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  • Kieran Tapsell. Two empires.

    Antonio Caballero, Semana, Colombia, 30 March 2014  http://www.semana.com/opinion/articulo/antonio-caballero-dos-imperios/381891-3

    Barack Obama is normally very careful in his rhetoric, but some days ago, he said something a little unfortunate. When criticizing Russia’s annexation of the Crimea, he said to the press: “We (the United States) have considerable influence on our neighbours. But generally, we do not need to invade them to enforce their cooperation.”

    Generally? In its brief history of a little more than two centuries, the United States has invaded its neighbours on the American continent twenty nine times, beginning with its defeat in attempting to annexe Canada in 1812 (although even before that it had been casting its eye on Mexico and Haiti after its slave revolution).  It was distracted for a period while it exterminated its internal enemy, the Indian tribes. Then it was full bore ahead.

    After the proclamation of the Monroe Doctrine, the divine right of the United States to govern the whole hemisphere, its first big invasion was of Mexico in 1846, adding another fifty percent to its territory (now Texas and California). In 1855, it occupied Nicaragua to re-establish slavery there as well as in the territory of its neighbours, Salvador and Honduras. Then there was Cuba in 1898, and then the conquest of Puerto Rico and the far away Philippines in the Spanish American war. Then Panama in 1903 and the Dominican Republic in 1904. Then in 1906, Cuba once again, Panama again in 1908, and in 1910, back into Nicaragua.

    The United States invaded another country almost every year from 1911 to 1927, occupying permanently or temporarily parts of Mexico, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Panama, Honduras and Nicaragua. Then they had a breather until 1954 when they invaded Guatemala. Then there were fleeting invasions through the agency of other people, like the anti-Castro Cubans in 1961, financed by the CIA or the military coups in Brazil, Uruguay, Guatemala, Bolivia and the very bloody one in Chile in 1973, organized by the Secretary of State, Kissinger, and then there was the support for the Argentinean generals, the invasion of the little island of Granada in 1983, and the bombing of Panama City in 1989.

    None of this takes into account the invasions of other countries in other continents, in Europe, Asia and Africa, and, as President Obama says, to “enforce the cooperation” of the people they invaded. And that is not taking into account their hundreds of military bases, just as Russia has in Sebastopol, in the recently annexed or rather re-annexed Ukrainian peninsula of the Crimea.

    President Obama, so well educated in the best Universities, does not know his own country’s history.  Or, it is not so much that he is ignorant, but he does not want to acknowledge it. It is not only part of his indispensable presidential function to tell lies, but it also comes from his puritanical education in hypocrisy.

    The United States has never seen itself as an empire, and for that reason it allows itself the luxury of condemning the imperialism of other empires in the name of liberty. Russia, on the other hand, brutally boasts about having been an empire for centuries, and it aspires to continue being so. For that reason, its president, Vladimir Putin says that “the courage of the Russian soldiers has brought the Crimea into the Russian empire.” And he is referring back to the wars of Catherine the Great, who has that name because of her wars.

    Russia and the United States are two empires, which, during the Cold War ended up enjoying hegemony over their respective halves of the world. But the collapse of communism has removed their masks to show them up as nakedly imperial. Russia cannot pretend that it is promoting a socialist revolution anymore, and the United States cannot pretend that it is the defender of liberty. Each of them is reduced to promoting and defending their respective interests.

    How? Through what Obama calls “cooperation”. That is to say, through the use of force, the same thing for which he criticizes Putin.

    Guest blogger, Kieran Tapsell, drew my attention to some good writing from Colombia on issues of international importance. Kieran is a Spanish translator. I hope you enjoy something a little different.  John Menadue

  • Michael Kelly SJ. The canonisation of Popes John Paul II and John XXIII – an event of telling significance.

    Pope Francis may need some help from Our Lady The Untier Of Knots

    On April 27, we will witness an event that will tell us more about what to make of Papa Francesco and what to expect in his papacy. He will canonize on the same day both Popes John Paul II and John XXII. Each represents contrasting styles and records as Bishops of Rome: John XIII who convoked the Vatican Council and opened up the Church; John Paul II who stiffened and straightened the Church when some thought it was out of control.

    From his opening words as pope, Papa Francis has cut a very different path to that of John Paul II and his immediate predecessor, Benedict XVI – an engaging and direct, simple and accessible approach whereas Pope John Paul drew millions to events of uncertain significance (such as World Youth Days) and Pope Benedict, as either Bishop of Rome or Joseph Ratzinger the theologian, preferred solitude as he produced books and encyclicals.

    Pope Francis has been quick to commence a style of more inclusive leadership through consultation and discussion, as demonstrated in his calling an extraordinary Synod in October. And he has moved to see the Church as a whole addresses the greatest challenge to its credibility in centuries by getting the new Vatican Commission addressing the issue underway with credible members and a reform agenda. This is of special relevance to us in Australia who have witnessed appalling sight of Cardinal Pell trying to call the brutal treatment of sex abuse victims “prudential management of the Church’s assets”.

    Along the way, the Pope has carefully but emphatically faced the Church in a fresh if not new direction. And, according to well informed sources in Rome, opposition to his reforms is mounting even as the  backlog of issues the Church has to face remains in place.

    He started early to address some of the outstanding concerns. With two simple observations – one to journalists in the plane on the way from Brazil and the other in his long interview with some Jesuit magazines last year – he has personally managed to defuse sex and homosexuality as obsessive topics of Catholic focus.

    However, the Church has virtually 50 years of unaddressed issues and reforms that need to be addressed:

    • Clericalism, the restructuring of ministry and that ticket into the clerical culture at the heart of so much trouble for the Church – celibacy – which Pope Paul VI prevented the Vatican Council from considering;
    • The weak grasp of human biology reflected in the Church’s sexual ethics, particularly as shown in the controversial issue of contraception;
    • Centralism and careerism in Church administration and those who ambition it;
    • The outdated nature of the Church’s legal processes;
    • And perhaps the biggest issue: the exclusion of women from positions of decision-making significance.

    That’s where the inclusion of Pope John XXIII in the beatification ceremonies next month becomes a clear indication of the style and direction of his term as Bishop of Rome.

    John XXIII’s cause for canonization had been languishing. Pope Francis dispensed with the usual process and simply declared, as he can, that John XXIII was worthy of canonization.

    Fans and devotees of John Paul II had started the chant for his canonization at his funeral – Santo Subito. But the canonization wheels continued to turn for John Paul II with his enthusiastic supporters declaring at his death that he should be called John Paul the Great. That title is appearing to be at least an overstatement as the details of his protection of the disgraced and disgraceful Marcial Marciel, child abusing father of two families whose crimes go back to his earliest days as Founder of the Legionaries of Christ in the 1940s.

    But the association of the two Popes in this canonization process is no casual coincidence. As all leaders know, managing change requires that the leader take the majority of the community, organization or nation along with him or her as the changes unfold. Faction-ridden as the Vatican in particular and Church in general really are, Francis has to take as many as he can from all factions with him as he helps the Church face the reality of its challenges and respond constructively.

    Pope Francis has already indicated how he wants to address the tense issues in the life of the Church with open discussion, inclusive participation in the conversation and a process that will reach conclusions. Along with the other hot topics, the subject of the Extraordinary Synod – family life, its challenges and how to include the divorced and remarried in the Church community – is a topic whose handling can be managed only with consultation and inclusion.

    As Jesuit Provincial in the 1970s, he was widely seen as, and has admitted himself to have been, a self willed and authoritarian figure. Divided as the Jesuits in Argentina were, he did little more than antagonize many with his style. But he has learnt from that failure. At the heart of Jesuit governance is the good working relationship and openness needed between the leader and his subjects. It needs to be inclusive and consultative leadership or it fails to do what the Jesuit Founder Ignatius Loyola wanted it to be.

    After failing as Provincial, Jorge Mario Bergoglio had another opportunity to learn how to govern when he became Archbishop of Buenos Aires. There, his approach was to be decisive only after extensive and inclusive engagement with those involved in or affected by the decision he had to make.

    Such a process means change will only come slowly. But to govern effectively in often-conflictive circumstances, Pope Francis needs to govern inclusively, as reflected symbolically in this joint canonization this month.

    These events defuse tensions while at the same firmly lead in a positive direction – defuse the cultists by recognizing John Paul II yet underlining what Pope Francis really wants: a return to the spirit of Vatican II as the animating spirit of the Church. That’s why John XXIII got fast–tracked.

    The documented turning point of Pope Francis’s life after his failure as Jesuit Provincial occurred before a picture in a German church of Our Lady, The One Who Unties Knots. To do what he plainly wants to do, Our Lady will have to be working overtime.

    Fr Michael Kelly is the executive director of ucanews.com

     

  • Michael Sainsbury. Tables have turned on China’s ex-security chief

    The imminent purge of Zhou Yongkang, China’s security chief from 2007 to 2012, brings to mind that wonderful Chinese expression: “The fish rots from the head down”.

    Since the major clearout after Mao Zedong’s death in 1976, Zhou is now the most senior Communist Party official to be fingered by its internal affairs division, the Central Discipline Committee. He is the first former member of the elite Politburo Standing Committee (PBSC) to be cast out by the Party. His case has implicated a reported 300 allies and relatives with total assets of US$14.5 billion.

    Zhou is the star victim of Chinese leader’s Xi Jinping’s showy, constantly publicized anti-corruption campaign. Zhou’s trial will be all about money and corruption, designed to showcase that Xi Jinping the reformer – who has promised to catch ”tigers” like Zhou as well as “flies”(lesser officials) is cleaning house in a ruthless and spectacular way – and at least officially – for all the right reasons. His campaign is the biggest in China’s history, yet it is destined to head precisely nowhere without political reform.

    China must start at the very beginning with the establishment of rule of law, independent institutions such as the judiciary and financial regulators, as well as de-politicizing the police force and armed services. But Xi has already very clearly ruled that out.

    Really, this is all about politics. In one way Zhou, the stony faced veteran of the oil and gas industry – his power base – was unlucky to be on the wrong side of the ledger when Bo Xilai, the former Politburo chief, went down in a mess of lurid tales of infidelity, poisoning and – yes – more corruption. Zhou wanted to back Bo into his old job but Xi cut it from the PBSC, which he trimmed from nine under Hu Jintao to just seven.

    Yet Zhou’s fall has, more than many who have simply fallen to internal politics, been apposite. He was the prime mover behind the overriding policy of the Hu regime’s “stability maintenance”, a euphemism for crushing protest and dissent by any means possible.

    Simply put, Zhou is a mass murderer. On his watch, thousands of people were executed by China’s pretence of a legal system, where judge, jury, prosecutors and police are presided over by the Communist Party’s Legal and Political Bureau, which he chaired during Hu’s regime.

    We will never have any clue as to how many more Chinese citizens were knocked off by the country’s terrifying State Security Bureau, the country’s feared secret police who operate in a government-sanctioned zone of extralegal kidnapping, torture, evidence fabrication and murder.

    Zhou has fallen victim to the same due process-free sham. He was last seen in public on October 12, after which Xi is reported to have ordered an investigation of him and his cronies. Under Zhou’s leadership, countless people were jailed without fair trial, and on the basis of flimsy or doctored evidence and with pre-ordained results. Let’s see how he likes it once he is on the other side of the fence, handcuffed and manacled – guilty until you are found guilty.

    It’s interesting that Jiang Zemin, who backed Xi as leader and was the man at the nation’s helm for 13 years (1989-2002) as China’s crony capitalism flourished, was reported in the Financial Times this week to have urged Xi to tamp down his anti-corruption drive. No surprises there. After all, no one wants the other old blokes in their weekly card game in some swanky state-owned palace locked up.

    Another of Zhou’s notable achievements in his reign of terror was presiding over the oppression of minorities and government critics. Together with Hu Jintao, Zhou was chiefly responsible for the post-July 2009 campaign of terror and oppression (and cultural destruction) waged against the Uighurs in Xinjiang. It continues today – as does the ongoing oppression and cultural destruction of Tibet.

    Zhou persecuted without fear or favor campaigners for all manner of basic human rights. Just to take a couple of examples, religious practitioners – in particular, “underground” evangelical Christians – and people living with HIV caused by government officials knowingly buying infected blood and supplying it to hospitals.

    Zhao locked up Chen Guangcheng, a blind advocate for the ending of state-sanctioned forced abortions and sterilizations. As soon as he came out in protest, he and his family were put under particularly oppressive house arrest until his miraculous escape to the US embassy in Beijing and later his emigration to the US.

    More generally, Zhou presided over a system that persecuted any advocates for peaceful and gradual change of a system that allows all of the above (such as incarcerated Nobel Peace Laureate Liu Xiaobo). Anyone operating in that dangerous grey zone could get that knock on the door from one of Zhou’s boys any time, any day. It was not just these people that Zhou set out to destroy but their partners, children and parents.

    Thousands of hard working business people who had the misfortune to cross the financial interests of a Party member suffered helplessly as years – sometimes decades – of hard work was destroyed or confiscated, all on Zhou’s say-so.

    On Zhou’s watch the size of China’s domestic security surpassed at least officially that of the People’s Liberation Army. That in itself speaks volumes about both the repression in Communist China and how long the Party can hold on.

    By pulling off this long expected but as yet not officially announced removal of a Party member previously considered untouchable, Xi has stamped himself as China’s most powerful leader since at least Deng Xiaoping. He’s made some progress (The destruction of Zhou is not progress; in fact, quite the opposite. It is reminiscent of Mao’s own purges.) but the jury is still very much out on whether he will wield power wisely.

    For all of Xi’s boasting about the campaign against corruption, as long as the Party remains in control it will continue on its paranoid, willful and violent way. Zhou in many ways is the ultimate product of a system whose biggest threat is the very system it created.

    The vilification of Zhou will be directed by the Propaganda Department in China’s state-run press, which once lavished Zhou with gushing praise. Now when you read eye-popping tales of 30-car garages, bulging Swiss bank accounts, villas worthy of America’s antebellum South and the endless stream of perfumed mistresses decked out in designer Versace, remember that Zhou, like others who were singled out for destruction before, was hoisted on his own petard.

    Then spare some time to think about his victims – casualties of a rotting Party that encourages and sanctions evil people like Zhou Yongkang in order to continue to serve more of the same. Don’t for a moment think that this has anything to do with the people.

    Michael Sainsbury is a Bangkok-based journalist and commentator who writes for www.ucanews.com

     

  • Ben Saul. Australia’s Guantanamo problem.

    Ben Saul has written an article for the New York Times about the imprisonment of 52 people in Australia for up to nearly five years without trial. Secret evidence has been presented against them. They have no prospect of release. 

    Read the full article from the New York Times by following the link below.

    Ben Saul is Professor of International Law at the University of Sydney.

    John Menadue

     

    http://sydney.edu.au/news/law/436.html?newscategoryid=64&newsstoryid=13274

  • Ian McAuley. Inequality in Australia.

    A Financial Review article on March 24 claimed “Inequality in Australia has not deteriorated over the last 25 years, according to Reserve Bank of Australia research that undermines claims the gap between rich and poor has worsened”

    The essence of the argument is that while, between 1993-94 and 2009-10, the distribution of income has become more unequal, we have all increased our consumption – what we spend on food, transport, housing health care, recreation etc – by the same amount. Therefore we aren’t becoming more unequal.

    The argument is superficially credible, but it’s a sloppy piece of journalism.

    For a start, the relevant Reserve Bank article, “The Distribution of Household Spending in Australia” in the latest Bulletin, is a carefully qualified study, and in relation to the change in consumption over the 16 years (not 25 years) to 2009-10 it concludes:

    “The top 10 per cent of spenders have experienced slightly faster growth in real consumption than other households over recent decades, though the difference in growth is less pronounced than in the case of income.”

    That is, even when consumption is used as a measure of wellbeing, there has been a rise in inequality. That is easily confirmed by comparing the 1993-94 and 2009-10 ABS Household Expenditure Surveys, which shows, in real (CPI-adjusted) terms, that the highest income fifth of households increased their consumption by 41 per cent, the middle fifth increased theirs by 32 percent, and the lowest fifth by only 19 per cent.

