Fires

REVIVE ANCIENT SKILLS TO BETTER MANAGE BUSHFIRES

VIV FORBES

There were key messages in the smoke spotted by our first explorers
The firelighter was the most powerful tool that early humans brought to Australia.

Fires lit by Aboriginal men and women created the landscape of Australia. They used fire to create and fertilise fresh new grass for the grazing animals they hunted, to trap and roast grass-dwelling reptiles and rodents, to fight enemies, to send smoke signals, to fell dead trees for campfires, to ward off frosts and biting insects, and for religious and cultural ceremonies. Their fires created and maintained grasslands and open forests and extinguished all flora and fauna unable to cope with frequent burn-offs.

Early white explorers and settlers recorded the smoke and the blackened tree trunks. They admired the extensive grasslands, either treeless or with well-spaced trees, and no tangled undergrowth of dead grass, brambles, branches and weeds.

Making fire without tinderboxes or matches is laborious. So most Aboriginals tried to keep their fires alive at all times. When on the move, selected members of the tribe were charged with carrying a fire stick and keeping it alight. In really cold weather several members may have each carried a fire stick for warmth. When the stick was in danger of going out, the carrier would usually light a tussock of dry grass or leaves and use that flame to rejuvenate the fire stick (or light a new one). As they moved on, they left a line of small fires spreading behind them. They were observed by early white explorers and settlers trying to control the movement of fires but never tried to extinguish them.

Early explorers who ventured inland were amazed to find extensive grasslands and open woodland. Their reports attracted settlers to these grassy open forests and treeless plains with mobs of cattle and sheep.

Despite modern folklore tales about Aboriginal fire management skills, anyone reading diaries from early explorers such as Abel Tasman (1642) and Captain Cook (1770) soon learned that Aboriginals lit fires at any time, for many reasons, and never tried to put them out.

If threatened by fires lit by enemies, the most frequent response was to light their own protective fires (now called backburning). Firelighting was deliberate, and sometimes governed by rules, but there was no central plan. There were no firefighters, no 4WD tankers, no water bombers, no dozers. But Aboriginal fire “management” worked brilliantly. Because of the high frequency of small fires, fire intensity was low and fires could be lit safely even in summer. Any fire lit would soon run into country burnt one or two years earlier and then would run out of fuel and self-extinguish.

Early squatters quickly learned to manage fire to protect their assets, grasslands and grazing animals.

Graziers need to protect herds and flocks, homesteads, haystacks, yards, fences and neighbours, as well as maintain grasslands by killing woody weeds and encouraging new grass. So their fire management was refined. They soon learned to pick the right season, day, time of day, place, wind and weather before lighting a fire.

Today we have replaced decentralised fire management with government-nurtured firestorms. First governments created fire hazards called national parks, where fire sticks, matches, graziers and foresters were locked out and access roads were abandoned or padlocked. And green-loving urbanites built houses beside them and planted trees in their yards. The open forests and grasslands were invaded by eucalypt regrowth, woody weeds, tangled undergrowth, dry grass, logs, dead leaves, twigs, bark and litter — all perfect fuel for a wildfire holocaust.

These tinderboxes of forest fuel became magnets for arsonists, or were lit by windblown embers or lightning. With high winds, high temperatures and heavy fuel loads some fires will race through the treetops of oil-rich eucalypt forests.

Into this maelstrom they send the brave volunteers. With insufficient tracks, insufficient nearby water, uncleared tracks, insufficient fuel reduction burning and bush right up to towns and houses, disasters are guaranteed.

Central management and control of burn-off policy has failed. Too often the people in charge did not understand bushfire history and science and were too influenced by green ideology.

Authorities should provide information but not control, which should be returned to landowners, homeowners, foresters and experienced local fire officers.

Locals with fire knowledge, experience and skin in the game could make a huge difference. Residents should be able to demand fuel load reduction near their properties and towns, and carry it out on public land if authorities refuse to do it. It can be burnt, slashed, raked, composted, heaped or buried as long as it is no longer capable of feeding runaway bushfires. Insurance companies should reflect fire risk in premiums.

No Aboriginals and few early settlers used water to fight fires. There were no water bombers, no fire trucks, often not even handspray backpacks. Graziers used backburning from station tracks. Their wives defended the homestead with garden hoses or tried to beat the flames to death with wet hessian bags and green branches. Aboriginals let the fire burn and tried to keep out of its path.

Water is undoubtedly useful to protect homes and towns, to extinguish burning buildings, to stop grass fires and to stop the backburn from escaping in the wrong direction. But trying to extinguish raging bushfires and forest wildfires with water alone is usually a waste of time, energy and water.

We must relearn two ancient skills — remove the fuel load everywhere and use fire to fight fire. Big fires need a lot of fuel. If you own the fuel, you own the fire. If you haven’t managed the fuel, you will not be able to manage the fire. And if your fire escapes and causes damage, you are responsible.

Viv Forbes is executive director of the
Saltbush Club. He has been a pastoralist in
Queensland and the Northern Territory for most of his life.

Climate Complexities

DANGEROUS TO SIMPLIFY THE COMPLEX MATTER OF CLIMATE

The push for consensus has come at the expense of exploratory scientific work

JUDITH CURRY

The UN Climate Change Conference this week in Madrid provides an important opportunity to reflect on the state of the public debate surrounding climate change.

Most of the world’s governments are prioritising energy security, affordability and industrial competitiveness over commitments made for the Paris climate agreement. Even if these countries were on track to meet their commitments, most of the national pledges would be insufficient to meet the Paris targets. At the same time, we are hearing increasingly shrill rhetoric from Extinction Rebellion and other activists about the “existential threat” of the “climate crisis”, “runaway climate chaos” and so on.

There is a growing realisation that the Paris climate agreement is inadequate for making a meaningful dent in slowing down the anticipated warming.

And the real societal consequences of climate change and extreme weather events remain largely unaddressed.

How have we arrived at this point? For the past three decades, the climate policy cart has been way out in front of the scientific horse. The 1992 climate change treaty was signed by 190 countries before the balance of scientific evidence suggested even a discernible observed human influence on global climate. The 1997 Kyoto Protocol was implemented before we had any confidence that most of the recent warming was caused by humans. There has been tremendous political pressure on the scientists to present findings that would support these treaties, which has resulted in a drive to manufacture a scientific consensus on the dangers of manmade climate change.

Fossil-fuel emissions as the climate “control knob” is a simple and seductive idea. However, this is a misleading oversimplification since climate can shift naturally in unexpected ways.

There is still great uncertainty about the sensitivity of the Earth’s temperature to increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We have no idea how natural climate variability (solar, volcanoes, ocean circulations) will play out in the 21st century, and whether natural variability will dominate over man-made warming.

We still don’t have a realistic assessment of how a warmer climate will affect us and whether it is dangerous. We don’t have a good understanding of how warming will influence extreme weather events. Land use and exploitation by humans is a far bigger issue than climate change for species extinction and ecosystem health. Local sea level rise has many causes and is dominated by sinking from land use in many of the most vulnerable locations.

