someone in the party ratted on the leader.  This was not some casual faux pas.  This was a deliberate and malicious kick to the head given for private political gain on someone who was down.  There you have a true ratbag at work.

And it brings me to my favourite anecdote from our politics.  Billy Hughes was a street fighter.  But face to face.  He handed it out in spades to that nice, decent man from Melbourne Grammar, Alfred Deakin. ‘Then I heard the word Judas.  That wasn’t fair.  It wasn’t fair to Judas!’ 

The speaker then reminded the House that Judas handed the money back – or threw it away – and then he at least had the courtesy to hang himself.

Politics – ALP – Liberal Party – Chalmers – Prince Harry.

George Pell was human.  He committed two great wrongs.  He put the interests of himself and his church over the interests of children.  In the result, priests attacked and injured children in their care.  Theirs was the ultimate breach of trust.  They betrayed God, their church, and Pell.  But their worst crime was the betrayal of children.  Many victims saw their lives ruined.  And most of that ruin could have been avoided had Pell not betrayed the children too.

Then Pell joined with others to design and implement a scheme to deny proper compensation to the victims by putting the church beyond the reach of the due process of law.  This despicable abuse of power and wealth took us back to the time when Beckett told Henry II that the king had no power over the priests of the church.  For this arrogance, Thomas was murdered by friends of the king, and was made a saint in record time by organs of the Vatican.  And the English concluded that they must forever preclude agents of a church from interfering with their governance.  Which they proceeded to do in what is referred to as the Reformation.  (You may recall that Tony Abbott said it was a pity that Islam had not had one.)

We now have a better understanding of the misery wrought on children in the church and their families by these dreadful breaches of trust.  As it happens, all that Pell did to protect the church has come back to damn it.  That church now stands stained and disgraced.  In England now, more people attend mosques than Anglican churches, and that looks to happen here too with this church.

And yet when Pell died, some said that he was a good man, and a victim.  Go tell that to those who were buggered because Pell chose to look the other way.

The moral vacuum and blindness induced in the faithful by their embrace of the supernatural defies belief.  We are used to the lunacy of Abbott when it comes to faith. 

But Peter Dutton’s mind appears to be even more warped.  He chose the death of a prelate as the occasion to make a political statement.  He said that what happened to Pell in one of the cascades of legal cases brought on by the evil within the church suggested that Pell was persecuted by a state Labor government.  I will not insult your intelligence by dealing with what I regard as the most banal political statement I have ever seen.  It does suggest that Dutton is unfit for any office of trust.

But why concentrate on just one case when it is beyond doubt that Pell was responsible for so many others – and then defrauding the victims? 

And I am yet to hear the word ‘sorry’ for the fraud.  And I won’t.  Those withered male prelates in Rome are far too proud for that.

As to that one case, its justification is plain from the reaction of two juries and two justices on appeal.  Most people will be able to live with the fact that the High Court came to a different view, but I would be more comfortable with it if I thought that court had given more weight to two notions about our process in courts.  You must hear both sides – and I stress ‘hear’; and the most important person in the courtroom is the loser.  

The justices declined to hear the evidence of the victim.  They were not there, they said, to duplicate the function of the jury.  That may be so, but what about the rights, interests and expectations of the parties?

 How does the victim feel?  Those who heard him believed him.  Those who did not hear him said the jury was wrong and then put the victim down. 

This doesn’t sound right.  And that was certainly not the best way to dispose of a red-hot burning issue that continues to agitate the Queen’s peace in Australia.  Their Honours look to have been both cold and cavalier. 

And the deployment of the epithet ‘specious’ does nothing to dispel the aura of aloofness.  It is one thing to lose a case.  It is another to hear your argument dismissed as ‘plausible, apparently sound or convincing, but in reality, sophistical of fallacious.’ 

And you cop ‘sophistical’ when your enemy is a prince of the church built on the teaching of Augustine and Aquinas.  A cardinal of the Church of Rome who was kept out of the witness box by the best lawyers that money can buy.  After you got the third degree in court from them for hours and days.  To give evidence that those who decided to release the cardinal disdained to hear. 

You were not broken.  He was not even tested.

No, your Honours – there are times in the law when mere logic is not enough.  What did that man do to cop all this – for nothing – but more pain, and the endless hurt of injustice?

But that one case, sensational as it was, is a distraction from the much wider wrongs of which Pell was guilty beyond doubt.  That some of the faithful now look on Pell as some kind of victim, or even a winner, shows that the power of religious faith and dogma to warp minds has not changed since the fall and rise of a saint in the Middle Ages. 

Nor has our need to ensure that it does not pollute our governance.

Child abuse – Roman Catholic Church – High Court – due process.