    Second, as the RBA article points out, “consumption is not a complete measure of wellbeing”. One reason is that household expenditure statistics cover only what we spend from our own pockets, and do not include our enjoyment of publicly-provided services such as health care and education. If we spend more on these services because we believe, rightly or wrongly, that the quality or scope of publicly-provided services has deteriorated, then we can hardly be said to be better-off.

    For example, between 1994 and 2010, the proportion of Australians with private health insurance rose from  36 per cent to 45 per cent, and between 1996 and 2010 the proportion of students in non-government schools increased from 29 per cent to 34 per cent. Household expenditure data shows that for the households in the middle income band 14 percent of their increase in expenditure was for education and health care, but for the highest income households health and education took only 11 per cent of their increased expenditure. The well-off already had private health insurance and children in private schools.

    Third, while most economists agree that over the long term consumption is a reasonably good measure of material wellbeing, the compelling reality is that it has to be financed. Therefore if consumption and spending diverge for a period, it must be financed by borrowing or running down saving.

    Robert Reich and other American economists point out that in the USA, while real incomes for all but the rich have stagnated or fallen for many years, people have maintained or improved their living standards by going further into debt. Australia’s situation is  similar but a little more complex. Around 2002 we stopped running down our savings and started saving again.  Our officially-measured savings rates in 1994 and 2010 were much the same, at around 10 percent of income. But those figures do not show the increasing tendency over that period to draw on increasing equity in our houses through financial innovations such as mortgage re-draw facilities. Our house price boom allowed us to use our houses as ATMs, a phenomenon eloquently described by a young man caught by a roving microphone on the evening of Howard’s 2004 election victory, who said.  “Of course I voted for Johnny Howard. When he was elected my house was worth only $200 000; it’s now worth $500 000.  Why wouldn’t I vote for someone who’s made me $300 000 richer?”

    That debt, financed by illusory wealth, eventually catches up with us. Indeed, in recent years (since 2009-10) it has been manifest in widespread complaints about the cost-of-living.  Work by Tim Soutphommasane of Per-Capita and research I have done for The Centre for Policy Development shows that although incomes have been rising faster than prices, Australians generally believe it is getting harder to make ends meet.  The most compelling explanation for this apparently contradictory finding is that we are at last finding that we have been living beyond our means.

     

  • John Menadue. Citizenship and shared experience.

    The recent decision by the NSW Government to evict pensioners and low-income tenants from the Rocks in Sydney highlighted for me the importance of mixed communities and shared experiences.

    We all benefit in society when we have shared experiences. We can then get to know other people’s aspirations and their problems. We invariably find that we have much more in common than we think. We benefit both as individuals and as a society.

    Why should only one part of society, the wealthy, enjoy harbour views? Why should a mixed community that has lived for so long in one area be destroyed with low-income tenants forced out whilst the wealthy join other wealthy to enjoy harbour views and the attractive lifestyle that goes with the Rocks.

    In shared experiences we are drawn in two ways. One inclination is to live in pleasant and attractive areas that are often composed of people like ourselves with the same incomes and even the same ethnic backgrounds. But we also know that we benefit from shared experiences with people who are different. Our most important shared and common experiences are in times of natural disaster – bushfires and floods which tear away social class. We are in the emergency together and we find great satisfaction in banding together. Many older Australians recall the common hardship of the Depression, the War and rationing. For Britishers, the bombings and air raid shelters brought people to a ‘common experience’. Despite the hardships and the danger, there was satisfaction in those common experiences. The fabric of society and trust in each other was strengthened.

    As Ian McAuley in ‘Dissent’, November 2012, has pointed out, the British sociologist Thomas Humphrey Marshall wrote in 1949 about ‘common experience’ as an essential ingredient for good citizenship. This common experience is a richer notion than social inclusion. Unfortunately social exclusion by the wealthy is becoming as serious a problem as social exclusion of the poor.

    It is not just the Sydney Rocks that is being pulled apart. Our health and education institutions discourage the mixing of social groups and denying common experience.

    Ian McAuley points out that government subsidies to private health insurance discourages the well-off in the use of public hospitals. Because PHI, particularly for people on the high tables, is used almost entirely to fund treatment in private hospitals, government policy subsidises a form of social exclusion and discourages common experience. It also encourages many articulate people to opt out of support for public hospitals knowing that when they need hospitalisation, they can turn to private hospitals.

    The trend in the denial of common experience is even more obvious in education. In the 1950s, 75% of Australian children attended public schools. Most of the other 25% went to Catholic schools which had a similar social, if not religious, mix as public schools. Now only 65% of students attend public schools. This trend is even more pronounced in secondary schools where just over 60% of secondary school students are in public schools. This proportion is even lower in early grades of secondary school. And this trend away from common experience in public schools is accelerating despite the fact that there is no evidence that private education secures better outcomes. It will take many decades of Gonski to reverse the unfortunate and divisive trends that are occurring. Common experience in schools is being eroded.

    As more and more middle class and articulate parents opt out of public education, a tipping point will arise where it will be hard to ensure public support for public schools. That tipping point is approaching

    Just as the government subsidies to PHI has driven social exclusion in hospital use, so in education government funding is being skewed in favour of the privileged in private schools. The concept of common experience is being steadily eroded.

    We are also seeing this denial of common experience in our built environment. In my blog of November 28, 2013 “there goes the neighbourhood” I drew attention to the way that some communities are being sundered by the wealthy excluding themselves from common experience. They have private pools within minutes of superb public beaches, private entertainment systems, high walls,roller doors and CCT to keep themselves from a common experience with neighbours. Even when public transport is reasonably available, children get driven to school in private cars.

    It is claimed that these developments in our health and educational institutions and in our built environment is justified on the grounds of choice. But choice is often a one-way street available only to those with high incomes. What choice do the low income tenants in the Rocks have about where they are going to live?

    We all know that common experience in national disasters and volunteering brings a sense of togetherness, community and shared humanity. We must nurture institutions that promote sharing and common experience. The most critical is shared experience in schools and education.

    We need institutions and a built environment that cut through social class. That is the path to shared experiences.

    The more we turn our back on common experiences the more our citizenship and society is impoverished.

  • Kieran Tapsell. Facing prejudice.

    Piedad Bonnett, El Espectador, Colombia 5 November 2013 http://www.elespectador.com/opinion/una-injusticia-historica-columna-466919

    Summary: Alan Turing was responsible for breaking the German enigma code in the Second World War. He was subsequently convicted of the crime of homosexuality, and given a choice of being chemically castrated or imprisoned.  He chose the former and then committed suicide.  The Queen has recently “pardoned” him posthumously.

    When, in 1952, the British mathematician, Alan Turing was threatened with choosing prison or oestrogen treatment to “cure” his homosexuality, the freethinking atheist, who openly admitted his sexual preferences to investigating police, risking public derision, chose what was in effect chemical castration that left him impotent, deformed his body and caused him serious psychiatric problems.

    Two years later, at 41, and at the height of his powers, Turing was found dead in his bed, and by his side was a half-eaten apple impregnated with cyanide. The Coroner ruled it was suicide.

    This cruel sentence, paradoxically, led public opinion, and the English press to start to protest about the continual persecution, convictions, and even executions of homosexuals. These protests ended up with the 1957 Wolfenden Report that declared that these people were not sick, and recommended that homosexual practices amongst adults cease to be considered crimes. It was already too late, unfortunately for the mathematician.

    Alan Turing was such a brilliant, versatile and exceptional character that he has become a feature of novels and a play, Hugh Whitemore’s Breaking the Code and several biographies and countless speculations, including the hypothesis that he was assassinated.

    His place in history has much to do with the term that seems familiar to us today: artificial intelligence. In a famous article published in 1936, Turing put forward the real possibility of making a computing machine.

    This idea was put into practical effect during the Second World War with the British Intelligence Division with the design of the “Turing Machine”. It used combined calculus, and managed to decipher the secret codes of the Enigma machine that sent instructions to German submarines attacking the allied forces.

    As well as all that, he was known to have liked writing “haikus”, that he was a notable athlete and that he invented morphogenesis, a discipline that brought together mathematics and biology to decipher why animal markings were the way they were. He must have been very curious to have wanted to know, scientifically, why zebras have stripes.

    Turing is recognized as a genius by the scientific community and as a notorious example of how moral cheer leaders have historically damaged innocent people for the mere fact of being homosexual.

    On 24 December 2013, Queen Elizabeth of England, pressured by a section of public opinion exercised her Royal Prerogative of Mercy, pardoning Turing posthumously. Although the terms of the decree are completely ridiculous – there is nothing to pardon Turing for – the decision has a very important symbolic effect.

    It makes us realised that the law is often bound up with religious or social prejudice and that very probably there are some things that today we pursue furiously – like cultivating coca, for example, – that tomorrow, after much blood and suffering, will be accepted without scandal.

     

    Guest blogger, Kieran Tapsell drew to my attention some good writing from Colombia on issues of international importance. Kieran is a Spanish  translator.  I hope you enjoy something a little different. John Menadue

  • Michael Kelly SJ. Where does the buck stop in the Church?

    You could be forgiven for not knowing where the buck stops in the Catholic Church these days. In any society, organization or Church community, it is important to know who is ultimately responsible in decision making; otherwise, chaos or worse would prevail.

    In an unprecedented (for a cardinal) cross examination in court last week, Cardinal George Pell of Sydney seemed confused about responsibility in the Sydney Church. He was speaking for the Archdiocese of Sydney which he led from 2001 until his transfer to a job at the Vatican, appearing before the Royal Commission into child sex abuse in institutions, including the Church’s, across Australia.

    The Cardinal blamed various mistakes on his hand-picked lieutenants, “couldn’t recall” the details of instructions being given on his behalf to his lawyers and claimed his legal representatives had gone beyond what was acceptable to any Christian in defending a case brought against the archdiocese by a child abuse victim, John Ellis.

    The same was true at a global level in February when the Vatican’s chief spokesman, Father Federico Lombardi, ducked criticism from the United Nations committee investigating the Church’s compliance with a UN protocol it signed on the rights of children.

    No, the Vatican wasn’t responsible for the oversight of the Church’s ‘best practice’ in child protection. It was only responsible for the 32 children of employees in the Vatican City State. Accountability for the Church doesn’t reside in Rome.

    Cardinal Pell’s confusions and the Vatican’s dodges with the UN notwithstanding, accountability for the Church throughout the world has always belonged with Rome – despite attempted reforms at Vatican II. It is from Rome that the authority devolves to any bishop in the rest of the Catholic world. Every bishop on ordination makes a personal oath of loyalty to the Pope.

    That reality has intensified in the last 30 years, disempowering local bishops who have become branch managers of a multinational enterprise, charged with repeating whatever the line from HQ happens to be.

    And it has neutralized dioceses and groups of dioceses in bishops’ conferences from assuming the authority and responsibility called for in Vatican II.

    Perhaps the confusion at the Vatican reflects something – this way of organizing things doesn’t work. The chaos that such a ‘command and control’ system of administration for a multinational community stretching across all the continents of the world and their diverse cultures reached the high point of its dysfunction with Benedict XVI.

    The well documented chaos and mismanagement of that period underlines something well known outside the Church: Imperial government is unsustainable and has been for a century.

    But the efforts of Rome to control all Catholic activities from headquarters, particularly while Joseph Ratzinger was cardinal prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith and as reiterated by the current prefect, Cardinal Mueller, extended to the neutralizing of regional groups of bishops conferences.

    In Asia as in the Americas – North and South – that meant that continental aggregations of bishops’ conferences were told that their groups had no doctrinal footing and therefore little significance for anything but convening occasional topical meetings.

    The situation appears to be changing with the emphasis of Pope Francis on decentralization, consultation and synods. He wants participation, consultation, devolution and decentralization. As well, what the pope wants of bishops – or any pastor in the Church – points to deep cultural change as well: shepherds who have the smell of the sheep they tend to, who know and feel with their people rather than look over their shoulders to Rome.

    But the desire for inclusiveness and participation runs into a very thick brick wall. At the moment, on most important matters, the pope takes full responsibility. The overwhelming power of the pope reached its high point in Vatican I’s 1870 definition of papal infallibility.

    Not only did the council decree that the pope would be “free from error” in defining faith and morals. It also held that the pope had “primacy and immediacy of jurisdiction” in the Church.

    The universal jurisdiction of the pope not only doesn’t work, as displayed especially in the confused mismanagement of Benedict XVI’s time as pontiff. It also represents a major obstacle to promoting Church unity.

    Both Paul VI and Blessed John Paul admitted that the biggest obstacle to building Church unity was in fact the pope.

    Reform of his office is what Blessed John Paul sought in his 1995 encyclical Ut Unum Sint. While some responses followed, there was little substantial reaction.

    The main sticking point for Orthodox Christians in their dealings with the papacy is their rejection of an overriding submission to the Bishop of Rome, not so much in doctrinal areas about which they mostly agree with the Romans.

    It is more Rome’s presumption of moral and disciplinary authority and the differing cultures and histories of theological emphasis that divide the Romans and the Orthodox.

    This is a disciplinary requirement to which the Orthodox will never submit. Having ultimate responsibility remain with the Vatican doesn’t work for the good governance for a Church that stretches worldwide. And it actually works against something every Christian should know was Jesus Christ’s hope – unity among his followers.

    The Holy See hires and fires bishops and sets the general terms for the operations of the Catholic Church through various instruments – papal directives, administrative decrees for dioceses and religious congregations, and the code of Canon Law.

    The Vatican and the pope can’t have it both ways. It either has the authority that carries responsibility and liability or it doesn’t. At the moment, by its own rules, it does; and that isn’t working. In fact it works against one of the main emphases of the post Vatican II Church. If it wants to change that and delegate authority and responsibility, it will need to revise Vatican I’s decree.

     

  • Kerry Murphy. To Kill a Mockingbird and 2014.

    Mark Twain is quoted as saying that history does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.  I was reminded of this when seeing the excellent production of To Kill a Mockingbird at the New Theatre in Newtown, Sydney last week.  Good literature manages to make us reflect on our own times, and challenges us to think about how we might act in difficult times.

    Harper Lee’s 1960 novel is well known and is a modern classic.  The seemingly simple story of young Scout and her brother Jem, and their widower lawyer father in 1935 Alabama still resonates with an Australian audience in 2014.

    The community attitudes on race we would think are unacceptable in 2014, however it was only a week ago that the Attorney-General told the Senate that there was a ‘right to be a bigot’.   A ‘rhyming Twanian’ theme would be the vilification of those arriving by boat and the increasingly harsh way they are treated, under both Labor and the Coalition.  In To Kill a Mockingbird we can feel for Scout’s father Atticus, the lawyer defending a black man on a charge of rape of a white woman.  Like young Jem, we ask how could the jury possibly find him guilty on that evidence.

    In the New Theatre production, the jury is the audience and we are challenged to face and reflect on our own fears and prejudices in 2014 Australia, just as Atticus challenged the jury in the 1935 story.  How do we come out of this challenge?

    Atticus tells Jem and Scout to ‘spend time in the skin or shoes of the other’ so they can understand that person. This is a challenge for us in 2014.  What if we spent time in the shoes of an Aboriginal who was discriminated against because of their race or colour, or an asylum seeker who was vilified because of how they arrived in Australia fleeing the feared persecution.   Would we so easily say there was a ‘right to be a bigot’ or that ‘illegals’ should be locked away in Pacific penal colonies?

    Lee’s 1960 story of a small town trial in 1935 Alabama resonated as much with the 1960s in the US as it does with Australia in 2014.  The play was well produced and a simple and effective set added to, rather than distracted from the story.  9 year old Teagan Croft stole the show in her confident and credible Scout.  Ably supported by 14 year old Hudson Musty as Jem and 12 year old  Kal Lewins as Dill.  Lynden Jones ably portrayed the genuinely good character of Atticus the lawyer, who had to explain to his children the bigotry of the town against his client just because of his colour.  As good as Lynden was, I still think of Gregory Peck in the 1962 film.