We have been told that the science of climate change is settled. However, in climate science there has been a tension between the drive towards a scientific consensus to support policymaking, versus exploratory research that pushes forward the knowledge frontier. Climate science is characterised by a rapidly evolving knowledge base and disagreement among experts. Predictions of 21st-century climate change are characterised by deep uncertainty.

Nevertheless, activist scientists and the media seize on each extreme weather event as having the fingerprints of man-made climate change — ignoring the analyses of more sober scientists showing periods of even more extreme weather in the first half of the 20th century, when fossil fuel emissions were much smaller.

Alarming press releases are issued about each new climate model prediction of future catastrophes from famine, mass migrations and catastrophic fires, yet these press releases don’t mention that these predicted catastrophes are associated with highly implausible assumptions about how much we might emit in the 21st century. Issues such as famine, mass migrations and wildfires are caused primarily by government policies and ineptitude, lack of wealth and land-use policies. Climate change matters, but it’s outweighed by other factors in terms of influencing human wellbeing.

We have been told that climate change is an existential crisis. However, based on our current assessment of the science, the climate threat is not an existential one, even in its most alarming hypothetical incarnations.

However, the perception of man-made climate change as a near-term apocalypse has narrowed the policy options that we’re willing to consider.

We have not only oversimplified the problem of climate change but we have also oversimplified its solution. Even if you accept the climate model projections and that warming is dangerous, there is disagreement among experts regarding whether a rapid acceleration away from fossil fuels is the appropriate policy response.

In any event, rapidly reducing emissions from fossil fuels and ameliorating the adverse effects of extreme weather events in the near term increasingly looks like magical thinking.

Climate change — man-made and natural — is a chronic problem that will require centuries of management.

The extreme rhetoric of Extinction Rebellion and other activists is making political agreement on climate change policies more difficult. Exaggerating the dangers beyond credibility makes it difficult to take climate change seriously. The monomaniacal focus on elimination of fossil-fuel emissions distracts our attention from the primary causes of many of our problems and effective solutions.

Commonsense strategies to reduce vulnerability to extreme weather events, improve environmental quality, develop better energy technologies, improve agricultural and land-use practices, and better manage water resources can pave the way for a more prosperous and secure future. Each of these solutions is “no regrets” — supporting climate change mitigation while improving human wellbeing. These strategies avoid the political gridlock surrounding the current policies and avoid costly policies that will have minimal near-term impacts on the climate. And these strategies don’t require agreement about the risks of uncontrolled greenhouse gas emissions.

We don’t know how the climate of the 21st century will evolve, and we will undoubtedly be surprised. Given this uncertainty, precise emissions targets and deadlines are scientifically meaningless. We can avoid much of the political gridlock by implementing commonsense, no-regrets strategies that improve energy technologies, lift people out of poverty and make them more resilient to extreme weather events.

Judith Curry is president of the
Climate Forecast Applications
Network and professor emeritus at Georgia Institute of
Technology.

Sex And Genders Etc.

Play ‘self-identity’, make yourself up as you go

FRANK FUREDI

Biological sex, determined at the moment of conception, is being rendered meaningless

A modern child can be black, Chinese, male, female — or just confused, like the rest of us
Until recently only children were expected to play and pretend they were someone else — a scary lion, Alexander the Great or Superman. Now adults, too, can join in and get to decide how they want to be seen and identified.

Britain’s Universities and Colleges Union has published a report that contends anyone should be able to identify as black regardless of the colour of their skin.

That means a university teacher with ginger hair and freckles can now — in all seriousness — assert their black identity and gain the validation of colleagues. And anyone who refuses to go along with this performance of blackness risks being accused of a hate crime.

The UCU’s report aims to resolve the current controversy about whether biological males should be able to self-identify as women and be treated as female. The report concludes with a resounding yes — you don’t need to have a uterus and female reproductive organs to identify as a woman. It also went a step further so you can decide if you are white, black or, presumably, Chinese.

It notes that “our rules commit us to ending all forms of discrimination, bigotry and stereotyping” and declares that the “UCU has a long history of enabling members to self-identify whether that is being black, disabled, LGBT+ or women”. The UCU’s argument about the right to self-identify is another way of saying it is up to everyone to decide how others are obligated to see them.

From this standpoint, your sex chromosomes, biology, physical features or cultural origins are more or less irrelevant when it comes to self-identity. Self-identification renders identity a form of role play. It works as a make-it-upas-you-go-along performance and you can adopt whatever role takes your fancy.

Once upon a time the UCU’s report would have provoked the response of “they must be joking”.

Some sensible commentators may still react in astonishment at its preposterous sentiments.

However, with the proliferation of a bewildering variety of new identities, the public has gradually got used to the unannounced arrival of yet another freshly invented identity.

Not so long ago most people were genuinely shocked and surprised when it was announced Facebook now had 71 gender identities to choose from.

Then came the appearance of an endless number of newly minted trans pronouns. In some circles the use of he or she was condemned as a cultural crime of misgendering. Instead zie, sie, ey, ve, tey or e were proposed as enlightened alternatives to the far too restrictive binary pronouns of he and she.

Now with the non-stop attention sections of the media devote to the cultivation of new identities, more and` more people intuit that the obsession with identity is here to stay. The right to self-identify and choose your race or gender enjoys widespread cultural affirmation.

The readiness with which public and private organisations have changed the language used in official forms to include new categories of gender suggests selfidentification is fast becoming institutionalised Society’s preoccupation with identity and selfidentification has acquired an explosive dynamic to the point it is rapidly changing the way we think and the words we use. The recently invented term “sex assigned at birth”, used by numerous institutions and media outlets, conveys the view that one’s biological sex is arbitrary and irrelevant.

Biological sex, determined at the moment of conception, is rendered invisible and meaningless through the administrative fiat of rendering it transitory. The transformation of a birth certificate into a statement of identity preference implies the description of a baby is a provisional one that is likely to alter. The premise of the phrase “sex assigned at birth” is that it is the developing child and teenager who will eventually choose an identity — preferably a genderneutral one — for themselves.

A significant cohort of “up-todate” parents have embraced the ideology of gender neutrality and adopted a style of child-rearing that avoids assigning a biological gender to their child. Such parents assume they are providing their offspring with the freedom to decide for themselves who they want to be.

In reality the embrace of gender-neutral parenting constitutes an act of adult irresponsibility. Instead of guiding their child to help understand their biological attributes and taking responsibility for the development of the child’s identity, they place the burden of character formation on the child.

“Leaving it up to the child” may sound open-minded but its effect is to allow the confusing influences and pressures of popular and peer culture to monopolise the identity formation of young people.

Instead of providing direction and guidance, children are left to deal with a chaotic world dominated by social media, consumer culture and identity politics.

In places of work and in institutions of higher education, people face strong pressure and sanctions should they refuse to embrace a gender-neutral vocabulary.

