Another day, another outrage

Victims, of any kind, have a right to absolute justice and I and many welcome the Royal Commission into the Catholic church and the perennial sexual abuse of their younger and more vulnerable charges. To my surprise, some bishops have actually welcomed the inquiry. If we are serious about tackling this execrable scourge then no doubt it is the right thing to do and should not be confined to an investigation into the Catholic church only. It should be broad and far-reaching. But it has finally come to this and I'm concerned about the over-representation of abusers and pedophiles in the CC. Maybe it's because CC leaders find it too easy to "pretend" to be celibate. Perhaps they were deviants prior to entering the CC and did so because they saw their victims as easy-pickings, as abhorrent as it sounds. In which instance the royal commission must extend to any institution where children are left at the mercy of groups of male figures of authority and are, essentially, unsupervised and unregulated (boy scouts, juvenile detention centres, boarding schools, etc). And as a result of non-reporting, the culture has managed to exist for....... well how long is a piece of string (or a string of rosary beads)? The culture has begot a culture of its own. The church has taken it upon itself to turn a blind eye to the cruelty and dehumanization inflicted on these victims, in the name of God. If this isn't a glimmering sample of how religion poisons everything then I haven't grown an overly-manly-man mustache this month. 

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Without any segue I'd like express my opinion on the government's plan to have all Australian students speaking an Asian language by what was it, 2015? 2020? 2050? I can't remember because I like to shelve things that are ludicrous into the less accessible recesses of my memory. Business conducted in any other language (not just an Asian one) works up to a certain point, but BIG business is always conducted in English. I read somewhere that to become a fluent speaker of Mandarin Chinese would take a student 20 hours a week for their entire schooling life. In other words, torture. Given the chance I'm sure only a quaint percentage of students would elect to study it. We should instead be giving a massive bloody Gonski and look to fix up our own English education in schools. But it's the Asian Century, our beloved Media has been telling us lately. Umm, no it isn't. It's been the Asian Century ever since Asia existed. Again, Australia needs to get over itself: we are not better than these guys and all we can ever hope for is to play catch up and not fall too far behind. The rollout of the NBN should go a long way to support this game of catch-up. Both major parties as well as the Greens agree with it. If we show a lack of conviction to embrace communications technology then we lay bare our ignorance and complacency for our intellectually superior neighbours to see. We need to be able to show them that, as a rich and imaginative nation, we are at the forefront of thinking and of business transformation. I can hear you sniggering. The total blowout cost for the plan is now over $30 billion and we've yet to see it in most places. Say that again slowly.

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