    Revisiting this timeless tale gives a chance to reflect on whose shoes we should stand in to understand them better.  It is easy to preach or pontificate about the inflationary vilification and appalling treatment of asylum seekers in Australia, but like Scout and Jem, I need to stand in the shoes of the others.   What makes people so prejudiced against asylum seekers?  Why does the Attorney-General think there is a right to be a bigot?  Understanding their position will help me better explain my position and views.  I just wish they were able to stand in the shoes of the other as well, and maybe their bigotry and fear would diminish.

    Kerry Murphy is a Sydney solicitor who specialises in Immigration and Refugee Law.

    The play is at New Theatre until 19 April http://newtheatre.org.au/whats-on/season-2014/to-kill-a-mockingbird/

  • Mack Williams. Abbot’s visit to Korea not all about trade!

    As Tony Abbott’s first time to South Korea (ROK) as Prime Minister this visit carries much more importance than the mercantilist hype in which it  has been cloaked. It will certainly will be seen through a much larger prism by his hosts – and their brothers across the border. The Korean peninsular is of fundamental strategic importance to Australia as the only place in the world where the national interests of the all major powers intersect and the potential for conflict remains so high. The mozaic  of all these interests is extremely complex,  demanding close and continuing interest of the highest order and very sensitive management on our part –  as the Prime Minister and his team should have learned from the instant and robust reaction not only from China but also the ROK to his incautious remarks about Japan being Australia’s best friend in the region. This visit offers him the opportunity to appreciate this kaleidoscope of challenges at first hand.

    Both Japan and the ROK are alliance partners of the US but they often sing from very different hymn sheets – usually to the chagrin of the US as witnessed by President Obama’s very public efforts at the recent summit in The Netherlands to initiate and chair the first face to face meeting between Prime Minister Abe and President Park. Likewise, on many issues the ROK is more comfortable with China than it is with Japan. As their country has been a battlefield for centuries between China and Japan, Koreans have learned more about managing relations with both than any other country and have much wisdom to offer at a time when the rest of the world is beginning to focus on the looming strategic shifts in the region

    North Korea , of course, remains a constant threat not only to the ROK but to the region and the world more widely. ROK views on and policies towards the DPRK are naturally far more complex than media headlines would suggest – and often more sophisticated. This links directly into the ROK relationship with the US which is often quite sensitive. Australia would do well to understand much better these shades of difference and bear them in mind in forming our own policy towards the DPRK.

    There have been some notable occasions when Australia and the ROK have worked very closely together on regional and international initiatives :for example,  Hawke and his Korean counterpart with the foundation of APEC, Rudd and his counterpart with the development of the G20. But the Middle Power vision of the two countries in the region , along with Indonesia and others, has often been mooted but never taken off. It could be timely to revisit the concept in discussions with President Park.

    Given the welcome progress on the FTA after so many years in the making and  the extraordinary size of the travelling business retinue some of the hoopla is understandable. But there is still some way to go before its outcomes can be reasonably quantified. It will make little if any impact on the big hitters of Australian exports to the ROK whose business is well established and working well on a market basis with what is a remarkably globalised Korean economy. Last year we enjoyed a $ 10 billion trade surplus with our exports to the ROK twice the value of their exports to us. In any event Korean business culture is such that touring spectaculars seldom lead to instant match-making. Sustained engagement through personal networking remains essential. Even door opening for groups of this size becomes very problematic.

    Our agricultural exports should gain benefit from the FTA but the floodgates are unlikely to open wide – especially in beef which has been so contentious for decades. The services sector should also benefit. The most obvious Korean gain will be the removal of the 5% tariff on cars which has disadvantaged Korean manufacturers to cars from Thailand.

    In his recent Asia Society promo of the North Asia tour Abbott is “hoping” that the FTA will be signed while he is Korea. The uncertainty is generated by the lengthy translation of the volumes of paperwork involved. The Korea US FTA several years ago failed so badly in translation – sparking over 300 cases in Korean courts and real tensions between Seoul and Washington.

    After signature the formal approval of the FTA by both parliaments will be needed before implementation. On the Korean side this will be no cake-walk especially in the very sensitive agricultural area. Democracy is very much alive and well in Korea and they have a higher proportion of rural electorates than Australia. Given the outstanding success of cooperatives in the ROK, rural voters are largely small and ageing farmers not rapacious landlords or agribusiness. The Korean government may wait for the signature of FTA’s currently in negotiation with Canada and New Zealand to present all three as a package to the National Assembly.

    Mack Williams is a former Australian Ambassador to the Republic of Korea.

  • Walter Hamilton. The guts of a Free Trade Agreement with Japan.

    Dolphin-culling and free trade agreements represent opposite sides of the coin of the relationship between Australia and Japan. Both are currently in the news, with Sea Shepherd activists hounding the fishermen of Taiji (where the documentary ‘The Cove’ was filmed) and Australian cattle producers in Tokyo trying to break down the last obstacle to a bilateral FTA. More than that, the two issues encapsulate the divided response among many in the West to Japan as a backward and insular nation, on the one hand, and a modern, global partner on the other.

    Years ago I visited the island of Iki, off the coast from Nagasaki in western Japan, to report on the practice of ‘drive hunting’ of dolphins, the same culling method used by fishermen at Taiji to reduce the natural competition for a diminishing fish stock. The founder of Sea Shepherd, Paul Watson, had been in town a fortnight before and got himself deported for cutting nets strung across a cove in Iki, releasing scores of dolphins. The irony was that in the very act of sabotage Watson was caught in a storm and became stranded on an islet from where he had to be rescued by local fishermen (a fact omitted from the fanciful account of this episode posted on the organisation’s website.)

    Interested to find out how others living on the island regarded the dolphin killing, I visited a farmer working his small holding a few kilometres from the coast. ‘Oh, those fishermen down there,’ he told me, ‘they’re an uncouth lot. They give the place a bad name.’

    I was taken aback to find such a sharp divergence of interest, on this tiny island, between fisherman and farmer. I then realized the true importance of factionalism, based on occupation and geography, particularly in rural Japan. Australia’s FTA negotiators, the latest in a long line of officials who have tried for half a century to eliminate tariffs on beef and dairy imports, will be aware of these fissures in the Japanese bargaining position; the fissure, for instance, between the farm lobby and the consumer lobby, or the one separating domestic from international economic priorities.

    The ‘enlightened’ farmer I met proudly showed me his chief productive asset: one Wagyu steer penned in his front yard, being pampered and premium-fed in readiness for the abattoir. Yes, you read that correctly, a herd of one. This and a few other odds and ends, plus a huge government subsidy, kept him in reasonable comfort. He was (and I think he sensed it to a degree) a parody of modern farming. It reminds me of another occasion accompanying an Australian delegation, led by the then Primary Industries Minister John Kerin, in the mid-1980s. Australia at the time was in the grip of a terrible drought, graziers were at their wits end, and yet they could not sell into the Japanese market at fair prices. I remember going with them to a farm near Nagoya and trudging past a veritable showroom of brand-new farm machinery bought with cheap loans from a highly protected rural bank. The Australians could only shake their heads in bitter disbelief.

    So the Japanese farmer and fisherman, for all their differences in lifestyle, share one vital, historic conviction: that, whatever it takes, whatever the international pressure and criticism, their survival is paramount to the national interest. Anyone covering Japanese affairs will tell you that the Ministry of Agriculture has always outranked the Ministry of Foreign Affairs around the Cabinet table. While some progress has been made as a result of the decades of lobbying to gain improved access to the Japanese market for farm goods, every yard conceded has been hard fought. Cracks in the façade often seem to open up at moments during negotiations only to close again as a result of sectional pressure. I’ve heard Japanese Agriculture Ministers explain, in all earnestness, that their countrymen, even if they were given the choice, could not eat more imported beef––because, wait for it, Japanese intestines were different from Westerners’ intestines. Try arguing against that!

    Without major concessions on agricultural imports, no FTA with Japan would be worth its name. Political conditions, however, are as favourable now as they’ve ever been for a genuine agreement, mainly because the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, riding a large parliamentary majority, does not need the farm vote as much as it did 30, 40 or 50 years ago. Global trade liberalisation is also an important lever in Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s declared policy of economic deregulation (the last ‘arrow’ of ‘Abenomics’). Perhaps the time has come. But as the Sea Shepherd boys and girls will tell you, still prowling the headlands of Taiji looking for blood in the water, rugged self-reliance and a sense of entitlement to a traditional way of life remain formidable obstacles to change in Japan. And the Sea Shepherd crew should know all about that frame of mind.

    Walter Hamilton reported from Japan for the ABC between 1979 and 1996 for a total of eleven years.

  • Eric Hodgens. A new moral compass

    The Church is not the best guide to moral values. That is the response of some Catholics to the questionnaire which the Vatican sent out in preparation for the October Synod of Bishops. Many practising Catholics do not agree with the official opinions of the Pope on moral rules associated with marriage and sexuality.

    The disagreement list is long:

    • No living together before marriage;
    • No sexual activity except between a man and a woman officially married in the Church;
    • No contraception;
    • No masturbation;
    • No civil marriages or partnerships;
    • No re-marriage after divorce;
    • No sexual activity by homosexuals;
    • No homosexual partnerships, let alone marriage;
    • No IVF;
    • No refusal of sex to a reasonable request from a marriage partner;

    Many Catholics would say that they used to believe everything on the list was wrong; but not now. The times have changed. Implicit in this is the judgement that what is right and wrong is determined not by the Church but by the surrounding culture. That’s why it changes.

    On reflection we were effectively taught that in the seminary. Doctrinal statements could be infallible; but moral rules (laws) could not. They were too dependent on outside circumstances. Yet Catholic leaders like John Paul II, Benedict XVI and Cardinal Pell insisted that these were God’s law, and not open to question. They even tried to have Humanae Vitae accepted as infallible. They would say that the Church teaches these rules. But all the while the real Church – that is rank and file Mass-going Catholics – did not believe them. Reception by serious believers is necessary for doctrine or rules to be binding – the sensus fidelium.

    Meanwhile the immorality of bishops and popes has been embarrassingly displayed by their cover up of paedophilia by some of their priests. They knew it was happening and made it worse by moving offenders to other posts – thus spreading the offence. They were trying to protect the good name of the institution. In so doing they were harming the people entrusted to them. Basic human rights took second place to the institution’s appearance. Their moral compass was badly wrong. Many of them still do not get it. Nor do their superiors who refuse to sack them. The superior officials’ moral compasses are wrong too.

    Looking at it from a distance the preoccupation with personal, sexual morality as sinful is doing a disservice to sin. Real sin is a big thing. Exploitation, sectarianism, warfare, greed-induced poverty, manipulation of power, domination of the powerless by the powerful are the real sins of today. Sex can be an area of sin, too – but when and because it is exploitative, whether systemic, as in white slavery, or individual. Margaret Farley gets this one right in “Just Love – A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics.” But personal consensual sexual activity cannot be in the Big Sin category despite papal obsession with it.

    On the other hand Pontifical Secrecy is central to all Vatican official business. Diocesan curias also work in secrecy. What happened to transparency and accountability? Some secrecy is necessary, but it is more nuanced than that. Too much is accepted as secret when it should not be. What do you know about diocesan finances? Dare you ask? Yet diocesan spending should be transparent if its authorities are to be accountable. At some levels church secrecy is thwarting transparency and accountability. The moral presumptions are back to front. The secular world is moral and the Church is immoral.

    Some big sins of the past – so often sexual – are not really sinful. Some things which were OK in the past are really seriously wrong. Changing cultural values can be confusing but they are part of living in a changing world. Our challenge is to be part of the debate and to admit when we are wrong. This can be hard when we are emerging from an authoritarian, monist culture to a pluralist one. Meanwhile we cannot claim moral superiority unless we observe the ethics of the society in which we live.

    F. X. Harriott – The Tablet’s renowned voice of common sense – suggested in one of his last articles that the Vatican should take a decision to say nothing about sex for the next 50 years. Since its voice as a guide to personal morality is so thin, maybe it is time to extend that to all personal moral issues. The Ethics Committees advising governments and research institutions seem more aware of basic human rights and are in touch with the prevailing values of society. Should we take note of them, use our own common sense and make this our new moral compass?

    Eric Hodgens is a retired priest who ‘writes a bit’.

  • Walter Hamilton. Credulity and formalism: Abbott’s twin challenges in Japan.

    A prominent Japanese historian once likened the psychology of wartime Japan to a ‘madhouse’ in which the public became capable of believing anything. Another who lived through those years noted how formalism––keeping up appearances long after a cause has ceased to have any meaning––suited a nation unable to change with the times. Credulity and formalism remain powerful elements in Japanese culture, regardless of the fact that the population is highly educated and, these days, formal barriers to the free flow of information are low. Recently we have witnessed extraordinary examples of this phenomenon. As Tony Abbott prepares for his first official visit to that country as prime minister next month, it is worth reflecting on the Japanese state of mind.

    The instinct driving an elderly mother to hand over her life savings on the strength of a telephone call might appear to have little to do with international affairs, and yet her credulity fits within the larger picture. Japanese call them ‘ore, ore’ (‘it’s me, it’s me’) scams, in which a con artist pretending over the phone to be a relative of the elderly victim pleads distress and solicits money. Despite public warnings and police campaigns, this and similar forms of extortion netted criminals an estimated 12.8 billion yen ($140 million) in 2012. Though it might be hard to prove the Japanese are the most credulous people on earth, evidence points to a strong predisposition to believe what they are told.

    Take, for example, the supposedly deaf composer described as Japan’s ‘new Beethoven’ and given the imprimatur of the national broadcaster, NHK, in a documentary broadcast last year entitled Melody of the Soul. The man was neither deaf nor did he compose the works for which he was feted (they were written by somebody else). The journalists and many others who dealt with him had grounds aplenty to doubt his story, but nobody dared challenge the myth. It wasn’t until the real composer, fed up with his paltry reward, threatened to blow the whistle that the truth was revealed last month.

    This episode was followed soon after by another––in the field of science. The story initially presented to the public again proved irresistible: an attractive, 30-year-old female biologist had led a team of researchers to discover a way to create stem cells, opening a simple and ethical way to the cure of all sorts of ailments. Her youth, her sex, and the fact that she worked at a comparatively unknown (to the lay observer) institution added glamour to what was hailed as a far-reaching discovery. National pride oozed from the saturation media coverage. When it became known that, during her experiments, the superstar scientist wore a Japanese cooking apron, or kappogi, in preference to a lab coat, sales of the traditional garment skyrocketed. She might be a modern girl, but her heart was in the right place.

    The stem-cell heroine is now in virtual hiding. The research papers she co-authored have been called into question on several grounds, prompting an inquiry. Though the mistakes uncovered so far have not been branded deliberate deceptions, clearly the public had been too ready to believe in miracles. As the backlash builds, there is a tendency to vilify (‘immature, sloppy’ research, her boss now calls it) what was previously adored.

    Where Tony Abbott comes into the discussion is not, of course, in relation to the specifics of these episodes, but rather what they might indicate about the psychology of present-day Japan. There seems to be a strong, pent-up craving for miracles: redemption miracles, artistic miracles, medical miracles and, in the shape of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, economic and political miracles. It would be dangerous for Abbott, and Australia, to indulge in similar wishful thinking about the bilateral relationship. Japan is not out of the woods, economically, and relations with its nearest neighbours, currently as bad as they have ever been since the war, show little sign of improving. To ignore, play down or set aside these major conditioning factors in our two-way relationship would pander to the Japanese weakness for credulity and formalism.

    What Japan needs right now is a cold shower: a reality check, a return to earth. Tokyo’s recent decision not to review the 1993 government apology on wartime ‘comfort women’ might, at first glance, appear to be the start of a healthy sobering up. But Abe’s explanation, that ‘we must be humble regarding history’, is not necessarily what it seems. Given the government’s direct hand in textbook screening, just one example of its current ideological offensive, his further comment that ‘issues regarding history should not be politicised or made diplomatic issues’ is hardly ingenuous or helpful. If Abbott ever intended broaching the issue that lies at the heart of Japan’s poisonous relations with China and South Korea (and recent media reports suggest he does not), he has been warned off even before he gets to Tokyo.