It is increasingly common to provide people with a list of words they can or cannot use at their workplace. One of the most disturbing targets of linguistic policing are daycare centres and primary schools, which are exhorted to socialise children by preempting them from adopting the language and values of the generations that preceded them. As far back as 1995 the daycare centre at La Trobe University in Melbourne banned the use of about 20 words, including the gender-related terms girl and boy, to promote its mission of altering traditional sex roles. Those who violated the code were forced to pay a fine and treated as if they had used a dirty word.

The focus on altering children’s vocabulary is not accidental. The project of purifying of language is motivated by the objective of altering people’s behaviour.

Language serves as a medium through which human relations are ordered and people’s reality is shaped. Thus, socialising children into a gender-neutral culture and vocabulary aims to alter the meaning youngsters attach to their identity and existence.

Such irresponsible behaviour can mess up and confuse the generations to come, which is why we need to embrace the role of the young boy who exposed the pretensions of the naked emperor with the words “he has no clothes”.

Instead of allowing promoters of self-identification to embarrass us into silence, we have to speak out and insist that playing an identity game does not alter the hard facts of biological sex.

Frank Furedi is a sociologist and
author of How Fear Works: The
Culture of Fear in the 21st Century (Bloomsbury).

CarbonFears

LET’S NOT POLLUTE MINDS WITH CARBON FEARS

IAN PLIMER

Talk of an emergency is ignorant, populist scaremongering
As soon as the words carbon footprint, emissions, pollution, and decarbonisation, climate emergency, extreme weather, unprecedented and extinction are used, I know I am being conned by ignorant activists, populist scaremongering, vote-chasing politicians and rent seekers.

Pollution by plastics, sulphur and nitrogen gases, particulates and chemicals occurs in developing countries. That’s real pollution. The major pollution in advanced economies is the polluting of minds about the role of carbon dioxide. There are no carbon emissions. If there were, we could not see because most carbon is black. Such terms are deliberately misleading, as are many claims.

But then again, we should be used to this after the hysteria about the Great Barrier Reef bleaching that has really been occurring for hundreds of years, fraudulent changing of past weather records, the ignoring of data that shows Pacific islands and the Maldives are growing rather than being inundated, and unsubstantiated claims polar ice is melting. By ignoring history and geology, any claim of unusual weather can be made sensational.

We’ve had reefs on planet Earth for 3500 million years. They came and went many times. The big killer of reefs was because sea level dropped and water temperature decreased. In the past, reefs thrived when water was warmer and there was an elevated carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere. Reef material is calcium carbonate, which contains 44 per cent carbon dioxide. Reefs need carbon dioxide; it’s their basic food.

We are not living in a period of catastrophic climate change. The past tells us it’s business as usual.

It has never been shown that human emissions of carbon dioxide drive global warming.

Climate models have been around 30 years. They have all failed. Balloon and satellite measurements show a disconnect from climate model predictions. If they have failed across the past 30 years when we can compare models with measurements, there is little chance that the climate projections across the next 50 years will be more successful. Modellers assume carbon dioxide drives climate change. It does not. The role of the sun and clouds was not considered important by modellers. They are the major drivers for the climate on our planet.

We emit a trace atmospheric gas called carbon dioxide at a time in planetary history of low atmospheric carbon dioxide. The geological history of the planet shows major planetary climate changes have never been driven by a trace gas. Just because we are alive today does not mean we change major planetary systems that operated for billions of years. Earth’s climate dances to rhythms every day, every season and on far larger lunar, ocean, solar, orbital, galactic and tectonic cycles. Climate change is normal and continual. When cycles overlap, climate change can be rapid and large. Sporadic events such as supernovas and volcanic eruptions can also change climate.

The main greenhouse gas is water vapour. It is the only gas in air that can evaporate, humidify and condense into clouds that precipitate rain, hail and snow. These processes involve a transfer of energy, and water vapour makes the atmosphere behave like a giant airconditioner. Carbon dioxide is a non-condensable atmospheric gas like nitrogen and oxygen. Water vapour in air varies depending on temperature and location from five times the atmospheric carbon dioxide content in deserts to more than 100 times in the tropics. Water is 12 times more effective than carbon dioxide with respect to all incoming and outgoing radiation.

Earth is unevenly heated. Our spinning oblate globe is influenced by two fluids of different composition and behaviour moving chaotically against each other over the irregular solid surface of the planet. Oceans hold most of the planet’s surface heat, not the atmosphere. Processes that occur during sunlight do not occur at night due to the prime driver of our planet’s surface temperature: the sun.

Carbon dioxide is plant food. It is neither a pollutant nor a toxin. Without carbon dioxide, all life on Earth would die. Plants convert carbon dioxide, water and sunlight during photosynthesis into sugars, cellulose, fruit, vegetables and grains, which animal life uses as food. Marine organisms also take up and use carbon dioxide. Plants need almost three times today’s carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere to thrive. For decades horticulturalists have pumped carbon dioxide into glasshouses to increase yields. The fossil record shows that a thriving and diversification of plant and animal life occurs every time the atmosphere had a very high carbon dioxide content. In the past, warming has never been a threat to life on Earth. Why should it be now? When there is a low atmospheric carbon dioxide content, especially during very cold times, life struggles.

For the past 500 million years, the atmospheric carbon dioxide content has been decreasing and if we halved today’s atmospheric carbon dioxide content, all life would die. This carbon dioxide has been removed into the oceans and is sequestered into coral, shells, limey sediments and muds and on the land into coals, muds, soils and vegetation.

Air contains 0.04 per cent carbon dioxide. We add carbon compounds to our bodies from food and drinks and exhale carbon dioxide. The human breath contains at least 4 per cent carbon dioxide. Our bodies contain carbon compounds. If we were so passionately concerned about our carbon footprint, then the best thing to do is to expire.

In our lifetime, there has been no correlation between carbon dioxide emissions and temperature. On a larger scale, the ice caps show that after a natural orbitally driven warming, atmospheric carbon dioxide content increases 800 years later. Rather than atmospheric carbon dioxide driving temperature, it is the opposite. Geology shows us again there is no correlation between atmospheric carbon dioxide and temperature. Each of the six major past ice ages began when the atmospheric carbon dioxide content was far higher than at present. The thought that a slight increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide will lead to unstoppable global warming is demonstrably wrong.

In the past decade China has increased its carbon dioxide emissions by 53 per cent, 12 times Australia’s total carbon dioxide output of 1.3 per cent of the global total. The grasslands, forests, farms and continental shelves of Australia adsorb far more carbon dioxide than we emit. The attack on emissions of the gas of life is an irrational attack on industry, our modern way of life, freedoms and prosperity. It has nothing to do with the environment.

Emeritus professor Ian Plimer’s latest book is The Climate Change Delusion and the Great Electricity Ripoff (Connor Court).

There are no carbon emissions. If there were, we could not see because most carbon is black

Social pressure

Follow Michael Crichton’s Rule

The late writer warned about bending to social pressure instead of heeding evidence.

