Speaking of signs and portents ...

(Above: just because we love it as a way to start the day. There will be order!!, order!! at the pond, and never mind any sexist implications. This is after all, the woman who cheerfully stood beside "ditch the witch" and "Bob Brown's bitch" signs without a hint of remorse or apology. A David Rowe master cartoon, and more Rowe here)


Now we have some order in the house - will someone shut jolly Joe Hockey up, busy as he is confecting a debt and budget crisis - it is the general opinion of the pond, through way too intimate an acquaintanceship, that Victorians are weird.

Oh sure, making available fried dim sims, vinegar and soy sauce for a working luncheon is an exceedingly quaint custom, even if the pond prefers a decent Vietnamese roll from Footscray.

But forget the food foibles for evidence, take a squiz at the fuss surrounding the Napthine government and its speaker, Ken Smith, who got himself out of trouble by suspending parliament.

You can read about it in Sooner or later, Smith will have to move, but the real fun starts when you cogitate on the fact that Geoff Shaw is at the centre of the storm.

Geoff Shaw? The very same MP who was not so long ago molested on the steps of parliament house and struck back, and who in earlier times got in to trouble about a parliamentary car being used for business, and then resigned from the Liberal party - do a Greg Hunt wiki search here, and then go on to Frankston MP Geoff Shaw votes with the Opposition (forced video at end of link in case you're running tabs).

And right now the pond is dreading venturing on to the rural roads of Victoria for Xmas. There might be other ways to die, but none as easy as testing the maintenance regime for Victorian roads.

Still, it's probably a relief to Victorians that they're weird and they know it.

An ordinary New South Welch person has to sit and read and laugh and smile while reading Michael Pascoe's rant about a second airport for Sydney, NSW fiddles while Queensland builds.

Yet what do we see today in MP sounds out Abbott on airport plans?

Yep, mealy mouthed Tony Abbott moving to allay concerns ... when the major concern is that once again, the Federal Government will delay, flub and obfuscate ...

Meanwhile, speaking of Abbott, it doesn't seem enough for Julie Bishop and Abbott to head off to Sri Lanka - what global climate science crisis or meeting? - and suck up to the Sri Lankan government, oh forget the prim and prissy Canadians ...

And never mind that the onerous regime is one of the chief reasons so many of their citizens turn into refugees seeking boats ...oh sorry, sssh, don't mention the boats, operational matters don't ya know, and never mind that Abbott and co wallowed in detailed statistics and data for years ...

Speaking of signs as we sometimes do ...

Never mind any of that - hush hush, operational matters don't ya know, no numbers, no pack drill, no information, just a Friday fest of dissembling bumbling betrayals - you see Abbott has had to go and stick his oar in the water, and offer a lifeline to his spiritual mentor and confessor.

Okay, the metaphors are mixed, but you'll catch the drift of the tide and the sound of the cockleshells by reading PM's defence of Pell angers abuse victims (forced video at end of link).

Good old Barney Zwartz. When he's not bringing the world stories about Danny Naliah raising people from the dead - I was raised from dead, woman tells - he's on hand to tell tales about Tony Abbott praising Cardinal Pell as a caring CEO - though the real issue isn't mentioned.

When will a church which specialises in suckling on the teat of the taxpayer be made to embrace conventional corporate structures and thus be liable at law for the misbehaviour of their employees?

That's one of the key recommendations of the Victorian parliamentary inquiry into the handling of child abuse cases, and it was given a tidy bit of coverage yesterday by Alison Caldwell in The World Today - you can listen to the story here.

The reliance on covert, deeply buried trusts and an incoherent, invisible structure, and Rome as the last resort and excuse is a nonsense, for any religious institution which trawls for government funding and claims tax exemptions.

Incorporate now should be the chant.

But back to Barney, and to Abbott, specifically disavowing the findings of the inquiry:

Mr Abbott told Fairfax Radio that Cardinal Pell, a former Catholic archbishop of Melbourne, was the first senior cleric to take sexual abuse by clergy seriously. Prime Minister Tony Abbott. Prime Minister Tony Abbott. 
Asked whether Cardinal Pell, now Archbishop of Sydney, carried any responsibility for the failures described by the report of the Victorian inquiry into the church's handling of child sexual abuse, Mr Abbott said he hadn't read it. 
''As is pretty well known, I have a lot of time for George Pell … my understanding is that the first senior cleric who took this issue very seriously was in fact Cardinal Pell.'' 

Whatever understanding Abbott was doing, it wasn't an understanding derived from reality:

Wayne Chamley, of advocacy group Broken Rites, said Mr Abbott needed to ''check the history''. The first senior cleric to tackle sex abuse by clergy was Sydney Bishop Geoffrey Robinson in the 1990s. 
As the architect of the national church abuse protocol Towards Healing, Bishop Robinson quit in 2004, disillusioned with the church's response. Just weeks before that protocol, Cardinal Pell launched the Melbourne Response, which only applies in that city and deflects responsibility for responding to victims away from the archbishop. 

What's bizarre is that Abbott launched into his defence of Pell, while at the same time saying he hand't actually read the report.

What's predictable is that he sought to deflect the blame from the church by blaming mysterious "others":

"I understand that these things probably did happen but I suspect it wasn't just the church that didn't handle these things well," Mr Abbott told Fairfax Radio. 
 He said Cardinal Pell was not perfect but he was a "fine human being" and a "great churchman". (here at the lizard Oz but actually a recycling of AAP copy, and with forced video).

Uh huh. So is Abbott saying it was him that didn't handle these things well? In your dreams, he's still not handling it well.

The 800-page parliamentary report on institutional abuse responses said Cardinal Pell's evidence revealed "a reluctance to acknowledge and accept responsibility for the Catholic Church's institutional failure to respond appropriately to allegations of criminal child abuse". 

Oh yes a fine human being, the very acme of a dissembling, devious churchman. And if you doubt that Abbott said it, you can hear him blathering on at 3AW here.

It was also scathing of the Catholic Church's leadership prior to the 1990s, giving specific examples in which former Ballarat bishop Ronald Mulkearns and former Melbourne Archbishop Frank Little moved known sexual offenders between parishes without reporting them to police. 
 Mr Abbott said the issue could have and should have been handled better but he didn't know about cover-ups. 
 "I just don't know for a personal fact what was done," he said. 
 "I absolutely know that it wasn't handled well."

He didn't know about cover-ups, he didn't know about the shuffling of priests between parishes and jobs? Somehow "a personal fact" gets him off the hook of knowing and understanding?

What sort of oblivious cretin is actually running the country?

Now isn't the time for Abbott to be running this sort of specious defence.

The Gillard Government has left him and the Catholic church and others a fine old ticking time bomb via the Royal Commission.

The Commission is just starting to crank up, and as Barney Zwartz noted a few days ago, is being swamped by submissions. Because of the overwhelming response, the chairman has called for more staff members to help with the workload, as you can hear at The World Today, here.

The inquiry is due to provide an interim report by next June.

Who knows what it will report, but it might well be that the Victorian inquiry was merely a brush fire.

And at that point, Abbott's denialism about the church and Pell might do him more harm than his climate science denialism ...

(Below: Ron Tandberg, more Tandberg here)