    History and diplomacy cannot be separated on a whim, no matter how much certain politicians might find it convenient to do so. The formalism of humility without candour and sincerity, the credulity of a diplomacy built upon a refusal to fully face up to the past: these are manifestations of the same blind spot exploited by conmen, ‘deaf geniuses’ and headline-grabbing scientists. Tony Abbott needs to go to Japan with his eyes wide open and not take the line of least resistance to Abe’s unsustainable worldview.

     

    Walter Hamilton reported from Japan for eleven years.

  • John Menadue. Pity our diplomats.

    It is not often that our diplomats in foreign posts receive or need our sympathy in the work they do. But just think of their present plight in defending the Australian Government’s behaviour in foreign policy. What we are seeing across so many countries is alarming. With many key countries, we are skating on very thin ice – and the ice will probably crack fairly soon.

    Just consider what is happening.

    In our region for decades, opinion leaders and almost anyone else who knew anything about Australia scratched their heads when they realised that we had a foreign head of state. Invariably they asked themselves and others, how can this be in a country like Australia that sees its future as an independent nation in the Asian region? This cultural cringe has worsened in the last few days. We are going to have knights and dames.  How do our diplomats in the region explain this colonial nostalgia which is taking us back down a time-warp to Menzies of the 1950s? We are really making a laughing stock of ourselves. We give lip-service to the Asian Century. But knights and dames belong to the 19th Century.

    The Abbott Government has cut overseas development aid by over $100 million this year and with further cuts to come. The poor of our region will be punished so that the government can fund parental leave for the wealthy. How do our diplomats explain this?

    We ask Cambodia, one of the poorest countries in the world, to take asylum seekers that we have a duty to protect and support. Cambodia is a member of ASEAN. The other members of ASEAN must be nonplussed.

    We have offended the President of Indonesia in the clumsy handling of telephone tapping of his office. We add to this insult by breaching Indonesian sovereignty almost at will with our naval vessels and turn backs of asylum seekers. Scott Morrison tramples not only over the rights of asylum seekers, but also has been extremely damaging in his visits to Indonesia. On very reliable advice, I know that in Jakarta he is regarded as quite garrulous and aggressive. He shoes the same approach in Australia.  He is causing great damage. He is determined to stop the boats at any cost, including our relations with Indonesia.

    The Australian Government tapped the telephones of East Timorese ministers and officials who were engaged in delicate negotiations with the Australian Government on the gas field between Australia and East Timor. The Director of ASIO, who sanctioned the tapping of the telephones in the first place when he was head of ASIS, then persuaded George Brandis to issue orders for raids on the premises of a witness and the Counsel for the East Timorese Government before the International Court. I am glad I am not a diplomat in Dili to try to explain this.

    In Opposition, Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison attacked the human rights record of Malaysia, and particularly ‘caning’. It caused serious damage in our relations with Malaysia.  It was wilfully and deliberately done because the Coalition did not want the Labor Government to be successful in stopping the boats. Under the rubric of concern for human rights, the Coalition sided with the Greens in bashing Malaysia.

    Our relations with China have been pungently described by a frequent visitor to China as ‘f… ed’. Tony Abbott started the damage by describing Japan as Australia’s best friend in Asia. Given the long-term hostility between Japan and China it was not surprising that China was offended. Julie Bishop then added to the insult by her comments in Washington. Quite unnecessarily we sided with the Japanese against China over the disputed islands in the East China Sea. When Julie Bishop visited Beijing in December last year she was publicly chided by her Chinese counterpart Wang Yi. He accused Australia of ‘jeopardising bilateral mutual trust’. He added ‘the entire Chinese society and the general public are deeply dissatisfied’. Peter Rowe, our top diplomat for North Asia, told a Senate Committee a few weeks ago that ‘I have never in 30 years encountered such rudeness’. The Chinese are clearly very angry. Our diplomats in Beijing would be wise to keep their heads down. Not surprisingly they are having difficulty arranging Tony Abbott’s visit

    But wait, there is more. Last month in an exclusive in the SMH on February 24, Bianca Hall and David Wroe reported that ‘Diplomats preparing for the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva have expressed concern that Australia is working to actively undermine a push for an international enquiry into human rights abuses in Sri Lanka because of the [Australian] Government’s eagerness to cooperate with that country’s leaders on asylum seekers’. It was reported that the US and UK officials had ‘a deep concern’ about Australia’s position.

    If this serial blundering continues, we will suffer real pain. It is likely that China and Indonesia could be the ones to inflict that pain.

    Spare a thought for the diplomats who have to try and repair the damage.

     

  • John Tulloh. The way to the future through annexation.

    Annexation, as in the latest example of Russia with Crimea, usually refers to a smaller entity being swallowed up by a bigger one. It has a long history with both violent and peaceful outcomes. A recent example is East Jerusalem which Israel took over after the Six-Day War in 1967, resulting in enmity ever since. Before that was the Anschluss in 1938 when Hitler declared Austria to be part of Nazi Germany. Not long afterwards he annexed Sudetenland, a German-speaking area of Czechoslovakia, precipitating the road to World War Two. In 1975, Indonesia invaded East Timor and announced it had annexed it, much to the disquiet of its residents.

    It may surprise some that Hawaii and Texas became part of the U.S. as a result of annexation in the 19th century. Texas had been a northern state of Mexico until a majority of its people favoured joining the U.S and got the blessing of Congress to do so. Hawaiians had little say in the matter. The Americans overthrew their Queen and made Hawaii part of the U.S. for strategic and trade reasons.  In 1910, Japan annexed Korea. In 1914, Britain added Cyprus and Egypt to its Empire, taking both from the Ottomans with whom it was at war.

    In 1961, Goa, the Portuguese colony on the west coast of India, was forcibly absorbed into the newly-independent country. In formal terms, it was annexed, but India has always insisted it was ‘liberated’. It has similarities with with Crimea. Both are small specks in the overall geography of their regions. Crimea has a Russian-speaking majority who voted overwhelmingly to become part of Russia. In 1961, nearly two-thirds of Goa’s population was Hindu just as they were the overwhelming majority in India. Goa had been in Portuguese hands since 1510. Crimea became part of Russia in 1783 when Catherine the Great actually annexed it until the Soviet Union ceded it to one of its states, Ukraine, in 1954.

    The reasons for both takeovers were mainly strategic. In its latest move, Russia clearly wants to protect its naval access to the Black Sea and to the Mediterranean. In the case of Goa, India was worried by the likely consequences of the 1955 CENTO pact (Central Eastern Treaty Organisation) consisting of Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Turkey and Britain with the U.S. taking a keen interest on the sidelines.

    The distinguished Indian newsman, Prem Prakash, who covered the Goa takeover, recalls:

    ‘With the prospect of Goa, the only natural harbour along the vast western coast of India, possibly becoming a military base of the U.S.-led CENTO which could bring Pakistan forces there, India became alarmed. India’s hawks and anti-U.S. lobbyists led by Krishna Menon, the then Defence Minister, started pressurising (Prime Minister Jawaharlal) Nehru to take pre-emptive action’.

     Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, wanted to see if the matter could be resolved peacefully. But the Portuguese Prime Minister and dictator, Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, said Goa was non-negotiable because it was part of metropolitan Portugal.

    India began building up its forces around Goa. Portugal tried to rush warships there, but President Nasser of Egypt refused them access to the Suez Canal. That was because India and Egypt had just become founding members of the Non-Aligned Movement. Portugal then tried to provide reinforcements through its air force only for its planes to be denied overflying or refuelling rights. A civilian charter did get through. Portuguese soldiers, expecting to find hand grenades, instead found sausages for their consumption.

    Salazar demanded his hopelessly-outnumbered  troops in Goa fight until the last man. They ignored him. The result was that India took control of Goa within a day with minimal casualties. Later the Portuguese governor was tried for treason.

    Just as happened with the Crimea takeover, the U.S. rushed to the UN Security Council to protest, while the Soviet Union applauded the action. China, though a vociferous opponent of colonialism and its running dogs, neither condemned nor supported the invasion.

    Prakash says the Indian action was justified in much the same way as the Russian one was. Why, he asks, would India allow the threat of a foreign takeover of a prime naval base just as Russia reasoned much the same about its Black Sea presence after the elected leader of the Ukraine had been overthrown by mob rule tacitly supported by the West?

    Goa became part of India with little trouble and has developed into a prosperous and peaceful international tourist destination. Lisbon still offers Goans Portuguese nationality if they can prove they or their ancestors were born during colonial rule. For Crimea, separation may not be so easy when it depends on the Ukraine for its water and power supplies and has no contiguous border with Mother Russia.

    John Tulloh had a 40-year career covering foreign news.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Michael Kelly SJ. Sexual abuse and the humiliation of the Catholic Church. A new spirituality.

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    Michael Kelly SJ invites Australian Catholics to embrace the humiliation that is bound to increase as the Royal Commission into child sexual abuse continues in 2014 through a spirituality based in the gospel. The Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius Loyola invite us to pray for the gift of identification with Jesus in the abuse and derision he experienced in his Passion.

    Much of what made people pleased to be Catholic throughout our history since white settlement in Australia is gone and never to be revived. It fitted a time – one where most Catholics felt at home in the tribe, got their identity through belonging to ethnic groups that were, till recent decades, mostly populated by relatively uneducated and unskilled or semi-skilled males and house bound females who married in their early twenties if not their teens.

    Until the 1970’s, three quarters of Australian school children did not complete six years of high school and matriculate. Tertiary education was taken up by little more than one in five Australians. Today, nine out of ten young Australians complete six years of high school and from my own experience, which is among those who do get married in the Church, I would rarely see a couple where the male is younger than his early thirties and the female in her late twenties.

    Gone are the days of strict ethnic, religious or cultural identification underpinned by fairly rigid and exclusive social groups that impacted on employment opportunities. As well, the carriers of faith that helped many generations of Catholics to find a relationship with God have been unequal to the challenge of building a post – Vatican 2 Church whose self understanding was not to be found in hierarchy or devotional practice but as the People of God whose appreciation of their faith was to be grounded in Scripture and sacramental participation.

    For robust Catholic faith to thrive, something new has emerged. People come to faith by invitation and persuasion rather than direction and fear. The invitation and persuasion are there to develop understanding, conviction and personal commitment as pilgrims on a faith journey.

    Moreover, what many fail to appreciate is that now some two generations of Catholics in Australia have been better educated in faith, in Scripture and in Catholic theology than many, even most, in the generations of clerics and Religious who did the yeoman’s work of building communities and institutions, of providing services and creating the culture that is now all but gone.

    What I believe is the next and deepest challenge for the Catholic faith and its prospering in Australia is to feed more than the minds of those drawn to affirm the faith. That is necessary and must endure. What is needed are various ways in which the hearts of those seeking to discover deeper conviction can be nourished.

    That search is essentially a personal and intimate one, a search that is given the loose name “spirituality”.

    I am not talking about the return to devotional practices of the past that are still alive and well in the seclusion of some ethnic groups more recently arrived in Australia, with patterns of Catholic devotion that are not going to the fountain of faith – the New Testament. Like their predecessors in the Irish Australian tradition, they simply will not survive the chill winds of the wider secular culture in which Australian Catholics live.

    And, of course, I do not refer to that form of nostalgia evident in some Catholics for a pre-Conciliar way of being and worshipping as a Catholic that is little more than a selfindulgent distraction.

    The spirituality I am referring to is the experience of the living God, felt at depth, and the experience of whom is the peace and confidence within which faith, hope and love grow. It is the experience of a relationship with God that is supported, encouraged and celebrated in the community of faith through the Eucharist especially. But it is also an experience that is deeply and essentially personal.

    For faith to deepen in us, we need to absorb and face our experience of life, be honest with what we discover in the depths of our being, in our hearts where we find what is leading us to joy, light and growth and what is inhibiting or distracting us from embracing the growth we are invited to enjoy.

    Of course, our spiritual growth is always done in context – the context of our own lives and their opportunities and disappointments, their blessings and failures. But it is also done in the context we share with others: in our society and world and in the Church that is our faith community.

    We can each describe the changes on our personal journey home to our hearts where we discover the God who is searching for us. But I think there is something else, something that happens to us individually by focusing on an experience we all share.

    I believe there is something we share as an experience right now: we Catholics in Australia are at a tipping point, in a crisis that is also an opportunity for us as a community of faith.

    I refer of course to the event engulfing the Catholic Church in Australia: the Royal commission into child sex abuse. What relationship does this event have to the deepest opportunity for Catholics in Australia and those who may be drawn to our faith?

    The point we always start from in approaching the living God is one of humility. We are only unworthy servants in the presence of the one who is both utterly other and mysterious but also intimately present to us, coming to us through our experience of the people and world we encounter. That is what Christians proclaim – God is to be found in and among us. Our humble and open acceptance of this mystery is our starting point.

    But sometimes a humble starting point is forced upon us. We may be the object of abuse and betrayal or of others’ loathing, envy or violence. Or we may be humiliated by something we have done or been part of.

    That is where most of us are in the Australian church right now: humiliated.

    In a book to be published in May, the journalist and academic Chris McGillion has chronicled the sorry story not just of criminal misbehavior by Catholic clerics and religious who have abused children but also of the complete ineptitude and likely malfeasance of many bishops and religious superiors over a long time.

    McGillion then looks at what is likely to happen following the enquiries which are mostly into the Catholic Church, the Royal Commission currently happening, the investigation into the handling of complaints against a “Father F” in the Diocese of Armidale by Antony Whitlam QC, the Parliamentary Enquiry in Victoria last year and the investigation into the Diocese of Maitland Newcastle conducted by Margaret Cunneen whose report has just been handed down.

    While conceding that these external interventions into the Church will insist on institutional best practice for the protection of children by the Church from here on, McGillion is doubtful that they will be any more effective than such enquiries are on other subjects when conducted in universities, Government departments and other similar large organizations.

    Much of it, in McGillion’s view, will lead to extensive bureaucratic red tape, adept evasion of the strictures imposed, ways around ordinances and fundamentally a distraction from what is the Church’s only way to fix itself – the revivification of its core mission of communicating and sharing sacred truth. Without that, the Church collapses into being no more than an extensive NGO service provider, bogged down in itself.

    I am inclined to agree with Bishop Bill Wright, the bishop of Maitland Newcastle, in his answer to a question on ABC radio last year. Asked by an ABC Radio journalist if he would guarantee that children in the care of the Church in his Diocese would never be at risk, he responded with a firm “No”.

    Asked why, Bishop Wright replied that there is no system known that can meet the challenge posed by the mercurial, deceptive and fraudulent behaviour of some of the most evil people known among human kind. He would try but couldn’t guarantee that he would beat them at their own devious game and he believed that there is probably no system that could guarantee that he would beat them.

    I’m sure Bishop Wright would agree that while regulatory regimes need to be as tight as we can make them, the law won’t renew the faith life of Catholics in Australia. Only the Spirit can do that.

    And, as St. Paul never tired of saying, God’s grace and the Spirit’s energy are most at work in our human weakness and there is no weaker place to be than the experience of humiliation and diminishment.

    In his Spiritual Exercises, St Ignatius Loyola invites anyone following his way to a deeper encounter with God to consider and pray for what he calls The Third Degree of Humility. That is where he invites the one making the Exercises to pray for the gift of identification with Jesus in his dereliction, in the abuse and derision he experienced in his Passion.

    This can sound like masochism if it’s not understood as a gift of God that brings pain yes, but also freedom and peace, as his crucifixion did finally to Jesus.

    Now we don’t have to go looking for or try to invent events in our lives that can allow us into the heart of Jesus in his derelict state. They come our way uninvited on a regular basis – those times when misunderstanding, betrayal or envy may come unbidden, for example. These are the moments when a deeper unity with our Savior is there if we can accept them.

    We can deny them, dance around them, acknowledge them but wish they would go away. Most of us do that to humiliation and the opportunity it offers most of the time. But embracing humiliation as a gift and an opportunity is the first sign that the Spirit is at work in and among us.

