Push to have disgraced former governor-general Peter Hollingworth defrocked to be heard by Anglican Church panel

I have followed this matter from its inception. And the treatment of Peter Hollingworth has been monstrous. A genuinely holy man has been given great anguish only because he was not politically correct. I did not know him well but I have spoken with him, shaken his hand and observed his joyous leadership of a eucharistic procession. And I have no doubt that he is a genuine Christian, a rarity in the Anglican episcopate.

His offence was to adopt a proper judicial attitude towards a serious accusation against one of of his priests. That was a great secular sin. Accusations of sexual abuse are expected by the Leftist press to be believed without question. In such matters the presumption of innocence is thrown out the window

He was a proper servant of his God in acting as he did. As it says in Deuteronomy 1:17: "Ye shall not respect persons in judgment; but ye shall hear the small as well as the great; ye shall not be afraid of the face of man; for the judgment is God’s"

It would have been easy for Hollingworth to hunt with the hounds and condemn a potentially innocent man but he did not. He refused to act on an unsubstantiated accusation. That was his sin. His integrity became his undoing. His only fault was insisting on proper evidence rather than immediately believing a sex abuse complaint

It sealed his downfall when John Howard made him governor general. That was intolerable to the Left and all sorts of exaggerated stories about him have been dredged up in additional to the original complaint


Five years ago, an Anglican church investigator said there was enough evidence on the public record to defrock the disgraced former Archbishop for his failure to act on evidence of sexual abuse in the church.

Yet, Dr Hollingworth remains a bishop and the 87-year-old draws a vice-regal pension worth hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

Victim-survivors of Anglican abuse hope that will change after this week — when the church's special independent investigator, Kooyoora, finally hears the case against Dr Hollingworth.

In 2018, the ABC revealed that Dr Hollingworth was the subject of multiple complaints from survivors of abuse at the hands of Anglican clergy and teaching staff in the Brisbane diocese, where Dr Hollingworth served as archbishop in the 1990s.

Those complaints were investigated by Kooyoora but are still yet to be finalised, with the long-overdue hearing slated to begin on Monday.

"I'm not joking, this is probably the longest-running case of child abuse in the world,'' says Chris Goddard, an abuse expert and veteran advocate for survivors.

Victim blaming, the obfuscation of the church and constant delays reinforce the trauma for survivors, experts say.

Five years ago, the ABC revealed that a former Kooyoora director of professional standards told a sexual abuse survivor there was "…more than enough justification to prove [Dr Hollingworth's] unfitness to hold Holy Orders".

This fuelled the anger of survivors who have been waiting years for justice.

Despite survivors and their legal teams preparing for the upcoming hearings, the executive director of Kooyoora, Fiona Boyle, would not confirm if any hearing was taking place this week, nor if it involved Dr Hollingworth.

She says it is "terrible" if any matter takes five years to be dealt with, but has declined to comment on why this case has been delayed for so long.

Archbishop Philip Freier is on leave, but an Anglican spokesman says: "Dr Hollingworth has a limited permission to officiate in the diocese. If a finding is made against him, that will be revisited accordingly."

"The complaint process regarding Bishop Hollingworth is, properly, entirely independent of the Diocese of Melbourne. The diocese has had no influence on the investigation, and the Archbishop cannot comment on the process."

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-02-05/disgraced-former-governor-general-peter-hollingworth-panel/101926976

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Fascism reinvented in Australia

Business being "guided" by government was Mussolini's invention: Fascism. It's an old temptation on the Left

Like Kevin Rudd before him, Labor Treasurer Jim Chalmers used the first summer after winning government to write an essay about how he is going to save capitalism. Chalmers begins by quoting Ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus saying, ‘No man ever steps in the same river twice. For it’s not the same river, and he’s not the same man.’ Reading Chalmers one is more inclined to think of that great baseball philosopher Yogi Berra who said, ‘It’s like déjà vu all over again.’

Chalmers didn’t go to the World Economic Forum (WEF) jamboree in Davos but Rudd did and just as the phantom of Rudd hangs over Chalmers essay, there’s also more than a whiff of the WEF. Chalmers wants Klaus Schwab to know he’s a fan. He chides the previous federal Liberal government for giving no thought to ‘the potential of the fourth industrial revolution’, the title of Schwab’s 2016 book on the topic.

