Ok, this what George Pell said:
“I didn’t know whether it was common knowledge or whether it wasn’t. It’s a sad story and it wasn’t of much interest to me.”
He followed this by responding to a question from the Royal Commission with: “The suffering, of course, was real and I very much regret that but I had no reason to turn my mind to the extent of the evil that Ridsdale had perpetrated.”
Now Andrew Bolt has been complaining about the witch hunt seeking to burn George at the stake, and …
Oh, even Andrew couldn’t support that one! Although he did suggest that it may have just been an unfortunate choice of words …
Well, I guess I shouldn’t refer to him as “George Pell”. After all, he is a cardinal, but I feel a bit silly referring to him as “Cardinal Pell” when clear he’s only ever succeeded in the organisation by being the sort of patsy who gets promoted for not asking too many questions.
Let’s take what Georgie boy has told us and take it at face value.
When he was a young gun, he was kept in the dark because his superiors knew that he was the sort of person who wouldn’t allow that sort of abuse to continue. Ok, when he was told by a boy in the 1970’s about abuse occuring, he did nothing beyond contacting the school chaplain. After all the boy never asked him to do anything, so he didn’t really see that he needed to do anything. I wonder if the boy had told him that one of the altar boys was pilfering from the collection plate, whether he’d have thought he needed to be asked before investigating further, but I guess that’s different.
So how these people knew this is unclear but I guess it must have been something about his demeanour. He would have been more concerned with the victims than the reputation of the Church, hence, he was not told.
Later, when he was more powerful, people kept things from him because they knew – based on his history of knowing nothing and never reporting any priest for misdeeds – he would would have taken action if he’d ever known anything.
Of course, we’re now hearing from some of Pell’s supporters in Parliament – people like Tony Abbott – that one of the concerns about the Safe Schools programs is that it’s sexualising children too early. If you want to be a comedian, timing is everything! However, the strange thing is that they don’t understand why some people want to mock them and laugh at what they say…
Yep, I thought that Pell’s story was about the most incredible thing I was going to hear all week until I heard about the BIS Shrapnel report.
Now, I don’t want to bore you with a lot of economic concepts because, well, I suspect that like Tony Abbott you don’t really have an interest in economics, but it does strike me as strange that one can argue that house prices will fall and at the same time rents will rise. While I realise that such a thing can happen in the short term, in the long term, surely the market will correct any anomaly.
While I’m not a believer in laissez-faire economics … And not just because it’s a French word that I can’t spell! I do know a thing or two about the real world. So let’s take a real world example and consider how this would play out.
Boris and Petunia are a happily married couple earning a reasonable income. They are renting a house worth a million dollars. It cost them $40,000 a year. Property prices drop by ten percent; rents rise by ten percent. At current interest rates, they are now paying more to rent than it would cost them to buy. Let’s say they decide not to buy and the same thing happens the next year… You can see that at some point, they’d be foolish not to buy.
Ok, you say, what about the people who can’t afford to buy? Well, as rents increase, they too can’t afford to not buy and if the bank won’t lend to them, then we have an increase in homelessness and landlords will keep putting up the rent even though they have no tenants … Hang on, doesn’t Economics 101 suggest that if there’s a reduction in demand then prices will fall?
Perhaps, I’m missing something. It’s easy to do!
Just ask Georgie Pell!