    And where does the Spirit take us if we embrace what is happening in and among our community of faith as it faces the inescapable shame of deeds and misdeeds of too many, including those trusted with leadership? Just where the Spirit always takes us: to the foot of the Cross where we share in the surrender of that prototype of all disciples, Mary the mother of Jesus, in her surrender into the hands of the living God.

    And what happens with that? We come by God’s grace to let God be God.

    This is the present moment and the present opportunity for Catholics in Australia: face our failure as followers of Jesus and deliver on reform we must. But this is also an opportunity to move beyond the externals of the faith and accept this time as a moment of grace.

    We can only do so if we let go of the securities that fostered faith for a different time and for people in a different place. Surely, daily conversion to following the Nazarene on his path to Golgotha is not the only thing we have to do to meet the challenges of our mission today in Australia. But without it, we will deliver a caricature of Catholicism and a substitute for adult faith.

    It will be a distraction from the riches given into our hands not simply for our benefit but for those who may be drawn by God’s grace to find the inexhaustible treasure to be found in Christ in our country at this time.

    Fr. Michael Kelly SJ, Executive Director

    This article was published in Autumn edition of ‘The Swag’, the quaterly magazine of the National Council of Priests in Australia.

  • Chris Geraghty. Farewell to Pell

    It was sad and painful, and no satisfaction, sitting at home in front of a computer, watching a senior prelate stagger around, wounded and bleeding. I sat glued to the screen, mesmerized, fiercely proud of our legal system, and watched a prince of the Church in humble street-clothes being tormented.

    George Pell, Cardinal Archbishop, sat there day after day, an image of King Lear, a broken man, weary, slow and incompetent, a man who had spent his life climbing the greasy clerical pole, now at the tail-end of his life, being forced to answer questions and to confront his conscience, summoning hollow logic to assist in his defence, thrashing about blaming others, constructing academic distinctions, trying to exculpate himself and deflect the load which will inevitably be heaped upon him. His private secretary, Dr Casey, Mr John Davoren, the elderly man and ex-priest who used to be in charge of the healing service of the archdiocese, and Monsignor Brian Rayner, his former chancellor – all muddlers, all incompetent and unable to provide an accurate version of events, while he was macro-managing the show with his hands off the wheel. The board of any public company would have long since called for the resignation of its CEO.

    His time in Sydney was at an end and the cardinal was heading off to the Vatican to take control of a bank in trouble and of the finances of a giant, international organization. Let’s hope he asks more questions over there than he did at St Mary’s. He was in charge. He was the boss. The orchestra was under his direction.  At the beginning of the hearing, even years before, Pell should had put his hands in the air and confessed. “I made bad choices. Very bad. Me. I received bad advice and accepted it. I allowed wounded people to be tormented. They were my mistakes – and they have had truly awful consequences.”

    As the days wore on and the archbishop grew tired, I began to understand a little of how the man’s brain worked. Slowly. Some confusions. Circles and dead-ends. Non sequiturs. Fending off blows, protecting himself. Appeals to trivial logic in the face of catastrophe. I could see how he came to be a man-made climate change denier, why over the years he had not given a lead on the many ethical and moral issues which were confronting our nation, why he had led the English-speaking world back to the old, fossilized and awkward formulae of the Mass, why he had not even mentioned the name of Father Ted Kennedy when he opened the Jesuit school for aborigines in Redfern, why he was unable to comprehend that his placement of Neo-Cats in Redfern had been a mistake and needed to be remedied, why he had not inspired his Sydney brethren to faith and action, why he had failed to engage the general community and had preferred to identify with the conservative, reactionary forces of times now past. He was dull. Colourless. Distant. Pugnacious. Yesterday’s man. Some might even say dumb. Now, for a few days, we were able to look behind the figure on the plinth, observing a king without his finery, seeing the man behind the frills and furbelows.  It was frightening to see how the system worked – and riveting.

    Not so long ago, the cardinal had been on television complaining that his Church was being singled out, treated unfairly by the mass media, picked on and persecuted, and stating that in comparison with other institutions,  his organization was not doing so badly in the pedophile stakes. He quoted figures and percentages. Until recently, he just hadn’t got it. Maybe he still hasn’t. But in the witness-box, he was prepared to criticize his blind brothers in the Vatican. They were even slower and duller than their clerical counterparts in Australia. The team in Rome, against all advice, still thought that the pedophile scandal was largely a conspiracy perpetrated by enemies and haters of the Church. In the end, one can only conclude that the guys in Rome must be really dumb if they are thicker than the ones we have been in charge here.

    From his evidence, it was clear that Pell was desperate to regulate the outflow from the Church’s financial dam of assets. He wanted to remain in charge of the show. After all, the Roman Catholic Church was different – powerful, independent, international. A history going back centuries. Its own language, structures, legal system, customs and practices. Tax exemptions and immense political influence. She has always been treated as special.

    The cardinal thought that the proper tariff for something like the effects of pedophilia was somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 dollars. A hundred thousand was far too much. The $750,000 later being claimed by Ellis in his court case was simply ridiculous. Let’s keep this in perspective, and in our own back-yard. We can contain the damage. One of his major jobs was to conserve the assets of the Church.

    But the complaints, the claims and the outrage was always going to break out into the real world. It was naïve and silly to imagine that this scandal, causing profound and lasting damage, was not going to find its way into the public arena. Wait until the secular courts of the real world begin to make just awards in the millions. Whoever advised Pell of the appropriate tariff for these claims was a buff-head.

    I was amused to watch the interplay between the secular and the sacred, to see a member of the judiciary and his foot-soldiers enforcing the values of compassion and justice on one of our religious leaders. The archbishop was insisting on the Church’s rights before the law, on proper legal process, on legally acceptable avoidance mechanisms, on forensic niceties, while the secular, judicial arm of government kept taking him back to the message of Jesus and the Temple money-changers. “What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world…..” A hard lesson to learn at the top-end of one’s life, confronted with a message you had preached for years from the pulpits of two major cities. The institution and the prelate in charge were on the rack, quizzed by the state’s Torquemada as he explored the implications of the message of Jesus and of a life well lived. The red slipper was supposed to be on the other foot.

    But what should the archbishop have done? How could he have redeemed himself just days before he was abandoning his flock to take up a cushy appointment in the Holy City?

    It would have been difficult and humiliating, especially for a cardinal, but the moment he entered the witness-box and swore the oath to tell the truth, he should have looked the viewers, the commissioner and all Sydney-siders in the eye and told them that he was truly ashamed of what he had done, of the choices he had made, the instructions he had given and leadership he had provided.

    “I am truly ashamed. I have proved to be a slow learner, as my brother bishops also have been.  I have neglected my duties, grievously. I turned my back on the needy. To the wounded, I failed to show understanding and compassion. I was deaf to the message of the Gospel that I preach.  The damage had been caused by my Church. It was my responsible to do all I could to support the victims and remedy the scandal. I failed. Even now I am just at the start of a troubling journey. Insight is beginning to dawn. So late. I am beginning to get it, but for me it has been a slow and painful process, and my mistakes have compounded the damage. Before leaving my people to continue my life in Rome, I want to spend the remaining few days exploring the possibility of reconciling with the Fosters and with Mr Ellis who have suffered unspeakable heartache. I am hoping they will show more compassion, more generosity to me than I was prepared to show them. I want to go to them humbly, cast myself on their mercy and seek their forgiveness.”

    Maybe he can do it. Sincerely, I hope so, for their sake, and for his. But the signs were not favorable. When he left the box at the end of his evidence on Thursday, the archbishop walked past Ellis without even a friendly glance of recognition.

    Pell exposed himself before the commission as the prize muddler par excellence. A tragic figure. I positioned myself at the back row of  les arenes,  and watched the commissioner and his cool, analytical counsel-assisting teasing the witness, delivering wounding blows at will, drawing blood, playing with their prey, delaying to the end  their final thrust into the very heart of an old bull already mortally wounded, standing beaten and defense-less in the centre of the ring.

    Farewell George Pell. We wish you well in Rome, in the twilight of your career. I am sure that Sydney was not exactly what you had expected, and that there is still more to come before you’re finished.

    Chris Geraghty is a retired NSW District Court Judge and formerly a Catholic priest. 

     

  • Kieran Tapsell. Pell’s business strategy in tatters.

    There was once a rich man in England who became tired of watching his friends’ estates being eaten up by lawyers’ fees in disputes over wills. So, he made a very simple will leaving everything to a friend, and then wrote a letter to the friend explaining what he wanted the friend to do with his estate, thinking that this was the best way to keep lawyers’ snouts out of it. That will and the letter ended up becoming a lawyer’s veritable pig feast because it became the classic case in the House of Lords on secret trusts. I could not help being reminded of that while watching George Pell in the witness box at the Royal Commission, trying to explain his reasons for “vigorously” fighting John Ellis’s claim for compensation arising out of his sexual abuse by the Sydney priest, Aidan Duggan.

    In 2002, Richard Carleton interviewed Pell on Sixty Minutes about his Melbourne Response. Pell admitted that the victims had to swear to observe secrecy in return for the limited compensation that the scheme offered. He said that if the victims did not want to sign this, they could “go to the courts.” Two years later, in the Ellis case, Pell demonstrated what would happen to them if they tried. Pell and the Trustees of the Archdiocese spent $756,000 paying lawyers to fight a case that Ellis initially was prepared to settle for $100,000, and then for $750,000 at the time the application for leave to extend the limitation period.

    Pell and his lawyers revealed all the classic symptoms of someone wanting to run a test case to prove a point, and to indicate to potential claimants that their claims were on shaky legal ground. They succeeded: the New South Wales Court of Appeal found that the Catholic Church does not exist in law, Pell was not liable for the negligence of his predecessors as Archbishop of Sydney, and the Trustees of the Archdiocese were not liable for the sexual abuse of a priest because they had nothing to do with the appointment and supervision of priests. The High Court refused leave to appeal.

    Anyone wanting to run a test case will never try to settle it. If the other side makes an offer of settlement, it is rejected, and no counter offer is made. If a counter offer were made, the other side might accept it, and that would be the end of the test case. This is precisely the strategy that Pell and his lawyers adopted with Ellis.

    Pell conceded at the Victorian Parliamentary Inquiry that most priests are “not well off”, and therefore a sex abusing priest is unlikely to be able to meet a judgment. The so called “Ellis defence”, where used by the Church, saved it hundreds of millions of dollars, as is shown by a comparison between the average amounts paid out by the Toowoomba diocese, where former Bishop Morris refused to have anything to do with it, and the average payouts by the Melbourne Response and Towards Healing.

    In the witness box, Pell was caught between trying to justify his test case, and denying that he was trying to protect the Church’s coffers.  Pell accepted that his instructions to his solicitors, Corrs, were to “vigorously defend the claim” and that part of that was an attempt “to encourage people not to go into litigation.” If they could not go into litigation, their only other recourse was to go cap in hand to the Church for compensation through the Melbourne Response with its official ceiling of $50,000 and Towards Healing with its unofficial ceiling of the same amount. In other words, despite what Pell said to Richard Carleton in 2002, he wanted to make sure that victims of child sexual abuse knew that they really did not have the alternative of going to the courts. As the Chair of the Royal Commission, Justice McLellan pointed out, in those circumstances, the Church, and not the courts, had complete control over the amount it would pay. Justice McLellan has already dropped a gentle hint that all the settlements achieved through Towards Healing and the Melbourne Response may need to be re-opened.

    Like the man who wanted to avoid enriching lawyers by writing a letter to the beneficiary of his will, the Church will not only be paying out significantly more in compensation than it otherwise might have, but it will be enriching lawyers as well. The Church won this battle in the High Court, but it has lost the war.

    Perhaps the Church should have listened to something a wise man once said that might be paraphrased: what does it profit a Church if it gains the whole world, and suffers the loss of its soul. And the loss of the Church’s soul could not have been more starkly demonstrated than by the evidence given to the Royal Commission about the treatment of John Ellis.

     

     

  • Louise Newman. Detention of children seeking asylum in Australia.

    Australia has a unique approach to the ‘problem‘of asylum seekers arriving by boat in an ‘unauthorised’ fashion – exportation. Under current policy all unauthorised arrivals are processed as rapidly as possible on Christmas Island and then transferred to Nauru or Manus who are supported by Australia to assess refugee claims, house and ultimately resettle those found to be refugees. Or so the story goes. Much recent discussion, particularly since the attacks on asylum seekers on Manus allegedly by those in protective roles, has pointed to the breakdown of this system with increasing numbers remaining on Christmas Island and lack of any processing of claims or moves to resettlement. There is even discussion about the commitment of PNG to the resettlement process and they themselves have recently stated that it will not be possible to resettle in PNG those already there. The politics is complex and with a certain air of separation on the side of the Australian Government which is wedded to the concept of off shore processing as part of a framework of deterrence. The focus on deterrence of any arrivals on the mainland has led to extreme measures such as towing or pushing boats away and setting asylum seekers in the opposite direction in life boats where they become someone else’s problem on landing. The consequence or outcome is seen as the sole factor driving policy and little account is taken of the means. It is in this context that vulnerable groups such as children and unaccompanied minors and the mentally ill are caught in a particularly unpleasant political drama.

    As this is played out on the high seas we hear little discussion of Australia’s position as a voluntary signatory to the UN Convention on refugees and our responsibilities. We do not hear much discussing of the regional issues and need to support neighbours who bear most of the burden of supporting asylum seekers with minimal support. We do not provide leadership in the construction of a regional protective frame work despite this being raised by the Government appointed expert group looking at a system of response to the needs of asylum seekers and displaced persons. The ‘problem ‘ of displaced persons continues to grow as Australia’s response shrinks  – to the point where we now accept no asylum seekers coming by boat and will never resettle these arrivals on the mainland.

    In the middle of this debate the plight of the asylum seekers is often forgotten or trivialised. Many find stories of persecution and trauma ‘distasteful ‘and Government prefers to dismiss many as ‘economic refugees’ with the implicit judgment that they are unworthy. The system does not value seeking a safe life for children or fleeing ongoing persecution as worthwhile goals. The notion of threat from asylum seekers continues to be used as a political tool. The community has been caught in this escalating series of political moves aimed at limiting discussion of the broader issues and escalating fear and xenophobia. The language of “sovereign borders” and approaches veiled in secrecy as we wage a war on people smugglers does little to help us think in a rational way about Australasia role in supporting the worlds dispossessed or being a leader in our region. Both major political parties brought in reductionist approaches and prided themselves on harshness and firmness in the name of a greater good.

    The current situation emerges from a history of harsh approaches including arbitrary and mandatory detention of all unauthorised arrivals including infants, children and the mentally ill. In the days of Baxter and Woomera detention centres in remote locations a considerable amount of research and clinical evaluation documented the damage of indefinite detention on mental health and the deterioration of asylum seekers capacity to tolerate the situation. Helplessness, depression and despair took their toll as the community witnessed mass despair, self harm and protest. Children witnessed violence and behavioural breakdown and saw the deterioration of their parents. The damage was significant and well described in the HREOC report of 2005 which recommended that children should only ever be detained as a matter of last resort. Following this and with the support of all major medical and health groups, children and families were moved in to community settings with seemingly greater awareness of their needs.

    The past 5 or so years has seen a reversal of that position as successive Governments saw the need to maintain a politics of exclusion and to appeal to those sections of the community with deep seated anxiety about Australian security in a changing world. Detention of the vulnerable has continued and no exceptions are made on the grounds of trauma exposure, age, mental disorder or physical condition. Government has exported the most vulnerable to situation where health and mental health services are  minimal and with no certainly about the future has essentially recreated the conditions of over a decade ago where the detention centres became the breeding ground of mental disorders and breakdown. Recent protest, violence and self-harm are entirely predictable in these circumstances and should therefore be preventable.

    The detention of children and other vulnerable groups in these circumstances is a great shame and belittles us all. Those of us in the mental health sector need to speak out about any policy which damages the mental health and development of children and others and help to develop a higher level of discussion across the community about these important issues, Whilst Government may prefer to remain silent on its actions and their morality, we cannot.