Chalmers tells us that we are in a ‘polycrisis’, a term cooked up by Simon Torkington for the WEF. A polycrisis, says Torkington, is a cluster of related global risks with compounding effects so that the impact is greater than the sum of its parts. He says the cost-of-living crisis is the most immediate but that climate-related risks are the biggest future threat facing the world. The WEF helpfully provides a list of the ten most serious risks over the next two and ten years.

But if that’s not scary enough, Chalmers quotes Nouriel Roubini, aka Dr Doom, who forecasts ten ‘megathreats’ in his latest book, talking about a nuclear bomb being dropped on New York, Florida under water, drought from Colorado to California, wildfires all over the American West, the military annexation of Canada, and job-stealing robots. ‘This won’t end well,’ writes Roubini. You don’t say.

Of course, nothing excites the imagination of WEF-fies more than a crisis. Unless it’s ten crises. As Rahm Emanuel, adviser to President Bill Clinton and chief-of-staff to Barack Obama said, ‘You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that, it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.’

Chalmers certainly isn’t going to let his crises go to waste. He claims, like Rudd, that the Global Financial Crisis ‘exposed the illegitimacy’ of neoliberalism, which Rudd was going to fix with his own summer essay, a task left undone when he was turfed out of office creating what Chalmers calls the ‘lost decade’ which ended with the pandemic crisis, the energy crisis and the cost-of-living crisis, driven by the climate crisis.

According to Chalmers the ‘common thread’ in these crises is ‘vulnerability’. In reality, the common thread is that each of these crises was caused by politicians in their most dangerous guise, that of grinning do-gooders cracking the whip.

The GFC was created by do-gooding US governments forcing banks to lend to people that couldn’t afford to service their loans when interest rates rose, and regulators who gave triple-A credit ratings to subprime mortgages so that their clients in investment banks could make mega-profits selling them for far more than they were worth. When the inevitable crash came, the Big Banks were bailed out by their mates in government, to whom they had generously donated, and taxpayers and consumers footed the bill.

The so-called climate crisis has taken place while global lower-tropospheric temperatures have increased at a rate of 0.1 degree per decade since 1979, even with the massive increase in CO2 emissions from China over the last 20 years. According to the 2021 IPCC report, Earth’s average temperature in the last decade was 1.09 degrees warmer than the pre-industrial baseline, which means that if warming increases at the current rate, the planet will still be below 1.5 degrees hotter in 2050, meant to be the safe upper threshold, Yet, oblivious to this, governments force consumers and taxpayers to subsidise the most inefficient and unreliable forms of energy production while turning green investors from millionaires into billionaires.

The escalating cost of energy has driven inflation and fuelled rising interest rates and the cost-of-living crisis. This has been amplified by the government’s response to the pandemic, shovelling billions of dollars out to keep people alive while it destroyed their jobs and businesses while coercing people to take a vaccine which has coincided with an unprecedented 16 per cent increase in excess deaths.

Each of these crises has been created by government, the product of bad policies and regulatory capture. This isn’t a polycrisis, it’s a polly crisis. Only the pollies don’t want a cracker. They are crackers.

Chalmers’ modest proposal is to ‘build a better capitalism’ by redesigning markets, saying, amazingly, the ‘clean energy sector is a perfect example’ of what he plans to do to the whole economy, showing how ‘greater levels of private investment are achieved when the government ensures the flow of first-class information’. What Chalmers means by the first-class flow of information is the first-class flow of propaganda and the censorship of any other points of view, using his government’s misinformation legislation that will give the media regulator the power to crack down on online ‘misinformation’ as defined by faceless bureaucrats.

In the clean energy sector, state and federal governments have used a combination of subsidies, taxes, regulations, price caps and outright bans to railroad investors into building the most expensive and unreliable sources of energy that will inevitably pauperise consumers and drive any activity that requires significant energy offshore.

Chalmers proposes to start with climate finance but expand into aged care, disability, education, ‘partnering with the private sector’ in these ‘shared goals’ because, as he admits, ‘the federal budget is deep in debt’.

