Tag Archives: The Australian

Pell’s accuser has psychological problems – what else?

Chris Merritt, the Australian’s legal affairs editor, reported that the liar in the Pell case has psychological problems:

‘Victorian law meant the jury could not be told that the complainant had been treated for psychological problems.

‘Section 32D of Victoria’s Evidence (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act also meant Pell’s legal team could not tell the jury the cardinal had been denied access to records of that treatment.’

What else about this man is hidden from the public?

The Pell conviction – a failure of the basic rules of reason

A number of times I have claimed that the two (supposedly) eminent judges who rejected Cardinal Pell’s appeal, (Chief Justice Anne Ferguson and Court of Appeal president Chris Maxwell) seem to know nothing about the rules of reason. They seem not to know that abstractly speaking matters of fact can always be otherwise, that nothing is impossible except a contradiction, that judgements about reliability and trustworthiness are based on the empirical evidence.

Chris Merritt, legal affairs editor at The Australian, commented (18 September) on Cardinal Pell’s appeal to the High Court in which the Cardinal’s lawyers take up the question of reasoning – or rather the failure of reason.

The State’s System of Justice Put on Trial

By Chris Merritt

BRET WALKER SC is an old-fashioned stickler for precise legal language. That is why his clinical evisceration of the judges who ruled against George Pell is so effective. Without a skerrick of emotion or one wasted word. Walker has torn the guts out of the Court of Appeal majority who rejected the cardinal’s appeal against convictions for sexually assaulting choirboys.

The special leave application drawn up by Walker and barrister Ruth Shann leads to an unstated but obvious conclusion: two of Victoria’s most senior judges utterly botched the cardinal’s case, not just on the facts but on the law. For the two judges who formed the majority, Chief Justice Anne Ferguson and Court of Appeal president Chris Maxwell, this document will make extremely difficult reading. Walker is widely regarded as one of the nation’s greatest lawyers. Yet his signature appears at the end of a document that accuses Ferguson and Maxwell of effectively reversing the onus of proof, engaging in “unorthodox reasoning,” “circular reasoning” and “erroneous judicial method”.

If the High Court agrees to hear this appeal, it will need to grapple with those arguments and determine whether the judicial method demonstrated by Ferguson and Maxwell is actually as flawed as Walker and Shann believe. The stakes are staggeringly high. This affair now concerns not just the freedom of a cardinal but the continued public standing of Victoria’s top judges and the man who might well be the nation’s greatest lawyer.

If the assessment of Walker and Shann is accepted by the High Court, it will amount to a crippling blow for Ferguson and Maxwell.

But consider the position of Walker and Shann. If this appeal fails, they will stand accused by their peers of making extraordinary assertions – amounting to judicial ineptitude – against the two most senior judges in Victoria. Whoever loses this argument will forever be damaged goods. But as things stand now, Walker and Shann have the better argument. It does look as though the cardinal has been the victim of a shocking miscarriage of justice.

In order to succeed, Pell’s legal team merely needed to show there was a reasonable doubt about the prosecution’s case. The onus of proof was up to the prosecution; it was not up to the cardinal to prove his innocence. Yet the special leave application asserts that the Court of Appeal majority decided the cardinal’s fate on the improper basis that it was up to the defence to prove that the prosecution case was impossible. If this is what happened – and a conclusive ruling is up to the High Court – it will devastate Victoria’s system of Criminal justice.

Gays in Vatican – The Australian censors comments

The Australian ran an article on 16 February headed ‘New book on sex lives of Vatican priests suggests 80 per cent are gay.’ The book In the Closet of the Vatican by homosexual Frederic Martel is ‘based on 1500 interviews with cardinals, clerics and even papal Swiss guards.’ It alleges further that one of the most outspoken prelates against ‘same-sex marriage’ ‘secretly frequented male prostitutes.’ All very sensational.

The article provoked the usual simple-minded, ignorant, anti-Catholic bigotry in the comment section as well as the usual reaction by many Catholics that the anti-Catholic media were at it again. They were, indeed, but they were close to the truth this time. I submitted the following comment:

The Australian media appear way behind the international conversation (especially in the US) over the incidence of homosexuality among the clergy and what it means. Some traditional Catholic groups, like Church Militant, are hammering the hierarchy unmercifully not only over clerical sexual abuse and the cover-up by many bishops, but about the behaviour of some well-known prelates.

Google Cardinal McCarrick and one will find a sensational story of scandal. Cardinal McCarrick is on the point of being laicized – defrocked. There has been a 180 degree turnaround by some traditional Catholics (like me) in their attitude to clerical sexual abuse. They thought it was just a beat-up by an anti-Catholic press. No, we have discovered that the story goes far deeper – and into the past. The huge increase of homosexuals in the priesthood after 1960 was no coincidence. Nor was it a coincidence that the rate of the abuse of male teenagers rose relative to that increase. The figures are there.

The Australian did not print my comment – as I expected. Even Australia’s most reliable newspaper quakes before the power of the far-left homosexual activists.

Writers are a boring bunch

In today’s Australian, Jack the Insider, entertains with an amusing swipe at those self-adsorbed people who call themselves writers.

I’ve always said I’d never go to writers’ festivals and true to my word, I never have. The mere thought of sitting in a room filled with writers fills me with a deep sense of anguish…

I’ll let you into a little secret. Writers, like actors, are sometimes vaguely interesting, often horrendously boring but always hopelessly, relentlessly self-absorbed. I have seen scribblers lapse into speaking of themselves in the third person, weighing up their remarks with extravagant gravity and no apparent sense of self-consciousness of the arses they are making of themselves.

Perhaps this why the Melbourne Writers Festival turned into a dog-and-pony show this year, featuring a bunch of non-literary mad escapades. Anything to avoid the ugliness of writers talking about themselves.

We’re an odd breed, to be honest. I like the company of people, don’t get me wrong, but I am just as happy on my own. Writing is a solitary affair with long hours strapped to a keyboard. Like most jobs it is often a chore and only occasionally joyful. Even the pleasure of a near perfect paragraph is one that goes unshared at least for the time being.    Read on…