     

    Louise Newman is the Professor of Developmental Psychiatry and Director of the Monash University Centre for Developmental Psychiatry and Phycology.

  • David Isaacs. Impacts of detention on children.

    I am a paediatrician. I specialise in paediatric infectious diseases but also work as a general paediatrician. For the last 10 years, I and my colleagues have run a Refugee Clinic at the Children’s Hospital at Westmead, where we assess child asylum seekers and refugees. The initial aim of this clinic was to screen children for treatable infectious diseases like tuberculosis and malaria and for other non-infectious conditions like rickets. However, the whole nature of the assessment has changed of late.

    Over the ten years, we have seen a very large number of children who have been in detention centres. It has become increasingly apparent that many of the children we see are suffering from post-traumatic stress and this number has risen steadily so that currently more than half of all the asylum seeker children we see are suffering from post-traumatic stress. This may be because we are increasingly aware of post-traumatic stress and ask more searching questions, but often a history of the symptoms of post-traumatic stress is easy to obtain. Young children have nightmares and sleep disturbance including sleep-walking. They are fearful and cling to their parents. They may start wetting their beds or pooing their pants. They may have problem behaviours, such as being defiant, angry or irritable. They may have somatic symptoms such as head-aches or abdominal pain. Older children may self-harm.

    Many of these children were exposed to traumas in their countries of origin and undertook perilous journeys, which clearly contribute to their stress. However, the trauma of being in detention centres without knowledge of when they will be released clearly adds to the stress and compounds the problem. Children are particularly vulnerable if their parents are struggling to cope with the trauma.

    We are able to refer our most severely affected children to a dedicated psychologist working in the Department of Psychological Medicine in our hospital. The NSW Service for the Treatment and Rehabilitation of Torture and

    Trauma Survivors STARTTS is a useful resource for adults and children with post-traumatic stress.

    Impact of length of detention on children

    Unequivocally, we find that the longer a family is in detention, the greater the stress on the child and on their parents. Mounting parental stress in turn increases the stress on children.

    Measures to ensure the safety of children

    Although traumatised children in detention are referred to specialist mental health staff occasionally, this is the exception rather than the rule. Children in detention who are suffering from post-traumatic stress need to be seen by a paediatrician to see if they need specialist mental health assessment.

    Education, recreation, maternal and infant health services

    Australia is a co-signatory to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child which states that all children have the right to be provided with a safe environment and with adequate health-care and education. We have an obligation to provide these to children under our care, whether they are citizens, permanent residents, refugees or asylum seekers. This includes asylum seeker children on Manus Island or Nauru. Australia cannot abdicate its responsibility to asylum seeker children by preventing them reaching the mainland.

    The separation of families across detention facilities in Australia

    Separation of families is fortunately uncommon, but when it does occur it can have a disastrous effect on children’s mental health.

    The guardianship of unaccompanied children in detention in Australia

    Unaccompanied minors have often left their entire family behind and are in urgent need of being able to contact them and to stay in contact. Closed detention is particularly inappropriate for these highly vulnerable children.  There is a clear conflict of interest in having the same person who is detaining the child as the person who is legally responsible for their welfare (i.e. the Minister).  The role of advocate for the child has to be independent of judicial decisions about the child’s fate.

    Assessments conducted prior to transferring children to be detained in ‘regional processing countries’

    Children in offshore detention should have appropriate screening tests and catch-up vaccinations and be adequately protected against malaria.

    Progress made during the last 10 years

    There has been only minor progress in the last 10 years. It was acknowledged by the previous Government that children should not be in detention at all. The number of children in community detention has grown slowly but steadily. According to DIAC, however, in September 2013 there were still over 1000 children in immigration detention facilities and alternative places of detention (not community detention). There are no current figures available on the number of children in immigration detention or their whereabouts. This is disturbing. We need more transparency. No child should be detained unnecessarily in a detention centre.

    Conclusions

    Australia has a duty of care to asylum seekers under International Law, which includes protecting them. Delaying decisions about their fate and imprisoning asylum seekers and their children in detention centres is a dereliction of that duty of care. Whether or not the asylum seekers are eventually accepted as refugees, it is counter-productive and cruel to increase their mental health problems by inappropriately draconian measures such as detention.

    Professor David Isaacs is a Consultant pediatrician at the Children’s Hospital at Westmead and Clinical Professor in Paediatric Infectious Disease, University of Sydney

     

     

  • Mark Isaacs. Deterring boat arrivals!

    Over the past decades of asylum seeker policy in Australia we have heard many justifications for a strict deterrence policy. Border protection, save lives at sea, ‘no advantage’ for queue jumpers, smash the people smugglers’ business model, and, of course, ‘we decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come’.

    At the same time, public debate fostered by mainstream media and by Australian politicians continually refers to asylum seekers by terms such as ‘illegals’ and ‘queue jumpers’, terms that we must continually reject as they have no legitimacy in Australian or international law and aren’t representative of the global view of asylum seekers. Those who control the public discourse have created a confused and purposefully misleading national discussion that shadows the truth and promotes anti-asylum seeker sentiment.

    This was recently made clear to me with the recent publication of my novel, The Undesirables, and the subsequent media space I have had the privilege to occupy. I was faced with a multitude of different arguments that rarely aligned but all came from a similar source, propaganda. The main issue most journalists wanted me to address was the idea that a deterrence policy does stop asylum seekers getting on boats to come to Australia, and hence, the government is saving lives. It seems that when a person speaks out on humanitarian grounds, with the knowledge and conviction to say that these people aren’t illegals, terrorists, threats to our security, the debate focuses on ‘saving lives at sea’.

    First and foremost, I don’t believe that this policy is about saving lives. If this policy is about saving lives at sea, and not the border protection threats Scott Morrison cites in his press releases, why aren’t we championing this policy to the world as a humanitarian achievement? Why is the policy so heavily criticised by international organisations such as UNHCR and Amnesty International? Why has the Australian government banned Australian media from entering the camps? Why are we not allowed to know how many boats the government has turned back to Indonesia?

    Let’s say that this policy does stop asylum seekers taking boats to Australia. This doesn’t necessarily save lives and doesn’t solve any global issues with asylum seekers; it merely shifts our responsibility for protecting asylum seekers, a responsibility assumed by signing the United Nations Refugee Convention, to another part of the world. It means those asylum seekers originally facing persecution now face a very bleak situation in Indonesia, a country that has no such obligations to processing refugees. Asylum seekers will still need to flee persecution and will still need the help of people smugglers to facilitate their escape because there are few ‘correct channels’ of migration, if any, available to them. I asked the men I worked with in Nauru why they didn’t come to Australia by the ‘correct channels’. Such a question was an insult in the camp.

    ‘You show me the Australian embassy in Afghanistan. You see if a Hazara man can go there without being shot. If you go to the Australian embassy they ask you why you want to leave. If you say you have a problem, they say it is not enough. Many people have tried. We cannot go to our government and ask for visas. We are not even allowed to study in Afghanistan. How do I apply for a visa to Australia when my government wants to kill me? If you want to go to the United Nations office in Quetta, Pakistan, it is in a dangerous area. People recognise Hazara faces and they target them easily. If you go there, you have to stay for a long time and it is dangerous. Maybe you will be targeted. You think we would leave our homes if we didn’t have to? You think I’d leave my family if I didn’t have to?’

    The reality of deterrence is indefinite detention: incarcerated for unlimited time periods with no idea of when you can leave. Every day feels the same, no progress, no change; just waiting. The reality of deterrence is an illogical processing system that purposefully avoids giving people answers because judging by statistics 90% of these people will be approved as refugees. In my time in Nauru I witnessed self-harm, hunger strikes, thirst strikes, psychosis, and the ultimate loss of hope, suicide attempts. Saving lives at sea by ruining lives. Countless times I heard Nauru described by asylum seekers of all ethnicities as hell. If these people could return to their home countries, they would.

    I wrote ‘The Undesirables’ for many reasons, one of which was to show the Australian people what the reality of offshore detention centres is. If the Australian people are okay with placing people in such conditions in an attempt to shift our responsibilities for protecting the world’s most vulnerable then so be it, but better they make an informed decision than hide behind the falsities and mistruths peddled by both sides of politics and claim ignorance due to this veil of secrecy that has been placed over both Manus Island and Nauru.

    Mark Isaacs

    Author of The Undesirables

    http://www.bookworld.com.au/book/the-undesirables-inside-nauru/47134434/

    https://www.facebook.com/isaacsmark1

    http://markjisaacs.com/

  • John Dwyer. Primary healthcare in Australia reaches the crossroads.

     When I graduated some 50 years ago more than 50% of my class pursued careers as General Practitioners. In the last available survey of the career intentions of graduating medical students only 13% said they were interested in Primary Care and only 13% of those who would consider a career in rural Australia. Currently more than 45% of the General Practitioners available to rural based Australians are overseas trained doctors most of whom are working there as provider numbers were not available for metropolitan practice. The average age of working General Practitioners is 55 years.

    Young doctors considering vocational training cite positive and negative reasons for their disinterest in Primary Care. Many other career opportunities seem more attractive as they provide much higher average incomes and part time employment provides funds sufficient for many. General Practice training is equally as vigorous as that required for other specialities but “GPs” are not paid as specialists and often feel their vital and increasingly unique skills are underappreciated. Tales from GP land tell young graduates of practice subjected to stifling bureaucracy, the need to “bulk bill” and thus to practice “turnstile medicine” with short consultation times being unsatisfactory to both patient and physician. These and many other impediments place us in real danger of having far too few GPs to provide us with quality Primary Care in the near future.

    All this reality is addressed by rhetoric from government reassuring GPs that they are the “heart and soul” of the nation’s health care system. The fact that the Federal government is freezing cost of living adjustments to Medicare rebates for four years and considering strategies to reduce our 18 billion dollar annual Medicare expenditure should not be taken personally. As I have commented here previously, we should be spending more not less on Primary Care but Primary Care that is restructured to better meet contemporary needs. This would include reducing the seven million bed days utilised in public hospitals by avoidable admissions. Hospital expenditure dwarfs Medicare spending.

    Is it possible that the introduction of a new model of Primary Care could produce better, more cost effective health outcomes for Australians and at the same time attract a new generation of doctors to Primary Care? International experience would say the answer to both questions is a definite yes. We know what that new model should provide; infrastructure to support preventative strategies, early diagnosis of problems that, left untreated, could become chronic, team management of established chronic and complex diseases and care in the community for many who are currently being sent to hospital. The model described is usually referred to as “Integrated Primary Care”  (IPC) which, to use American parlance, provides individuals with a “Medical Home”.

    IPC is structured around teams of health professionals working in the one practice. It is not doctor centric and provides individuals who enrolled in the IPC program with access to doctors, nurses and a range of allied health professionals including dental hygienists. Doctors cannot provide all the services described above but here can concentrate on those things only doctors can do. Well run IPC programs in the UK, the US, New Zealand and many other countries have demonstrated their cost effectiveness, better health outcomes and fewer admissions to hospitals for the patients of such medical homes. Perhaps most importantly in our context, they attract and hold GPs who enjoy better job satisfaction in this form of practice. An international trend has IPC practices offering their doctors flexible arrangements for remuneration. Rapidly payments based on a “fee for service” (FFS) are giving way to “blended payment” options. What is this all about?

    Many Australian GPs want to move away from the FFS model with very significant numbers joining large corporation owned practices where they are salaried or paid on contract. FFS at bulk billing rates does not work well for patients with chronic diseases and complex needs. A number of countries are offering their GPs fixed annual payments for their care of complex patients while those seeking a “one off” service are still charged a fee. In New Zealand more than 85% of the GPs work in such a system with about 80% of their income fixed with the remaining 20% coming from traditional FFS payments. Such arrangements are in the medical news here in Australia as Minister Dutton has publically expressed cautious interest in seeing how this could work in Oz. In the US 60%of GPs are paid in this way and this is increasingly so in the UK. There is an abundance of data showing that blended payments within the IPC model produces better health outcomes with fewer hospital admissions.

    Overseas experience with this radical reform tells us that its implementation must be a “bottom up” one available to willing participants and never forced on the medical profession. Space doesn’t permit detailed discussion of the mechanisms involved in establishing this system but if we were to follow say the NZ model it would look something like this. Our Medical Locals would become Primary Health Care organisations and holders and distributors of a primary care budget provided after careful analysis of local needs. GPs or IPC practices would negotiate for a fixed payment for their care of their patients with chronic diseases and in return would provide quality/outcome data associated with the use of that money. Financial incentives are built into the contract to encourage “best practice” management.

    Our medical profession, government and citizenry, should not be concerned by the exploration of these changes. The evidence is strong that, done properly, the results are very positive and the model attractive to clinicians and patients alike.

    John Dwyer is the Emeritus Professor of Medicine at the University of NSW.

  • Ian McAuley, Jennifer Doggett and John Menadue. The case for government funding of healthcare.

    In our joint submission to the Senate Inquiry into the Abbott Government’s Commission of Audit, we drew attention to the fact that by international comparison, Australia is a low-taxed country. Furthermore, the trend in Commonwealth expenditures has been downwards since the mid-1980s. Our full submission can be found on my website (click above).

    In that submission we made the case for government funding of healthcare as a superior option. Extracts from this submission on healthcare follow.

    The flaw in the “unaffordable” argument (made by the Abbott Government in respect of health care) is that even if the government withdraws from funding, we still have to pay for health care, and all the evidence from other countries’ experience shows that if the government abandons responsibility for funding health care, we will end up spending a greater amount for the same or a lower quality of care.

    In all probability Australians want to share the bulk of our health costs with one another. Across all OECD countries people pay only about 20 percent of health costs from their own pockets – that is through payments at time of service delivery and in amounts not covered by insurance. In Australia, at 19 percent, we are just below that average. In developed countries most health care costs are paid through insurance – either a government insurer or competing private insurers.

    Even if, as is likely, we accept a need to pay more from our own pockets, we will continue to seek insurance cover for large outlays. We may be willing to take our chances in many aspects of life, but when it comes to health care we have little to guide us about our future needs.

    Policies which shift funding responsibility from government programs, such as Australia’s Medicare, on to private health insurance (PHI) have a short-term attraction to a government concerned with containing fiscal outlays. But even the best designed policies to entice or force people into PHI are costly and inequitable.

    For a start PHI involves high administrative costs. In Australia only 84 cents in every dollar paid to PHI is returned in terms of payment for services. The rest goes to administrative costs and corporate profits. By contrast, Medicare has administrative costs of about 5 percent, and another 1 percent in Tax Office collection costs. That means that Medicare returns 94 cents in the dollar as health services – a ten cent difference in comparison with PHI.35 The USA, highly dependent on PHI, provides the standout example of administrative overheads. Only 69 cents in every dollar Americans spend on health care comes back in terms of services.36

    Second, and more important, when there are competing private health insurers they have little ability to control the prices demanded by service providers. If one insurer tries to bargain hard with hospitals to keep prices down, the hospitals will simply choose to do business with another insurer. The insurers have about the same power in the market as consumers do when they are dealing with powerful oligopolies such as banks. By contrast a single national insurer, usually a government agency, has the market power to put some discipline into prices and utilization.

    Evidence from international experience bears out these points. When countries rely on PHI to fund health care they pay more for it, without necessarily getting any better health outcomes. To quote at length from the OECD:

    Private health insurance markets have resulted in increased overall health costs in several OECD countries. First, by bringing more financial resources into the health care system, it raises total health expenditure. Second, cost-control measures – such as global budgets, price regulation and capacity controls – have been applied to the public sector in virtually all OECD countries. Conversely, the private financing sector in virtually all OECD countries, except the Netherlands, has not been subject to such centralised, governmental cost controls. This has resulted in less tight control over activities and prices in the private sector. Third, private insurers in most OECD countries do not have the same bargaining powers over the price and quantity of care provided to insurees as public systems do, although within concentrated PHI markets insurers can exert stronger pressure, as in the case of Ireland. Payment options such as global budgets that have helped public systems to contain costs in several countries are hard for private insurers to negotiate – or may not be options at all. PHI carriers have generally exerted little leverage over costs – as they might if they engaged in more selective contracting.