What Chalmers is really proposing is not some new kinder version of ‘capitalism with values’, it’s corporatism, or just plain old-fashioned crony capitalism, in which power is exercised by the government in concert with the trade unions, industry superannuation funds and favoured businesses for their benefit at the expense of ordinary people. Chalmers claims the last decade was wasted. But there can be little doubt that it will look like a golden age compared to what’s ahead.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/02/polly-wants-a-crisis/

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Anthony Albanese’s radical agenda that no one voted for

Imagine if Anthony Albanese had told us, pre-election, that a Labor government would create an Indigenous Voice as the fourth branch of government after the parliament, the executive and the courts, and that one of its first jobs would be to negotiate hundreds of treaties between various aboriginal groupings and the rest of us?

Imagine if he admitted his plans to soften us up to change the date of Australia Day, take the monarch off the $5 note in readiness for the “inevitable” republic, put the unions back in charge by allowing industry-wide bargaining and strikes, and effectively ban all new fossil fuel developments via planning rules, despite the fact we still rely on coal and gas not just to keep the lights on but also to prop up our debt-laden budget?

How do you think voters would have reacted? Not too well would be my guess, even allowing for the fact that Scott Morrison was a massive drag on the Coalition’s vote.

No one should forget that Anthony Albanese is PM despite fewer than a third of Australians voting for Labor.

And Anthony Albanese should never forget that he doesn’t have a mandate for this radical remaking of Australia that he and his government now seems hellbent on pursuing.

Make no mistake: this is a government set on the cultural and economic reordering of our country.

Last week’s leftist manifesto, a 6000-word essay in The Monthly from Treasurer Jim Chalmers, is terrible economics but a good guide to where the government wants to take the country.

His call for markets to respond to “values”, rather than to price signals set by supply and demand, inevitably means more government interference in our economic freedom — on top of the taxes, regulations and subsidies that are already making it harder and harder for people to get ahead.

It shows the government’s determination to wage the class struggle as well as the culture wars that, pre-election, the PM was at pains to reassure us he’d left behind.

Paul Keating’s statement “when you change the government, you change the country” wasn’t just the self-evident point that governments make a difference and that different governments make different decisions. Rather, he was pointing to what Labor governments see as their mission: not to make the country work better but to reshape it in order to better reflect Labor’s values, not necessarily the values of our country.

Most Labor ministers, for example, are not just fixing policy problems in their portfolio, but instead determinedly stripping out any programs and laws from former governments as far back as Howard.

It’s ideology over good sense, as the decision to end the grog-bans in remote Indigenous communities (from Howard) and the cashless welfare card (from Abbott) show.

Last week, as well, we saw the Albanese government release plans to radically reshape the laws around shared parenting in the event of separation and divorce.

Under the draft laws, the decade-long position that both Mum and Dad are important to the life of a child is up for grabs, and experts fear it’s a stealth move back to the days when divorced fathers saw their children on the weekends, if at all.

As a respected aboriginal man told me last weekend in Alice, a big part of their problem with young boys was the absence of strong male role models.

But here we are, contemplating the same madness on a national scale, when it’s the right of the child to know both parents that should be front and centre.

While Coalition governments are usually concerned about addressing practical problems like school standards, hospital waiting lists, and the red tape drowning small business (as examples), Labor governments tend to focus on social engineering, and increasingly identity politics.

Once you could oppose Labor policy on the grounds of cost or lack of effectiveness, but now opponents are made out to be moral pariahs — not just wrong, but bad.

Listen to how often the Prime Minister says that supporting Labor’s Indigenous Voice is just “good manners”, that it’s about “being on the right side of history”, even that the world will judge us harshly if it fails. Despite the fact that he is refusing to give voters any details, everything he says on this topic drips with moral judgment.

But that’s the modus operandi for the modern green-left; make others feel unworthy so they’re more inclined to give in, or to meet the left halfway as we’ve seen on issues of climate and energy policy as well as social change.

It’s why too many moderate Liberals end up quibbling about the detail rather than rejecting what’s wrong in principle because they aren’t brave enough to counter criticism at the next dinner party or on social media.

It’s why the Liberal Party base is peeling off to other players on the centre-right and won’t come back until the MPs they’ve elected grow a spine to reflect the values of those who put them there.

Meanwhile, as the Liberals try to sort out who they are and what they stand for, Labor and its allies are simply relentless.

To soften us up for the Voice, the Indigenous flag is flown everywhere alongside our one and only national flag, and no minister or bureaucrat opens their mouth without an acknowledgment that the country doesn’t belong to all of us, just to some of us.