Jurassic Park” and “Westworld,” from the brilliant mind of Michael Crichton, aren’t real. But neither are a lot of things that pass for arguments these days. Crichton, who died in 2008, gave a lecture at Caltech in 2003 titled “Aliens Cause Global Warming.” In his words, it was about the “uneasy relationship between hard science and public policy” but I took away a lot more. Relax, this column isn’t about climate change.

His first example was nuclear winter. In 1975 the National Academy of Sciences stated that even with multiple nuclear detonations, the effect from dust would be minor. In 1979 Congress’s Office of Technology Assessment said the science was poorly understood and it wasn’t possible to estimate damage. Yet by 1982 the Swedish Academy of Sciences speculated that smoke would cover the Northern Hemisphere, blocking the sun and disabling photosynthesis—nuclear winter.

Within five years, famed astronomer Carl “Billions and Billions” Sagan figured a 5,000-megaton nuclear exchange would cause temperatures to drop below freezing for three months. Of course, there was no empirical study to back any of this. But what amazed me was the observation that no one could take the other side of the argument. Physicist Freeman Dyson said, “It’s an absolutely atrocious piece of science, but who wants to be accused of being in favor of nuclear war?” Argument over.

Same for secondhand smoke. In 1994 the Environmental Protection Agency found that 11 studies of the link between smoke in restaurants or offices and cancer were not conclusive, but nonetheless labeled secondhand smoke a Group A carcinogen. The World Health Organization also began to warn against secondhand smoke despite inconclusive studies of its own. Since then, study after study has found no statistically significant relationship between cancer and being near indoor smoking. Yet no one takes the other side of the argument. Except for smokers, no one likes the smell of tar and nicotine while they’re eating or working. Yuck. No one, including me, is actually for secondhand smoke.

Crichton observed: “Once you abandon strict adherence to what science tells us, once you start arranging the truth in a press conference, then anything is possible.” That includes children at the United Nations yelling, “How dare you.” It’s knee-jerk analysis. I call it the Crichton Conundrum: “I’m against it, so these theories must be right—even though the science is most likely bunk.” Shallow, but sadly a reality.

The conundrum is everywhere. Take the $15 minimum wage, a so-called living wage—who could be against that? The problem is that the alternative isn’t necessarily $8 or $10 an hour; often it’s no job and $0 an hour. Lo and behold, restaurants are closing in San Francisco.

Or take net neutrality. No one wants an un-neutral internet, even though that enables innovative pricing to help fund fiber-optic and wireless buildouts. Similarly, we all feel good about “natural” forest management and now California burns.

These arguments are often vague, even Orwellian—the expressions “net neutrality” and “climate change” conceal their shallow concepts. But they’re also Crichtonesque in the way they foreclose any argument from the other side. If you’re against food stamps or children’s health spending, you’re heartless, even though they are inefficient, ineffective and rife with fraud. And friendly sounding No Child Left Behind and Common Core? Sorry, math scores went down.

Free college, day care and medical care? Didn’t Cuba try that? Free or price-controlled goods always end up like subsidized bread in the Soviet Union. You get less of it and empty shelves. The same is true of rent control, as California will soon learn.

Nobel Prize-winning economist (who could be against that?) Joseph Stiglitz last year suggested relief of Puerto Rico’s burdensome debt. Ah, relief—except then Puerto Rico would probably not be able to borrow again for a long time (which applies to student loans as well). And then there’s social justice. No one is for injustice, but now campus mobs are threatening free speech.

Many counterarguments are hard to frame. You can’t just argue the opposite. Crichton reminds us to question the science, the data and the studies, and to argue outside the box you’re put in. Often the answer to most policy questions is “Who pays?” Of course, it’s “greedy corporations” or the 1% fat cats, except that jobs are created by corporations, or funded out of the investment savings of the wealthy, creating new companies and progress. Are you against that?

Why doesn’t anyone make the case for free markets? Because it doesn’t lend itself to easy sound bites: “What do you mean millions of people make billions of price decisions every day that efficiently allocates capital?” Michael J. Fox’s character on “Family Ties,” which ran until 1989, was the last popular free-market spokesman but was portrayed as greedy. Plenty of people still believe it’s better to have governments set prices.

Crichton would have a field day today: democratic socialism, implicit bias, medical marijuana, open curriculum, small class sizes, surveillance capitalism, HOV lanes, electric-vehicle credits, renewable-fuel standards, carbon taxes—it never ends. We’re sorely missing the other side of the argument.

TheJudeanChristianWorld

Secularism's Ongoing Debt to Christianity

By John D. Steinrucken

Rational thought may provide better answers to many of life's riddles than does faith alone. However, it is rational to conclude that religious faith has made possible the advancement of Western civilization. That is, the glue that has held Western civilization together over the centuries is the Judeo-Christian tradition. To the extent that the West loses its religious faith in favor of non-judgmental secularism, then to the same extent, it loses that which holds all else together.

Succinctly put: Western civilization's survival, including the survival of open secular thought, depends on the continuance within our society of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Arguably the two most defining and influential Christian concepts are summarized in two verses of the New Testament. Those verses are Romans 14:10 and John 8:32.

Romans 14:10, says: "Remember, each of us must stand alone before the judgment seat of God." That verse explicitly recognizes not only each man's uniqueness, but, of necessity, implies that man has free will -- that individual acts do result in consequences, and that those acts will be judged against objective standards. It is but a step from the habit of accepting individual accountability before God to thinking of individual accountability in secular things. It thus follows that personal and political freedom is premised upon the Christian concept of the unique individual exercising accountable free will.

John 8:32 says: "And you will know the truth and the truth will set you free." Whatever the theological meanings that have been imputed to that verse, its implicit secular meaning is that the search for truth is in and of itself praiseworthy.

Although I am a secularist (atheist, if you will), I accept that the great majority of people would be morally and spiritually lost without religion. Can anyone seriously argue that crime and debauchery are not held in check by religion? Is it not comforting to live in a community where the rule of law and fairness are respected? Would such be likely if Christianity were not there to provide a moral compass to the great majority? Do we secularists not benefit out of all proportion from a morally responsible society?

An orderly society is dependent on a generally accepted morality. There can be no such morality without religion. Has there ever been a more perfect and concise moral code than the one Moses brought down from the mountain?

Those who doubt the effect of religion on morality should seriously ask the question: Just what are the immutable moral laws of secularism? Be prepared to answer, if you are honest, that such laws simply do not exist! The best answer we can ever hear from secularists to this question is a hodgepodge of strained relativist talk of situational ethics. They can cite no overriding authority other than that of fashion. For the great majority in the West, it is the Judeo-Christian tradition which offers a template assuring a life of inner peace toward the world at large -- a peace which translates to a workable liberal society.            

A few years ago, I saw on television the interview of a reforming prostitute and drug addict. When asked why she had chosen to reform, her simple answer was, "I don't want to go to Hell." I am sure that she had previously received hours of counseling from secular social workers, all without discernible effect. What did it for her was the simplicity of a belief in Heaven and Hell, and with knowing that one day, she would stand alone before her God to be judged.