    In the United States, private insurance has been less effective than the public Medicare programme in controlling costs. Growth in per enrolee payments for a comparable set of services in private health insurance outweighed Medicare over the period 1970-2000, reflecting the higher payment rates to providers paid by private insurers. While “managed care” delivered some cost control in the 1990s, PHI premiums have resumed double-digit growth since 2001.

    Cost control is also more problematic to achieve in systems with multiple competing payers, including most PHI markets. Not only their purchasing position relative to providers is weaker, but also shifting cost onto other purchasers, whether public systems or other private insurers, is a more attractive strategy for insurers than restraining cost.

    PHI also risks increasing public expenditure on health. This is because, while PHI may serve as an independent source of health funding, its effects are rarely entirely disconnected from the publicly funded system.

    Subsidies to private health cover, as in Ireland, Australia and the United States, increase public sector expenditure and have an opportunity cost, sometimes increasing overall utilisation levels as well. Even in the absence of direct or indirect subsidies, PHI has given rise to higher public cost in several countries with a significant PHI market because of the way it interacts with the public system.37

    This is borne out empirically by data from the OECD….. The message is clear: the more governments rely on PHI to fund health care the more is the total cost of health care….

    As with administrative costs, the stand-out case is the USA, where health care costs are now almost 18 percent of GDP. (Even when the USA is excluded there is a positive relationship, and it is too big to be considered a statistical aberration.) As a consequence of America’s longstanding dependence on PHI – a dependence which could intensify with Obamacare – its government programs, Medicare and Medicaid, now cost around 8.5 percent of GDP. This is more than the governments of Sweden, Norway and Iceland pay for their comprehensive public insurance programs, and more than the governments of UK and Canada pay for their near-universal public programs.

    In an attempt to avoid universal public funding, the USA has developed a system which now incurs higher fiscal costs than they would have incurred had they pursued a single insurer option. That is because the government Medicare and Medicaid programs have become passive price-takers in a market where prices are set by powerful service providers. Even here in Australia, because of the generous way we subsidize PHI, those subsidies are costing more than they are saving government outlays. Reducing subsidies for PHI would result in some reduction in membership and therefore more government expenditure on health care, but there would be significant net public savings.38 The Grattan Institute, for example, estimates that even with offsetting compensation to public hospitals removing the PHI rebate could save public budgets $3.5 billion a year.39 …

    Simply ending subsidies for PHI is only part of necessary funding reform. The whole way health care is funded needs to be reviewed – a task well beyond a body such as the Commission of Audit. As a case in point, there needs to be rationalization of co-payments, so that they can serve to bring the benefits of market discipline into health care, rather than encouraging patients to seek “free” services to avoid co-payments. Our present division between “free” services, covered by Medicare or PHI, and paid service, is haphazard.40 Examples abound: public hospitals are “free” while pharmaceuticals incur co-payments; it can be cheaper for a consumer to leave tooth decay until it needs treatment in hospital than to seek paid preventative dental care early on; PHI and Medicare often cap the number of paid services in areas such as physiotherapy, leaving the patient with open-ended risk. Besides savings from scrapping the PHI rebate, the Grattan Institute estimates there are additional savings of around $6 billion a year to be found without comprising the quality of care.41

    The national insurer, of course, needs to use its purchasing power to contain costs. In this regard the Commonwealth, once highly effective in negotiating low pharmaceutical prices, as a result of a series of concessions to pharmaceutical firms is now paying more than many other countries for pharmaceuticals. Government purchasing and price negotiation are areas with potential savings.

    Replacing PHI with a strong, single national insurer removes incentives for over-servicing and over-pricing, but there are savings in private and public costs if there is less need for health care in the first place, through investing in preventive services.42 Preventive health measures, such as anti-smoking initiatives, deliver high returns, in terms of long-term health outcomes. However, Australia currently allocates less than two percent of the total health budget to preventive health.43 Investing in early childhood health and education is also a proven and cost-effective strategy to prevent the development of a range of lifelong social and health problems, but Australia also falls short in this area:  almost one-quarter of children are developmentally vulnerable at school entry with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and children in socioeconomic disadvantaged areas most likely to fare worse across a broad range of health and social indicators.44 Failure to fund preventive, public health and early childhood programs adequately represents a wasted opportunity to direct resources to achieve maximum benefit. These are functions which, if abandoned by government, will not be performed by the private sector.

    (Our basic case is that by shifting health expenditures from the public to the private sector will cost more. It will increase total costs)

     


    35.          Figures taken from John Menadue and Ian McAuley Private Health Insurance: High in cost and low in equity. Centre for Policy Development 2012.

    36.          Henry Minzberg “Managing the myths of health care” World Hospitals and Health Services Vol 48 # 3, 2012.

    37.          Francesca Colombo and Nicole Tapay “Private health insurance in OECD countries: the benefits and costs for Individuals and health systems” OECD Health Working Papers No. 15, 2006.

    38.          Terence Cheng Does reducing rebates for private health insurance generate cost savings  Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, The University of Melbourne, July 2013.

    39.          John Daley Balancing Budgets: Tough choices we need Grattan Institute 2013.

    40.          See, for example Jennifer Doggett “Out of Pocket: rethinking health copayments” Centre for Policy Development Occasional Paper 2009.

    41.          John Daley, Grattan Institute op. cit.

    42.          World Health Organisation. Key components of a well-functioning health system. May 2010.

    43.          Australian Institute of Health and Welfare Health Expenditure Australia 2011-2012.

    44.          Australian Institute of Health and Welfare A picture of Australia’s Children 2012.

  • Martin Laverty. Poverty and poor health go together.

    In 2008, the World Health Organisation provided an action plan to Australia and other countries to tackle the health disparity between rich and poor which sees an Australian in the lowest group of wealth-holders live with up to three times the amount of chronic illness of a person in the highest wealth-holding group.

    One year ago last week, Catholic Health Australia and the members of the Social Determinants of Health Alliance applauded a co-authored report of a Coalition, Labor and Greens Senate Inquiry that recommended the Parliament endorse the 2008 World Health Organisation’s recommendations on how to address health equity – that we had argued must be the first important step towards meaningful action on social determinants.

    But last week, on the one-year anniversary of the release of this rare tri-partisan report, there was nothing to celebrate. There was nothing to welcome. There was just a moment to bemoan the fact that yet another year had passed since the Senate Inquiry reported and the Federal Parliament has not pushed ahead with the Inquiry’s recommendations or any plan to address unacceptable disparities in the health of Australians.

    Reports seem to emerge every couple of weeks pointing to those unacceptable variances based on people’s socioeconomic status or their ethnicity or where they live or their education level. These reports – like last year’s Senate report – are not prompting action from federal politicians.

    While we have been advocating for change at the political level and in the public domain, CHA has also been presenting compelling evidence as to why action on the social determinants is crucial. One of those contributions is The Cost of Inaction on the Social Determinants of Health; a report commissioned by CHA and prepared by the National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling (NATSEM).

    That report found that $2.3 billion in savings could be found annually through avoidable hospital admissions if Australian Governments were to implement the findings of the World Health Organisation’s Closing the Gap in a Generation report. Those are the same recommendations that the Senate Committee said the Parliament should endorse.

    The NATSEM report also found implementing the WHO recommendations could see:

    • 500,000 Australians avoid suffering a chronic illness;
    • 170,000 extra Australians enter the workforce, generating $8 billion in extra earnings;
    • $4 billion in welfare support payments saved each year;
    • 5.5 million fewer Medicare services utilised each year, resulting in annual savings of $273 million;
    • 5.3 million fewer Pharmaceutical Benefit Scheme scripts being filled each year, resulting in annual savings of $184.5 million.

    These staggering opportunities are what new approaches to health policy could achieve, yet counter-intuitively they do not require change to the way our health system operates.

     

    The opportunity to reduce chronic illness and save on hospital and pharmaceutical expenditure requires action outside of the formal health system. Doing so would improve the lives of half a million Australians. It would also help the Federal Government achieve savings it is very keen to find.

     

    Australia suffers the effects of a major differential in the prevalence of long-term health conditions. Those who are most socio-economically disadvantaged are twice as likely to have a long-term health condition as those who are the least disadvantaged.

     

    Put another way, the poorest are twice as likely to suffer chronic illness and will die on average three years earlier than the most affluent. Poor health of low-income Australians can be avoided, allowing Government to spend less money on treating health conditions that should never have occurred in the first place.

    Drug-, alcohol-, tobacco- and crisis-free pregnancies are understood to be fundamental to a child’s lifelong development. So, too, is early learning that occurs in a child’s first three years of life.

     

    School completion, successful transition to work, secure housing and access to resources necessary for effective social interaction are all determinants of a person’s lifelong health. These are factors mostly dealt with outside of the health system, yet they are so important to the health of the nation.

    We can’t afford – in dollar terms, but more importantly in human terms – for this to be a political can that is kicked down the road. Action on social determinants will save lives, and deliver both government and community an extraordinary financial and social surplus.

    A resolution passed in the House of Representatives in 2010 compelled the sitting Government to respond to a Senate committee’s report with six months.

    Labor can point to the federal election – held within six months of the report being tabled – and the Coalition can point to the fact the report was tabled during the last Parliament, but we are becoming increasingly impatient with politicians who aren’t addressing the causes of poor health.

    Isn’t 12 months of increasing inequity more than enough? It’s time for action.

    Martin Laverty is the CEO of Catholic Health Australia. CHA represents the largest single grouping of non-government health, aged and community care services in Australia.

  • Graham Freudenberg on ‘The Making of Australia – A Concise History’ by Robert Murray

    When I was a teenage Tory in Brisbane in the early Fifties, Bob Murray, a bright young spark from the Melbourne Argus was the most persuasive of my newspaper contemporaries who led me gently towards the light.  In Sydney a couple of years later, at the end of 1954, in midnight to dawn sessions at the old Phillip Street Journalists’ Club, we debated the coming of the Labor Split, unwittingly laying the foundations for his classic account The Split – Australian Labor in the Fifties (1970).

    In the halcyon early Seventies, as one of the few people I knew who had actually been behind the ‘Iron Curtain’, he helped me keep Ostpolitik and  Détente in the perspective of the continuing awfulness of regimes like the East German. This clarity of views, sharpness of insights, balance and common sense abound in his octogenarian opus The Making of Australia – A Concise History (Rosenberg Publishing).

    This is the first single-volume general history of Australia since the ‘history wars’. To some extent it complements from a more conservative perspective the monumental Cambridge History of Australia edited by Stuart Macintyre, at less than a tenth of the price. Both works show how the ‘history wars’ have transformed our approach, especially about the relations between the Aborigines and the occupiers after 1788.

    For the first time, the relations between the aborigines and settlers form an integral part of the whole narrative. In the index, there are 196 entries, with substantial references, by my count, on 103 pages – one third of the book. The aboriginal story is woven into the ongoing narrative. This inclusiveness is unprecedented in Australian general histories.  We have come a long way from the great flowering of Australian historiography in the 1950s and 1960s, when Manning Clark subsequently apologised for his comparative neglect of Aborigine studies and Gordon Greenwood, in the first post-war general history Australia, ignored them altogether.

    In dealing with Australia’s military history, Bob Murray has taken a very different approach, and I think less successfully. He has chosen to lump the First and Second World Wars together in a single chapter entitled ‘The Call of Khaki’. This approach may emphasise the continuity of the two wars, at least in their European and imperial context. But, besides wrenching the chronology of the narrative somewhat, this treatment understates what I believe to be the centrality of the wars to our political, social and economic development.

    There are signs that the Anzac Centenary is going to spark another round of ‘history wars’ in much the way that the Bicentenary set in train the debate that led to the ‘history wars’ about Aboriginal Australia. Perhaps John Menadue’s blog last year about the political manipulation of the Anzac tradition was a first shot.

    This time around, I hope we are mature enough to avoid some of the nastiness that accompanied the last round. In his book on the Split, Bob Murray memorably noted ‘the absence of goodwill’ as a major factor in Labor’s self-destruction. There was a notable absence of goodwill in the waging of the first ‘history wars’.

    It would be ironic if the renewed debate on Australia’s military history came down to competing slogans of ‘best we forget’ versus ‘lest we forget’. After all, ‘best we forget’ was a sentiment often used to discourage the quest for truth about the Aborigines.

    When it comes to Anzac (as shorthand for all our wars) I uphold ‘lest we forget’ in the sense that the author of the phrase, Rudyard Kipling, used it in his poem Recessional, written for Queen Victoria’s Jubilee in 1897. Kipling meant it as a warning against the pride and arrogance of imperial power and that even the mighty British Empire would one day be ‘as Nineveh and Tyre’.

    Bob Murray and I belong to the last Australian generation for which the British Empire was still a going concern. This fine book can stand as the testimony of our generation and our understanding of what it means to be Australian.

    We were the depression babies, formed politically in the Chifley-Menzies era, with our adulthood dominated by the Cold War in all its manifestations. Despite this tumultuous and often menacing background, we have been an exceptionally lucky generation of Australians. Perhaps because the low birth rate in the Depression made our path to education and employment so easy, we were optimists. Fittingly, Bob Murray ends his book on a high note, quoting the ‘other half of Malcolm Fraser’s (and George Bernard Shaw’s) ‘Life wasn’t meant to be easy.’ – ‘But take courage, it can be delightful.’ Both halves of the quotation apply to the writing of books about Australian history. And in this case, the second half certainly applies to the reading of it.

  • John Menadue. Privatising Medibank Pte – who cares?

     

    This is a repost from 28 November 2013. My own view is that all the private health insurance companies, including Medibank Pte are parasitical and undermine Medicare. The only important political issue in my mind is whether the policy holders who have contributed over decades to Medibank Pte should receive appropriate recompense rather than the government taking the money for itself.  John Menadue

    I won’t lose any sleep if the Abbott Government proceeds to privatise Medibank Pte. It is anticipated that the sale could realise $4 billion. That will go almost half way towards the $8.8 billion that Treasurer Joe Hockey is providing as a reserve fund for the Reserve Bank, even if the Bank didn’t ask for it.

    Whether all of that $4 billion should go to the Treasury from the sale of Medibank Pte is a moot point. Don’t the policy-holders, some with as many as 37 years membership, have an entitlement to some of that accumulated value? I declare a personal interest as I became a contributor to Medibank Pte when it was established by the Fraser Government in 1976.

    Medibank Pte was established then because of the Fraser Government’s hope that it could be an alternative to the universal health insurance scheme which the Whitlam Government introduced and which later became known as Medicare under the Hawke Government.

    I am quite indifferent to whether Medibank Pte is publicly or privately owned. As Ian McAuley and I set out in an article for the Centre for Policy Development in January 2012, private health insurance is ‘high in cost and low in equity’.  See this article on my web by clicking on ‘website’ at top left hand of home page, then ‘health’ and then article of January 2012.

    Whilst Medibank Pte. Is publicly owned, it acts just like all the other health insurance firms that are privately owned.  I t serves no special social role. It is the largest health insurance fund out of the total of 40 funds. It has a market share of about 30% followed by BUPA with about 27%.

    I won’t repeat all of my objections to government subsidies for health insurance firms which cost about $7 billion p.a. for the taxpayer. But my objections remain strong.

    • The administrative costs, including profit, of health insurance funds including Medibank Pte are three times those of Medicare. Just look at the money they waste on television advertising.
    • With government approval, health insurance premiums have increased every year at well ahead of the CPI. The increase in Medibank Pte premiums are close to the industry average.
    • Private health insurance benefits high income earners at the expense of low income earners.  The more wealthy Australians use health insurance to jump the hospital queue
    • Gap insurance by health insurance funds has underwritten the largest increase in specialist fees in 25 years.
    • These health insurance firms limit the ability of Medicare to put a cap on cost increases, particularly by private hospitals and private specialists who are paid multiples of the salaries paid to equally competent specialists in public hospitals.
    • The US is the stand-out example of the havoc which high cost private health insurance (PHI) can cause. As I pointed out in my blog of March 4, 2013, ‘If the US had a health service like those in countries without heavy reliance on PHI, such as Australia, it could solve its budget deficit problem.’ Health services in the US scream out ‘Beware of private health insurance’.