To soften us up for a republic, axing the King from our bank notes is just the start.

You can be certain that if the Voice referendum fails, Labor will then try to do by legislation what the people have rejected as a way of letting us know that — under Labor — the government always gets its way.

Labor is masterly at bludgeoning Australians into changing what doesn’t need to change, fixing what isn’t broken, and running roughshod over what Australians have a right to decide, not politicians, whether we like it or not.

https://www.couriermail.com.au/news/opinion/peta-credlin-anthony-albaneses-radical-agenda-that-no-one-voted-for/news-story/b2480003dae655e4ba959697205b77ed

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Women must defend their single-sex spaces

A woman who works for the Australian Defence Force (ADF), has been asked by the Sexual Misconduct Prevention and Response Office (SeMPRO) to find an alternate bathroom to the female toilet if she finds the presence of a male in the facility unsafe. The only other bathroom in her office is for males.

SeMPRO was set up in response to the recommendation of a review into the treatment of women in the ADF and provides advisory services around sexual misconduct in the workplace to staff and service personnel. The review found that sexual harassment and assault existed in the ADF and that there was ‘significant under-reporting of sexually based incidents from victims because of fear of victimisation; concerns about negative impact on career progression; and personal trauma’.

SeMPRO is meant to ‘coordinate timely responses, victim support, education, policy, practice and reporting for any misconduct of a sexual nature’. SeMPRO considers the violence ‘gender based’, but evidence strongly suggests sexual violence is based largely in sex. The key error in government bodies and structures that considers gender to be behaviourally significantly dominant to sex, is causing a cascading list of problems for progressive and conservative politicians alike.

Nicola Sturgeon this week was so tongue tied over the previously simple question of whether ‘trans women are women’, she looked as if she might overheat in the midst of a bitter Scottish winter. Sturgeon had been forced by public outcry to intervene and place a trans identifying man into the male prison. To me, it felt like press were rebelling from draconian editorial guidelines by reporting the man had allegedly raped women with ‘her penis’, echoing Ricky Gervais’ latest controversial Netflix special.

When the ADF employee, (I’ll call her Jane) contacted SeMPRO to seek assistance, she told them that a male was utilising the female toilet facility she had been provided and he was making her feel unsafe in her work environment. SeMPRO allegedly replied with a warning to Jane, that if the male person identifies as a ‘transgender woman’ it would be ‘discrimination’ to deny them access to the female facility. The social worker from SeMPRO, with she\her pronouns, apparently went on to suggest that Jane ‘utilise a different bathroom’.

‘Female’ is now an identity category throughout the Australian government. All males who identify into the category of female, which they can do with a simple declaration, are given the assumption that they are free of male pattern violence.

According to the Australian Bureau of statistics, 97 per cent of all sex offenders are male. Under the doctrine adopted by all our government departments, it is theologically impossible for a male with a ‘trans’ declaration to exhibit male pattern sexual behaviour. Women, however, are doomed to inhabit the mortal world where physical bodies still matter a great deal in interactions.

The ADF is a ‘principal partner’ of ACON’s Pride Inclusion Program, gaining a ranking of ‘bronze’ in their latest Australian Workplace Equality Index (AWEI) publication, having fallen from the dizzy heights of ‘silver’ in previous years. According to ACON the Pride programs:

‘Help make the places where our community members live, work, study and play more inclusive of LGBTQ people, improving the mental health and wellbeing of our community through the reduction of stigma, discrimination and social exclusion.’

The higher your employer is in the AWEI ranking, the less likely they will be to have any accommodations at all for the special needs of female bodies, and certainly not with the security, privacy, and dignity of a facility that is separate from males. The AWEI has a 43 question ‘scoring guide’ for employers to gain ranking toward equity greatness. Item 15 in the ‘advanced’ section of the guide is the question: ‘We have (or are working towards) having “gender neutral” or “all gender” bathrooms.’

The AWEI will not give equity points to a Unisex facility because it ‘reinforces a binary’. Disability facilities are not to gain points for being ‘gender neutral’ because people with disabilities have specific bodily needs. Catering to the needs of female bodies is also without any points benefits in the AWEI, only feminine gender stereotypes are respected, the stereotypes feminist have long been critiquing.