For the majority of a culture's population, religious tradition is inextricably woven into their self-awareness. It gives them their identity. It is why those of religious faith are more socially stable and experience less difficulty in forming and maintaining binding attachments than do we secularists.

Most men do have a need for God. This, I think, is proven by the desperation with which so many of those who have forsaken the God of their fathers (it has been fashionable to do so) are now reaching for meaning in eastern exotica, new-age mumbo-jumbo, and other attempts to fill the spiritual hole.

Or they surrender themselves to secular ideologies or do-good causes, especially those in which they can mass with others in solidarity, shouting in unison mindless, ritualistic simplicities and waving placards of hackneyed and inane slogans.

Secularism has never offered the people a practical substitute for religion. From the time of the philosophes with their certainties in 1789, the rationally thought-through utopias of those who think themselves the elite of the world, when actually put to the test, have not merely come to naught. Attempts during those two centuries to put into practice utopian visions have caused huge sufferings. But they, the clever ones, never look back. In their conceit, they delude themselves that next time they are sure to get it right. They create justifications for their fantasies by rewriting the histories.

We secularists should recognize that we owe much to the religionists, that we are not threatened by them, that we should grant to them their world. Why should we be exercised over a Christmas Crèche in front of the county court house? It is appropriately symbolic of Christianity's benign but essential role as guarantor of our political and legal systems -- that is, of a moral force independent of andtranscendent to the political. And what harm will come to a child who hears prayer in the schoolroom? I daresay harm is far more likely to come in those places where prayer is not heard.

The fact is, we secularists gain much from living in a world in which excesses are held in check by religion. Religion gives society a secure and orderly environment within which we secularists can safely play out our creativities. Free and creative secularism seems to me to function best when within the stable milieu provided by Christianity.         

To the extent that Western elites distance themselves from their Judeo-Christian cultural heritage in favor of secular constructs, and as they give deference to a multicultural acceptance that all beliefs are of equal validity, they lose their will to defend against a determined attack from another culture, such as from militant Islam. For having destroyed the ancient faith of their people, they will have found themselves with nothing to defend. For the culture above which they had fancied themselves to have risen, the culture which had given them their material sustenance, will by then have become but a hollow shell.

An elite must, by definition, have a much larger base upon which to stand. For Western civilization, that base has over the centuries been the great mass of commoners who have looked to Christianity for their moral guidance and for strength to weather adversity. The elitists delude themselves if they think the common people will look to them for guidance once their religious beliefs have been eroded away.

The greatest crime of the elitists -- if they have their way -- will be their failure to use their gifts of intellect to lead and to preserve. Their sin will be the abandonment of that ninety percent of the population which had provided them with the secure societal and material wherewithal for practicing their conceits and dilettantes.

If the elitists of our Western civilization want to survive, then it is incumbent upon them to see to the preservation of the hoary, time-honored faith of the great majority of the people. This means that our elitists should see that their most valued vested interest is the preservation within our culture of Christianity and Judaism. It is not critical that they themselves believe, only that they should publicly hold in high esteem the institutions of Christianity and Judaism, and to respect those who do believe and to encourage and to give leeway to those who, in truth, will be foremost in the trenches defending us against those who would have us all bow down to a different and unaccommodating faith.

Irresponsible Activism

The Australian

Economic illiterates clueless of the damage they espouse

GREG SHERIDAN
FOREIGN EDITOR

STUART McEVOY
The Andrews government will not charge protesters for the cost of policing their sit-in at the intersection of Swanston and Flinders streets

BRIAN BENNION
Protesters Katya Alshanow and Kat Crysi in Brisbane

Shut down our coal exports and dirty stuff from Indonesia takes its place

This week Australian politics entered a new stage. Extremists taking direct action, in the name of a highly coercive version of veganism, stopped the traffic in Melbourne.

Nothing unusual about that.

Although, of course, the Victorian government of Daniel Andrews will not pursue the vegan protest organisers for the cost of the policing involved while it is happy to lumber the admittedly extremely unattractive right-wing Milo Yiannopoulos with a bill of tens of thousands of dollars for the policing of his events, even though he didn’t break any law.

That’s the new normal. Leftwing law-breaking is OK. Unfashionable right-wing law abiding will leave you with a bill for tens of thousands of dollars.

Nothing really new in that. That’s pretty much just the moment we’ve come to.

What was new this week was the determined, widespread invasion of family farms and farm businesses by vegan activists. This led Scott Morrison’s government to promise new legislation to penalise websites that publish the addresses of farmers to promote trespass. Importantly, Bill Shorten condemned the farm invasions. But what is the trend? These farm invasions attract ludicrously lenient fines under state laws.

But they are terrorising to the farm families involved. They explicitly use law-breaking violence and physical intimidation to advance a political cause. That is low-grade terrorism.

Farmers and their families do no constitute a socially progressive victim class so they get very little media sympathy and no support at all from the vast and growing activist class.

Last month, more than 100 vegan extremists, all dressed in black, invaded an innocent, lawabiding family goat farm in Queensland, yet there were no significant penalties. National Farmers Federation chief executive Tony Mahar saw this week’s events as an attack on farming and farmers: “The main concern here is that people are taking the law into their own hands. We’ve seen people dressed in black, their faces covered, breaking into a piggery, a family farm, in the middle of the night. I’ve got kids and if I was the farmer in that situation I’d be terrified and extremely annoyed.”

The extremist vegans — who presumably don’t represent the views of the majority of people who follow vegan diets — don’t merely want kinder treatment of animals. On all the evidence, Australian farmers love their animals and treat them as well as any farm animals in the world. Nor are the vegan extremists that much concerned with agriculture’s greenhouse gas emissions. Instead, they reject the “dominion” of mankind over animals. They do not want animals to serve human beings, especially as food.

The media was both confused and misleading in its treatment of the week’s events. It focused on greenhouse emissions from agriculture because the greenhouse issue allows any activity at all to be attacked. Network Ten’s The Project was particularly telling in censoring out NFF comments about everything Australian agriculture has done to cut its greenhouse emissions. At the same time, its treatment of the vegan extremism was essentially sympathetic.

This is because — and here is the crux — most of the media in most Western nations and, much more importantly, not just the media but the entirety of symbolwielding, values-defining, woke folks, have embraced the metanarrative that social protest in any progressive or left of centre cause, especially involving law-breaking, is morally heroic.

This is a trend across western Europe and Britain, North America, Australia and New Zealand.

The extremism of the extremist vegan wing is important because it’s illustrative. There is nothing any farmer can reasonably do to satisfy these folks. They are attacking the legitimacy of farming itself.

Resources and Northern Australia Minister Matt Canavan tells Inquirer that about 66 per cent of our commodity and merchandise exports are subject to hostile social activism campaigns. If you include services, then the share of our exports subject to negative social activism campaigns is just over 50 per cent.

But even in services, the activists are generally not happy with Australia actually making any money and earning its living.

