Mr Human Rights and Cardinal Dicky Heart

An excellent article with some strident observations from Elizabeth Farrelly about Ruddock's appointment to UN human rights representative for Australia. She rightly questions his credentials.
I also make the observation:

One would also wonder why at age 72 he needs another appointment any way. And I wonder how much it pays.

He has after all been in safe seat Parliament for 40+ years. That would seem a significant pile of superannuation and other benefits which Parliamentarians have so readily afforded themselves,

Farrely observes:
To anoint Philip ‘children overboard’ Ruddock as our special envoy on human rights is an irony of breathtaking proportions. It’s almost as bizarre as allowing George Pell’s dicky heart to distance him from those whose hearts he helped break. In both cases, Australia looks weak, venal and mean.


The WHOLE ARTICLE  is here

Go ahead and smack me

A new corporal punishment debate is started by news (no-doubt jumbled) that one woman has been chatted to by police about smacking her kid with a wooden spoon.

It just seems to me that a wooden spoon is a quite nasty weapon, particularly because it is conveniently to hand. And also because I know that I am one of those people who can too easily go from a tap-to a slap-to a thump.

I determined early on in my time as a parent that I needed to discipline myself to not strike my children. I did not always manage this, and it always said more about my behaviour than theirs.

Let's confess!

A very nasty case that is before the courts at the moment of alleged sexual abuse by a former Anglican priest (see here for The Australian's report) reminds us all that the ground has shifted in the reporting of these matters.
There is a bizarre caricature that alleged perpetrators might "confess" their sins to an authority figure and thus render the matter confidential. In an Adelaide court 'Archbishop' John Hepworth, a former Roman Catholic priest, and then Anglican priest...but now the leader of one of the many splinter groups (see here for a former blog about this) formed in the reaction to a whole range of issues...particularly the ordination fo women to the priesthood...
Any way Hepworth gave testimony at the trial revealing details of a phone conversation which once upon a time might have been considered privileged. I do not need to go into the nastiness of it here.
What is now the case is that people (by and large) cannot now claim that any conversation with a priest is 'confession' by definition.
To be covered under 'the seal of the confessional' the matter must be a deliberate and intentional confession, stated to be so before the event and not afterwards.
Some of the Anglican Church's guidelines (I don't know about Hepworth's mob...) suggest that in matters to do with child abuse that the 'seal' no longer holds any way. This has yet to be tested, but there is some sympathy with the idea that mandatory notification now extends into the confessional. (I would find this idea difficult and hope personally that I never have to test it)
This stuff is awful. But I think weare trying to take it seriously.

When, I ask, will the State actually adopt the same scrutiny to schools and institutions that it demands (and rightly) of the Churches.