When told to use another facility, Jane asked the social worker from SeMPRO if she should use the male facility or go home to use her own bathroom, to which she was given no response. Jane further inquired as to how serving female soldiers and officers will fare in the field when they are expected to shower and undress in a common facility. Will women be expected to shower naked in front of males? She was allegedly not given a response, although it is a fair question given the history of the ADF in failing to safeguard women from sexual assault and harassment.

A woman like Jane has no way to make her concerns heard about a trans identified male without the accusation of transphobia. Given that SeMPRO already know that under-reporting occurs because of ‘fear of victimisation; concerns about negative impact on career progression; and personal trauma’, it’s a wonder that they appear to continue the same patterns of silencing and shaming women for speaking up.

Sexual coercion, intimidation, and assault of women by trans identified males is impossible in gender identity theology, in the same way that it once was for a sexual predator to be in the priesthood. This is a religious belief, not a factual one. Not all priests were sex offenders, but the assumption that none of them could be, led to more harm than our society was ultimately able to bear.

The logical extension of trans activism and indeed the constant demand on women and their facilities, is that we should normalise the sight of the penis in a female-assigned public space where one might typically expect female nudity. Women and their children must become comfortable with the presence of males in facilities where they attend to personal bodily needs, of which they have many.

Last year, the Wi Spa controversy, saw a man in the women’s section of a Korean Spa, sport a semi erect penis in front of a naked female child. In response, prominent British trans activist Laurie Penny replied to a mother on Twitter asking what a she might tell a girl child to in such a situation by saying she should tell her daughter, to ‘not to stare at other people’s genitals without their permission, because it’s rude’. This advice aims at shaming the girl child for being uncomfortable around a grown man’s semi-erect genitalia.

The trans identified man in the Wi Spa incident was later confirmed to be a registered sex offender and was charged for indecent exposure, even though he had every legal right under California law to be in the facility. The woman who brought the story to the public’s attention, by confronting the staff on video, was vilified in the press and roundly accused of lying and transphobia.

Women are being forcefully recruited into a project of cultural re-engineering that requires women and girls to bury natural instincts and natural trauma responses in the presence of adult males, even if the men are exposing their genitalia.

The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare estimates that 1 in 6 women have been sexually assaulted as adults and more than twice that as children. So, if any given female facility is being used by more than five or so people we can safely assume it is being accessed by a survivor of male pattern violence and specifically sexual assault.

Women have a disproportionate need for facilities in the workplace, not just because of the complexities of the female protective instincts and trauma responses, but because of menstruation, pregnancy, breastfeeding, and the kind of problems that can be caused by birth injuries.

Not many women want to talk to their boss about sexual trauma, incontinence, or heavy bleeding. The dignity of attending to our issues in a single sex environment is a luxury we are being forced to abandon along with our knowledge that humans don’t change sex.

The mental health comfort and ongoing safety of women and girls is never a consideration in any modern equity bench-marking or progressive policy. The policies that now dominate the management of women’s facilities, stand in stark contrast to the reality of sex that women face in workplaces every day. Sexual abuse survivors are given no consideration as to their feelings about having males in female spaces, and no impact studies are being done on the mental health of women who are self-excluding from facilities, services and events that now include males.

What we are being asked for, instead, is to present evidence that Self ID is negatively impacting the lives of women and girls with rising cases of sexual assault. What they want to see is the bodies of raped women and children, and that in vast number, and that peer reviewed, before they will even consider reversing harmful loss of sex-based rights and protections for women and girls.

Girls between 10 and 14 are the most vulnerable individuals in our society to sexual assault, and that is just on conviction statistics. These girls are being told by ‘progressive’ government funded sexuality education that their instincts are discriminatory, and that they have no natural or legal right to seek a space that excludes males. Girls are being told that they must trust the word of a male if they tell you they are a female ‘inside’, and to trust self-declared ‘women’ in the same way they trust a woman.

Government funded groups like ACON, who dominate workplace bathroom policy, should be legally held to account, in my opinion, for the experience of women at work and the lies they teach our daughters. Women need to make political trouble for these organisations. Ask your union if they guarantee single sex facilities, and remember, any shame they place on you for asking for a boundary between you and a male is rape culture and the shame belongs to them.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/02/women-must-defend-their-single-sex-spaces/

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM -- daily)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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