Our two big services exports are education and tourism. Try to call to mind a single significant tourism development that has been supported by the green-Left social activist continuum.

The much bigger case is coal. Australian agriculture produces about $60 billion worth of product every year and the NFF believes this could easily be $100bn by 2030. Last year, coal was Australia’s biggest export and iron ore our second biggest. Our national prosperity still rests fundamentally on coal, iron ore, agriculture, gas and other minerals exports.

We can tell ourselves all the comforting bedtime stories we like about future jobs coming in health, aged care, teaching, preschool education, counselling, renewable energy. All these jobs depend on government money. Government money comes only from taxes. The only thing you can tax is profits. The resources industry alone pays nearly $20bn in direct taxes. Last year, the nation earned just a little under $70bn from coal exports.

Canavan includes iron ore among the exports subject to social activist opposition because to turn iron ore into steel requires a great deal of coal power. Renewable energy is unreliable and has become more competitive in Australia mainly because we have imposed such uncompetitively high energy prices on ourselves.

The dependence of Australian prosperity on coal takes many forms. It is not only the direct export income and tax base, but all the income tax the workforce pays and all the indirect businesses that service the coal industry. But there is another dividend. Coal and iron ore and gas and the other mineral and agricultural exports keep our dollar strong, which allows us to import all the things we don’t make in Australia — more of it or all of it — which constitutes our affluent life.

Thus the attack on coal and agriculture and other industries is an attack on the legitimacy of modern Australian life. What is astonishing and new is how few explicit defenders there are, prepared to make a case in principle in the public debate.

Anti-coal campaigners resemble the most militant vegans in a critical way. There is absolutely nothing the coal industry can do to satisfy their demands. Yet hurting our coal industry doesn’t help the planet.

If our coal is limited, dirtier coal from Indonesia takes its place and overall global emissions rise. Similarly with agriculture; if activists impose costs that run some of our producers out of business, we import food produced in countries with lower environmental and animal safety standards.

Increasingly, our export industries resemble the US president in Independence Day who asks the invading alien: “What is it you want us to do?” The alien’s answer is simple: “Die!”

Like everything on the Australian Left, the anti-business, antiagriculture social activism is derivative and imported from the US and Britain. It has no equivalent in Asia. The grassroots groups, like the kids who chained themselves to hire vans in Flinders Street, are a tiny part of the vast social activism campaign that has snared many millions of dollars in government money and also has received millions from Left-liberal US foundations. They also benefit from enormous taxpayer-funded university-based activism.

Across the West, the ideological Left in its postmodern, activist guise has captured the commanding heights of education, especially concerning political values. Its meta-narrative is that Western societies are bad: racist, sexist, hetero-normative, imperialist and so on and their economic systems are intrinsically evil, built on industries that are morally offensive and illegitimate.

Perhaps the baby boomers, or at the latest Generation X, was the last in which Western tradition put up some kind of significant minority rearguard action against the enveloping world view of the progressive activist class.

Young people, deprived of any knowledge of Western tradition, much less footling nonsense like economic literacy, are now more sympathetic to the activist outlook. Obviously there are magnificent minorities that stand against the new orthodoxies. But we live in a time of overwhelming moral cowardice and the desire to be part of the shouting mob, to get the approval of the symbol-wielding powers, is strong.

Certainly, the younger the cohort the lower the level of respect for institutions, laws and traditions. In this, young folks are constantly reinforced in their worst instincts by their cowardly elders. There is a trend across the West now for high school students to play truant to protest against climate change. There is nothing wrong with protesting against climate change if that’s what you believe. But the essential frisson in this silliness is that you don’t do it in your own time, but that you get the fraudulent moral charge of notionally breaking a rule by ducking school. No less a figure in contemporary Western civilisation than German Chancellor Angela Merkel has supported this rule breaking. A brave national leader would say to school students: your political participation is wonderful, but you should play by the rules. Instead, we are positively instructing school students that the only moral course is to break the rules even when the rules themselves are entirely good.

In Britain, Opposition Leader Jeremy Corbyn is a lifelong protester and rule-breaker of the most extreme and irresponsible kind, with a long record of supporting terrorists and associating with anti-Semites. In 2017, 64 per cent of 25 to 29-year-olds voted for him. In the US, the youngest congresswoman, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is a media star for promoting the Green New Deal as a serious program for government. This is an insanely utopian, coercive program that claims to guarantee high-paid jobs for every American, provide free university for everyone, cut carbon emissions in the energy sector to zero

— yes, zero. This is the stuff of pure activist fantasy. It bears no relation to reality. It may be idealistic but it is also destructive because it sets up politics for bitter conflict, inevitable disillusion and ferocious hostility to anyone who opposes the insane program.

Of course, there are also horrible demons on the Right of politics, many of them called into being by the madness of the contemporary Left.

The anti-business template in Australia is simple and much repeated: gain publicity and sympathy by protest and if possible by arrest; use this to drive fundraising; disrupt and delay key infrastructure; secure funding from big anti-development political organisations in Australia and overseas; increase investment risk; seek as much legal harassment of the targeted industry as possible; build a powerful movement; gain sympathetic media coverage; attack particular firms and sites and finally destroy the so-called social licence of the industry involved.

Following these tactics, the social activist class can achieve great destruction. It’s not clear they can build anything at all.

Their metanarrative is that Western societies are bad: racist, sexist, heteronormative, imperialist

Abuse of due process?

QED

Catholics, Sex, and Cardinal Pell

• 26th February 2019
 
•  Comments (1)

Peter Wales

The verdict revealed today is not an indictment of George Pell and the Catholic Church. It is an indictment of the media, whose vindictive witch hunt led to frenzied demands that someone, anyone, be punished. In this case the designated victim has done more than anyone to eradicate the very abuse for which he was laughably convicted

STRANGELY, for one usually so sceptical and questioning, the alleged high rate of child abuse in the Catholic church was something I simply absorbed from the ether, or perhaps from the ABC, which, since I disagree with it about almost everything, is my primary news source. Looking back, I am still not sure why, while enthusiastically poking holes in most other ABC reporting, I was content to accept their claims about the church being the locus of most child abuse. I wasn’t a Catholic at the time. Perhaps it was simply comforting to be able to think of something so nasty as being nothing to do with anyone I knew, or any organisations I was involved in. Except it wasn’t true.

It is hard to know where to start with this, so I will make just a few key points, which you can follow up or check if you wish. During the Royal Commission into institutional child abuse, the ABC breathlessly reported that 60% of child abuse in a religious institution took place within the Catholic Church. Shocking! How disgusting! What a hive of degenerates! Except that by not telling the whole story, the ABC was saying something completely untrue. What was left out was that during the time under investigation, 80% of children who attended a religious school or were resident in a religious institution, were students in or resident in a Catholic institution. The twenty percent of students/residents in institutions run by other religious groups accounted for 40% of the total abuse reported. In other words, a student in a non-Catholic religious school was more than twice as likely to have been molested than a student in a Catholic school.