    I have been a member of Medibank Pte for 37 years. It has been a waste of money. All it provided was some irrational ‘peace of mind’. I have found it hard to admit to myself that all those tens of thousands of dollars in premiums I paid over 37 years have been largely wasted. In the same way health bureaucrats in Canberra, under pressure from very powerful vested interests find it difficult to face the fact that their policy advice to governments on the subsidies to high cost  health insurance companies has resulted in appalling public policy.

    My forlorn hope is that an Australian Government will one day eliminate the $7 billion corporate welfare which the Australian taxpayer presently provides to PHI. There would be a bonus in money saved by the government, but more importantly it would shore up Medicare’s position as a single payer that could better control costs. Until that happy day occurs, I don’t really care whether Medibank Pte is public or privately owned. It makes no difference.  It is part of a high cost parasitical industry. All private health insurance is undermining the universal, efficient and equitable public health insurance system called Medicare.

  • Rod Tiffen. Abbott contempt of court.

    After the 2013 election, the ABC satirical program The Hamster Decides responded to an election night comment by the columnist for the Australian Chris Kenny that the ABC’s funding should be cut with an animated version of Kenny having intercourse with a dog.  Kenny demanded an apology and then sued for defamation.

    It is unusual for satirical programs or cartoons to be the subject of defamation actions, and such cases carry dangers for both sides in any litigation.  A jury’s reaction to something that in ordinary discourse would be bad taste or disproportionate is unpredictable.

    On March 6, Justice Beech-Jones ruled that the case could proceed to trial by jury because it carried the defamatory imputation that Kenny was a low, contemptible and disgusting person, although he rejected the imputation that the skit implied Kenny literally had sex with dogs.

    Following this partial victory by Kenny, there was a short publicity blitz by all those usual suspects who seize any opportunity to criticize the ABC.  In the short-term, Kenny and his allies seemed to be winning the propaganda war.  On the ABC panel show, Q and A (March 10), not one panelist took the program’s side.

    There were several claims that all Kenny had wanted was an apology, but this is in some doubt.  Sydney Morning Herald columnist Mike Carlton said that he had it on strong authority that Kenny had demanded a considerable sum of money, an on-air apology to be telecast after Media Watch, plus the statement that he was a fair and impartial journalist.  Presumably if the ABC holds its nerve and the case goes to trial, the truth of these early interactions will be revealed.

    Perhaps the most notable intervention was by Prime Minister Tony Abbott, who said in a TV interview: ‘Well the point I make is that government money should be spent sensibly.  And defending the indefensible is not a very good way to spend government money and, next time the ABC comes to the government looking for more money, this is the kind of thing that we would want to ask them questions about.’

    It is hard to remember any other prime minister making such an intervention into a civil case in progress.  It takes its place alongside other Abbott precedents, such as handing over his predecessors’ cabinet documents to the Royal Commission on the home insulation scheme, or using international fora such as the World Economic Forum in Davos to make domestic partisan criticisms.

    So far Abbott has had a Teflon run since becoming Liberal leader.  Partly this reflects the double standards at work in Australian politics.  If a Labor leader had made a comment like Abbott’s say about a News Corp columnist, there would have been a huge outcry.  Those media which have dutifully reported Abbott’s comments as sensible observations would instead have been filled with outrage.

    We have a novel situation in Australia at the moment, where substantial sections of the media (News Corp newspapers and commercial radio talk shows, at least in Sydney) see themselves primarily in tribal terms, that they are on side with the government.  In the process, those who seek to report politics impartially (the Fairfax press and in particular the ABC) are constantly attacked.

    Prima facie, Abbott’s statement seems to not only have decided what the outcome of the case should be, but also to threaten one side financially for continuing.  A naïve reading would consider that in a case which is sub judice and to go to a jury, this would constitute contempt of court.  But it is another Abbott precedent that is unlikely to cause him any damage.

    Rod Tiffen is Emeritus Professor in Government and International Relations, University of Sydney.

     

     

  • Wayne Gibbons. The boats were not sabotaged.

    “So we convince ourselves every cruelty we’ve inflicted – beginning with sabotaging boats along the Malaysia coast under Malcolm Fraser – isn’t a reflection on us. It’s tactical.”

    I was surprised and disturbed by this sweeping statement from David Marr in theguardian.com on 5 March. It unfairly casts a pall over the great success of Australia’s Indochina refugee program led by the Fraser government and the role of the immigration officials involved.

    From 1978 to 1980 I was based in Malaysia as Coordinator of Australia’s refugee resettlement programs in South East Asia. Prior to that fulltime roll I lead several short term missions to Guam and the East coast of Malaysia to offer resettlement in Australia to Vietnamese refugees. I have also served as private secretary to Ministers for Immigration in the Whitlam and Fraser Governments.

    From this vantage of involvement at the highest levels of government and at the coal face of refugee selection and resettlement, I am confident that no directions to sabotage boats were given to Australian immigration officers by people in authority and that no boats loaded with refugees were deliberately damaged by our officials. Though, I believe we may have disabled several empty boats to prevent their reuse to “push off” people who had already arrived on other vessels.

    I understand why some people may be confused on this point because we often spoke publicly about the need to “stop the boats”.  But far from resorting to sabotage as a tactical response, our strategy was to conduct a sizable, caring and efficient resettlement program under a Comprehensive Plan of Action with the countries of SE Asia in co-operation with the US, Canada, France, the UK, New Zealand  and ourselves.

    From the start, all resettlement countries wanted to discourage refugees taking very long and risky journeys across open seas in unsuitable craft. We all wanted refugees that were fleeing Vietnam on small boats to be landed in neighbouring first asylum countries into the care of the UNHCR. Australia and other countries had already agreed to treat all such people as refugees. This meant we could offer resettlement without first having to determine individual status under the UN Convention.

    From the fall of Saigon in 1975 until the first half of 1978, those setting out from Vietnam to cross the South China Sea were mostly rural ethnic Vietnamese. They travelled in small owner skippered fishing boats that were usually reasonably seaworthy.

    If our immigration officers came across any of these people as they arrived along the Malaysian coast they would try to counsel them to disembark and await an offer of resettlement. Most heeded that advice, but a few pressed on. At the same time, some local Malaysian officials would insist they keep going if their boat was seaworthy and in some instances resorted to towing them back to international waters.

    Being owner fishermen and competent seamen the Vietnamese were very reluctant to disable their own boats and would keep going if pushed off. Some made it to Darwin but most broke down en route and ended up in makeshift camps in Indonesia.  It is difficult to believe them allowing Australian officials to sabotage their boats.  Indeed I have been unable to corroborate such a suggestion among surviving officials who served in Malaysia during this period.

    All this changed rapidly from mid 1978 as arrivals increased dramatically. This next, far larger wave of departures consisted of urban people who paid corrupt officials and middlemen for their passage. They were predominantly ethnic Chinese who were crowded into vessels in numbers that made their journey highly dangerous. For example, a small vessel that would have carried 15‑20 Vietnamese could be packed with 100-130 ethnic Chinese in appalling conditions. Understandably they were almost always desperate to disembark at first landfall, be that in Thailand or Malaysia. Their wretched, cramped conditions and not infrequent encounters with pirates en route fuelled fears about being forced back to sea, which in turn encouraged them to scuttle their boats as soon as they reached coastal waters or if they were intercepted by Malaysian patrol boats. In any case, very few boats were able to withstand the coastal surf and most broke up within hours of beaching.

    UNHCR was very slow to gear up as arrivals skyrocketed and this created great frustration within the Malaysian Government, which was increasingly worried by the growing concerns evident among Malays living in kampongs along the east coast. Malaysia soon reacted by closing all mainland camps (except for the transit centre in Kuala Lumpur) and designating Pulau Bidong, an uninhabited island,  as the site for a major holding camp for arriving refugees. This created huge logistical difficulties for all resettlement countries, made worse by continuing UNHCR shortcomings.

    Malaysian patrols were also subsequently increased with orders to stem numbers landing in Malaysia by intercepting boats further offshore and deflecting them south. This led to a rapid build-up of refugees landing in the Indonesian Anambas Islands where the local population was quickly overwhelmed as more and more makeshift camps developed. Australia was among the first countries to organise resettlement from these new remote camps.

    Far from calculated cruelty, our approach to people leaving Indochina was generous and fair. It certainly did not include sabotage of small boats crowded with refugees.

    Despite the many difficulties, we made a significant contribution through resettlement. It was made possible through close cooperation with regional countries in a strategy that balanced their requirements and the demands of refugees with our own need to maintain public support at home.

    Whatever has happened since then, at the time of these policies it was a watershed for Australia. As John Menadue said in an earlier blog, “in accepting 150,000 refugees from Indochina …… Malcolm Fraser broke the back of White Australia”. Australia is a better society for it and I am grateful I had a role helping achieve that outcome.

    Wayne Gibbons was the Co-ordinator, Australian Indo-Chinese Refugee Resettlement Program. He was later Deputy Secretary, Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs and Deputy Secretary, Department of Employment, Education and Training. He was also the CEO of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission.

     

     

     

     

     

  • Kieran Tapsell. The best drama in town: the Royal Commission on the Ellis Case.

    There is a veritable ‘whodunit’ being played out at the Royal Commission into Sex Abuse. The Commission is inquiring into the treatment of John Ellis who lent his name to the so called ‘Ellis defence’, that confirmed that the “Catholic Church”does not exist in law. If the sex abusing priest or the negligent bishop is dead or has no assets, there is no one else to sue.

    John Ellis was an altar boy and was sexually abused by Fr Aidan Duggan from the age of 13. He subsequently suffered serious psychological problems, and approached the Church through its Towards Healing protocol in 2002. The Church organised an independent assessment in accordance with that protocol and the assessor found that on the balance of probabilities Ellis had in fact been abused by Duggan. An initial offer of $25,000 was made to Ellis, and it was increased to $30,000 after Ellis lost his job as a partner at a prestigious Sydney law firm. Ellis said that he would settle for $100,000. The Church rejected that. In the meantime, Ellis only had 3 years to apply for an extension of the limitation period, and that time was about to expire. So he instructed solicitors to make the application. At the time he filed it, Ellis offered to settle the case for $750,000, an offer that was rejected by the Church. It was this application for extension of time that eventually went to the New South Wales Court of Appeal and to the High Court.

    The two remaining defendants in the matter, (Duggan in the meantime had died), Cardinal George Pell, and the Trustees of the Archdiocese of Sydney ended up spending $756,000 on lawyers, more than the amount of Ellis’s settlement offer. They proved their point and won the case: the “Catholic Church” in law does not exist; Cardinal Pell was not liable at law for any negligence of his predecessors at the time, and the Trustees had no role in the appointment of priests, and so were not liable. Ellis was ordered to pay costs that were estimated on a party/party basis at $500,000. Pell and the Trustees instructed their solicitors, Corrs, to pursue the claim for costs, despite that being against the advice of its senior partner, Paul McCann.

    After the case was over, Ellis pleaded with the Church not to enforce the order for costs. He clearly was not in a very good situation either mentally or financially. A meeting was arranged between Cardinal Pell and Ellis and his wife, and it was agreed to waive the costs order. The Church went further than that, and agreed to assist him. It ended up paying out over $500,000 for psychiatric assistance, repairs to his house and a holiday.

    So, why did the Church go to all this trouble, and put an already abused man through this nightmare, and then help him out? In our common law system, court cases not only act as precedents that later courts have to follow (in the Pao case, Justice Hoeben has already applied Ellis), but they also send out a very strong message to lawyers and their clients.

    In an interview with Richard Carleton on Sixty Minutes in 2002, Cardinal Pell said that if the victims did not want to use the Church protocols that provided compensation limited to $50,000, they could always “go to the courts”.  The Ellis decision made very clear what would happen to them if they did.

    But the really interesting thing is what Ellis says Cardinal Pell told him at the meeting. Pell said that he was under the impression that Ellis’s claim was for many millions of dollars, and the Church had to protect itself. He further said that he was unaware of the offers of $100,000 under the Towards Healing protocol and of the $750,000 offer of settlement at the start of the legal proceedings. Ellis told the Commission that Pell said to him, “If I knew that, there is no way I would have spent more on legal costs than you were asking for.” Now the scene was set for an interesting stoush between Pell and his lawyers, Corrs.

    Solicitors are obliged under their retainer and under their ethical rules to keep the client fully informed of every aspect of litigation so that they can make informed decisions. According to Ellis, Pell had accused Corrs of negligence at best and professional misconduct at worst. The Royal Commissions Act protects legal professional privilege between a solicitor and client, but there is ample authority for the proposition that such privilege is waived if allegations of negligence or professional misconduct are made against the solicitor.  Corr’s file was produced to the Commission, and the partner, Paul McCann was cross examined about the emails going back and forth between his firm and their clients. McCann was adamant that at every stage of the proceedings, Pell was fully informed of everything, and everything Corrs did in the litigation was in accordance with their instructions, including the rejection of the $750,000 offer, the rejection of mediation suggested by Ellis, putting in issue whether Ellis had been abused (despite the assessor’s finding that he had been) and pursuing Ellis for the costs.

    McCann admitted that he never spoke to the Cardinal personally, and he always dealt with his private secretary, Michael Casey whose emails represented that the Cardinal was fully informed and had personally provided instructions. We also know from McCann’s evidence how Cardinal Pell had the idea that Ellis was “claiming” many millions of dollars. It seems to have come, not from Ellis, but from McCann himself who thought that it potentially could be worth that much because Ellis had lost his job as a partner at a prestigious law firm.

    Earlier witnesses, Michael Salmon, from the Church’s Professional Standards Office, and Monsignor Brian Rayner, the Archdiocesan Chancellor left very clear impressions that Pell was calling the shots on the negotiations for a settlement under the protocol. Now, we have to hear from Pell’s personal secretary, Michael Casey, the business manager, Danny Casey, and the chancellor Monsignor John Usher as to who was really calling the shots on the litigation that Monsignor Usher had conceded in a letter to Ellis was “legal abuse”. And then we have the star witness himself: Cardinal George Pell. There will be some interesting questions: why was the offer of settlement of $750,000 rejected? But more importantly: who was really responsible for this “legal abuse” of a man already sexually abused by a Catholic priest. And there might also be an added morsel: if Cardinal Pell now thinks that it is only right and just that the Church should be able to be sued by the victims of child sex abuse, why has it taken him so long to come to that realisation?

    It is all being live streamed on http://www.childabuseroyalcommission.gov.au/public-hearings/case-study-march-2014/ and will continue today, Thursday 20 March from 10am. It’s the best drama in town.

     

     

  • Susie Carleton. The ABC is at it again.

    Don’t we all now know from the upright Hon Scott Morrison that decent members of the Australian Armed Services would never – and did not – cause the burning of the hands of asylum seekers under their control. Nor was there any further ill-treatment of a later batch of unfortunates as claimed in ABC 7.30- Report of March 17. Servicemen told Scott – and he told us.

    Australian servicemen, according to Scott, are above such conduct and it is an insult to our nation’s Armed Services to think otherwise. Of this he is convinced because there are “Regulations” and a “Code of Conduct” which rules out the sort of behavior widely claimed by the victims.

    Isn’t there also not only a code of conduct but a criminal law to provide protection within the services against the gross ill-treatment and sexual violation of young men in the services’ playful initiation ceremonies or the sexual harassment, mistreatment, even rape of their female colleagues in the services.

    Recent years have seen, according to former Minister Steven Smith, more than 2,000 such incidents perpetrated by Mr Morrison’s upright servicemen. Almost without exception these have taken place on military establishments or vessels at sea with very senior military personnel close at hand. These offences have been committed against workmates and colleagues in the services.

    It ‘s surprising then that the same people become White Knights when operating among “enemies”, “Illegals” and “undesirables” virtually unsupervised on the high seas. Morrison said he had not bothered to question the alleged victims as they had “vested interests” in making their claims.

    In view of his “Code of Conduct” mightn’t the servicemen in question also have a vested interest in denial?