In fact, Catholic clergy have lower rates of abuse than clergy of other religions or denominations (some groups, for example the Jehovah’s Witnesses, have far higher reported rates of abuse than any mainstream denomination). In turn, clergy of other denominations have lower rates of abuse than occur in secular community and sports groups and public schools (the Boy Scouts in the US has just filed for bankruptcy because it cannot keep up with payouts for abuse claims). And abuse in any church, school or community group is far outstripped by abuse in the home, where it has been estimated 90% of abuse occurs. As Bettina Arndt noted

It’s total hypocrisy. We jump up and down in the Royal Commission about abuse of people in institutions. We don’t give a stuff about the major risk for children which is, you know, children in single parent families being abused by boyfriends passing in and out of those families … There are a whole lot of areas [of sexual child abuse] we don’t discuss because they are not politically correct. Obviously, we’re trying to get the Catholic Church and attack churches.

The Royal Commission observed there had been 2504 incidents of alleged child sexual abuse in the Uniting Church between its inauguration in 1977 and 2017. This compares with 4445 claims of abuse in the Catholic Church between 1950 and 2015. Some parts of the media pounced on this figure as again proving the disproportionate amount of abuse that occurred within the Catholic Church. But two other factors need to be considered: the Commission did not consider any abuse claims made against the Methodist, Presbyterian and Congregational churches during the 27 year period from 1950 to 1977. Most abuse claims in the Catholic Church occurred in the 1970s. This may also have been the case in other denominations. But whether so or not, this is 27 years in which abuse in the Catholic Church was considered and counted, but not in other denominations. In addition, media reports generally failed to note that the Catholic Church has five times as many members as the Uniting Church. On the Commission’s own figures, a child attending the Uniting Church was more than twice as likely to have been molested than a child attending the Catholic Church.

Another important fact that become clear in the cases reported to the Royal Commission is that almost all reported abuse in the Catholic Church occurred in the Sixties, Seventies and early Eighties. Was it disgusting? Absolutely. Was it wrong? Absolutely. Should perpetrators be brought to justice? Absolutely. Is it still happening? No. Or hardly.

So what changed? What happened to see the rate of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, already lower than other denominations and community groups, reduced dramatically even further? Part of the answer is that strong leaders like Phillip Wilson and George Pell were appointed to positions where they able to make a difference. It is no co-incidence that those two, who were most vigorous in setting up systems to support victims and to ensure that perpetrators were stopped, are also the men who have been targeted by the media and the courts.

At the time Archbishop Wilson was charged, I spoke to a senior priest, now a bishop. The charges seemed incomprehensible to me. On the evidence available it was not clear how any responsible prosecutorial team could reasonably expect a conviction. He agreed. “They don’t care,” he said. “They just want to get a senior Catholic.” Hard to believe, but if so, then the trials of Wilson and Pell are not so much trials of those two men, but a trial of Australia’s system of justice.

I wrote an article shortly after Archbishop Wilson’s conviction (that he had known of and failed to report abuse by priest James Fletcher) which was published at Quadrant Online. In it I argued that the malleability of memory is so well understood that a conviction could not possibly safely be based on two alleged conversations never noted or reported to anyone else until formal complaints were made over forty years later. I suggested that the presiding magistrate’s finding that the case against Archbishop Wilson was proven could only be understood in the light of the kind of media bias noted above, and predicted the verdict would be overturned on appeal.

It was.

District Court Judge Roy Ellis offered similar reasons to set aside the conviction as I had suggested in my article. Some of the evidence considered at the original trial as contributing to a finding of guilt beyond reasonable doubt was even more ludicrous than I had first believed. One of the two conversations which contributed to the “proof” of later Archbishop Wilson’s alleged guilty knowledge of the sexual abuse perpetrated by James Fletcher took place in the confessional. The complainant acknowledged he could not see clearly the priest was to whom he was speaking, but believed he saw red lips and recalled the priest having a deep voice. On this basis he came to the conclusion it was Fr Wilson, then a 25 year old parish priest! But Archbishop Wilson does not have red lips or a particularly deep voice. The original finding that Archbishop Wilson had known and deliberately covered up knowledge of the activities of James Fletcher, based on this and one other alleged conversation more than forty years earlier, was clearly and grievously wrong. Justice is not done, nor are victims helped, when innocent people are vilified and persecuted.

One of George Pell’s first actions on becoming Archbishop of Melbourne was to set up clear processes for dealing with complaints of sexual abuse. This was not in response to media alarm about child abuse. The Boston scandal, for example, was five years in the future. Nor was it an attempt to protect the reputation of the Church. Pell was one of the first in any organisation anywhere in the world to put protocols in place which protected victims, supported them through whatever processes they wanted to follow — including police action where appropriate — required any accused person to stand down during independent investigation, and which instituted a ‘one strike you’re out policy’.

It is hard to think of anyone in Australia who has done more to prevent child sexual abuse, to bring those responsible to justice, and to support victims and simplify processes for them.

However, it did not take long for The Guardian and the ABC to identify Archbishop, later Cardinal Pell, as an enemy, a prime target. He is on friendly terms with John Howard and Tony Abbott. He has publicly dismissed climate alarmism as a scam which, if policies based on it and urged by the UN and various celebrities were instituted, would cause serious harm to the world’s poorest people. He publicly described abortion as the worst possible child abuse. He declined to be sorry when some Catholic teachings, on the nature of marriage, for example, or the sinfulness of homosexual activity, were claimed to be offensive. He believes that Western culture is worth preserving, and that immigrants to Australia should enter the country legally, and apart from a carefully measured number of refugees, should be people who are willing and able to make a contribution.

And perhaps worst of all in the eyes of his detractors, he noted that it is impossible to take proper action to correct a problem until that problem is correctly identified and, therefore, any proposed remedies to sex abuse in ecclesiastical settings needed to take account of the fact that while girls and young women are overwhelmingly the most common victims of sexual abuse gtenerally, almost all of the child sex abuse that had taken place in the Church involved homosexual men and adolescent boys. Others who have pointed out this connection have been met with similar fury, most recently, German Cardinal Walter Brandmueller .

If you did not know Cardinal Pell and you wanted to invent a perfect nemesis for Australia’s left-wing media, you could not do better than to come up with a an intelligent, energetic, tough-minded, AFL-playing, politically and religiously conservative straight white male.

The ABC’s almost psychotic obsession with finding something dreadful to report about Cardinal Pell was noted at least as long ago as 2015, when Gerard Henderson suggested the mainstream media had the wrong target, and was focussing on Pell simply because he is a social conservative.

Then there are comments from left-wing media consumers. “He must have done something, they’re all at it.” (No, they’re not). “Even if he is not a pedophile himself, he protected them, moved them around.” (There is no evidence whatever this was the case.) “He had to know something.” (ABC journalist Paul Bongiorno, who shared a house with notorious pedophile Ridsdale, says he also didn’t know. As soon as Pell was in a position to do something to stop child sex abuse happening and to support victims, he did). “Someone needs to be held accountable.” (Yes, the perpetrators and anyone who assisted or covered up for them. As I noted above, there is no correction to injustice in committing the further injustice of vilifying and convicting people who are innocent.)

But what of the specific charges against Cardinal Pell? They were that, while Archbishop of Melbourne, he found two choir boys drinking altar wine after Mass at the Cathedral, and demanded they give him oral sex. Shocking? Yes. Terrible? Yes. And ludicrous, as Andrew Bolt noted at the time this claim was first made public .

Firstly, despite the gruesome headlines, there was one complainant, not two. The second boy alleged to have been a victim denied he had ever been abused. The accuser only claimed the second boy had been involved fifteen years after the alleged event, and after that boy, then a young man, died of a drug overdose in 2014. So a single, uncorroborated complaint.

The accuser was not able to specify an exact time when the claimed abuse took place. Instead, he claimed it occurred on a Sunday sometime between August and December 1996. St Patrick’s Cathedral was being renovated during much of this time, and Archbishop Pell celebrated Mass at St Patrick’s Cathedral only twice during the accuser’s four month window. On both of those occasions, Pell remained at the door of the Cathedral after Mass, greeting and talking with parishioners and visitors before leaving for other engagements. On both of those occasions he was accompanied by another priest who gave evidence that he was with Pell, rarely at more than arm’s length distance, for the entire time he was at the Cathedral.

Other witnesses pointed out that on both of the occasions on which Archbishop Pell celebrated Mass between August and December 1996, choir practice was held immediately after Mass, and that the absence of two choirboys would have been noted immediately. Other witnesses gave evidence that the accuser’s description of finding and drinking altar wine in a back room was unlikely in the extreme, given that altar wine was kept in a vault and only brought out in required quantities before Mass.

But it was not merely the accuser’s word against Cardinal Pell’s. Journalists and members of the public present at the trial said it was “a slam dunk for the defence.” The defence evidence, some of which is summarised above, showed not only cause for reasonable doubt, not even that Cardinal Pell did not commit the alleged offences, but that it was not possible for him to have done so.

The verdict is not an indictment of Pell and the Catholic Church. It is an indictment of the media, whose vindictive witch hunt led to a public furore and frenzied demands that someone, anyone, be punished. It is also an indictment of police departments and court administrators who allowed themselves to be driven by that frenzy, and perhaps, of the running of the trial and instructions given by the trial judge to the jury. There is a long-standing principle of Western jurisprudence that if there is a reasonable explanation of the evidence which is consistent with the defendant’s innocence, a verdict of not guilty must be returned. At very least, that should have been reiterated to the jury, and evidence of the accuser’s personal and criminal history made available as bearing on the credibility of his accusations.

Hopefully, the verdict will be overturned on appeal, which strikes me as most likely, as was the case with the equally egregious verdict against Archbishop Wilson.

Harm has been done. Firstly to Archbishop Wilson and Cardinal Pell, both faithful servants of the Church and the wider community. Secondly to the Church, which despite having lower rates of abuse than other bodies, has been, with a few appalling exceptions, open, forthright and pro-active in acknowledging abuse where it occurred, and putting processes in place to support victims. Many other institutions face a far larger public reckoning; there is filth lurking in places yet undreamed of. Thirdly to Wilson and Pell’s friends and families, who, like many other friends or family of alleged child abusers, have been subject to irrational hatred and slander, as well as unnecessary pain and doubt and confusion. Fourthly to genuine victims of child abuse, who, seeing these trials and their politically-driven outcomes, will wonder how they can rely on those whose duty it is to listen to them and protect them.

And finally, following these debacles, harm has been done to Australia’s courts and police, whose credibility and independence is rightly open to question.

__________________________

The Herald Sun‘s Shannon Deery lists the defence’s ten key arguments which failed to persuade jurors

The timing of renovations

Victim “AA” alleged he was abused by Pell after a Sunday Solemn mass in the mid 1990s, and then again a month later.

It was established at trial that Pell said just two solemn Masses that year. The cathedral had been under renovation so was not used until November of the year the victim said the offences happened. AA was adamant the second incident occurred in that year, but Pell was able to establish that was impossible.

The timing of Mass

Pell also argued it would have been impossible for him to be in the sacristy, robed and alone, so quickly after mass ended. Instead, he says he routinely spoke to parishioners on the steps of the Cathedral before being escorted back to the sacristy by at least one other priest.

He was never alone

Pell argued that while Archbishop he would never have been alone while robed at the Cathedral.
His legal team compared him to the Queen, saying she would never be left alone while robed for a ceremonial occasion. His master of ceremonies, Monsignor Charles Portelli testified that: “I recall the first two occasions he said mass and I can say I was with him the whole time he was robed on those days”.

There were people everywhere

It was argued that it would be impossible for Pell to molest two boys in the sacristy, or corridor, after mass because of the amount of potential witnesses in the area.

Former sacristan Max Potter, who worked at the Cathedral for decades, told the court he would unlock the sacristy in the minutes after mass when altar servers would start returning to the room to disrobe. They would also clean up after Mass, meaning the sacristy was only ever momentarily unattended.

Only a madman

It was Pell’s legal team’s submission that “only a madman would attempt to rape boys in the sacristy immediately after Mass.” They argued dozens of people would be around watching over the newly appointed Archbishop.

Choirboys don’t go unseen

The prosecution case centred on the fact that the two complainants were able to flee from a procession of choristers, altar servers, and priests, leaving church after mass in order to make their way to the sacristy.

Pell argued it would have been impossible for them to escape the carefully choreographed procession that was monitored with military like precision, without being noticed, and reprimanded. Further, he argued that even if they did, it would have been impossible for them to return to the choir rehearsal that immediately followed mass without being noticed. No witnesses testified that they could ever remember a single occasion when a choirboy left the procession unexpectedly.

The organists would know

Even if the boys did flee, Pell argued they would have most certainly been seen sneaking into the sacristy by nearby organists who continued playing for up to 15 minutes after mass as the congregation left the church.

Robes made it impossible

It was alleged that Pell abused the boys while robed in his Archbishop’s robes, consisting of multi-layered dress worn over his normal clothing. The robes were shown to the jury and exhibited as part of the trial with a demonstration of how they were worn. Pell argued that the nature of the robes meant that was impossible for him to expose himself while wearing them.

There was no red wine

AA testified that he and victim BB were caught drinking red wine in the sacristy.
Pell argued that at the time only white wine was used at the Cathedral because of a preference by the then Dean of the Cathedral. Evidence was called by a wine supplier, but it remained unclear whether white, red or both wines, were available at the Cathedral at the time. Pell’s team argued that AA made up the wine reference based on Catholic tradition of using red wine during mass.

They remained silent

The silence of both boys in the years after the abuse was used by Pell as strong evidence that it never happened. His team argued that if AA and BB were abused they would have, at the very least, discussed it among themselves. There was no evidence at trial that they had discussed it with anybody. AA swore he didn’t discuss it with BB, and there was evidence that even when asked by his mother, BB denied being abused while a chorister.