Henry ... while you are away we seem to be having an onslaught of nannyism. This article from today's 'Australian' is from George Pell, the Cardinal Archbishop of Sydney. The Eminent writer is opposed to the Brennan report which seeks to cripple us with a 'Human Rights Commission'.
 
One of the creeping problems in Australia is the growth of 'permissions'. Everything has to be decided for us by other people, who miraculously know better than we do what is good/better/best for us. From swimming pool fences, to hats on kids in playgrounds, to smoking rules ... you name it and there is a permission needed for it. The real drive behind all this is simply jobs ... the nanny state, the permission culture is simply a way to employ people on the political Left who would be better off working in something more productive and useful like teaching or nursing.
 
The points made by Cardinal Pell centre on the sly and sliding ways of the cultural bolsheviks who are endlessly tinkering with our lives and the institutions we have. The Report leader is Frank Brennan a Jesuit priest and compulsive adjuster of everything he can get his consecrated hands on. These inner city malcontents see what we can also see: there are many problems in Australia and these problems must be addressed. This is a correct observation.
 
The correct next step after this observation is to wind up the political system in Australia to tackle these problems ... the political parties have to develop policies that actually work; the politicians have to retrieve their own suppressed personalities and get out among the people to sell workable policies. Instead, what we get is proposals to have a Human Rights Commission which will undertake to ensure, to 'guarantee', that it will never rain on anyone's parade and if it does, someone must be punished and above all, no-one can be trusted to make any decisions for him/herself. All we need ever do, according to the cultural bolsheviks who have spewed up this Brennan Report, is check every action (and thought?) we may want to do with a list of 'core rights' and then co-ordinate our thoughts and actions with this list.
 
Couldn't the government have found someone with the name 'Orwell' to head this report? Shouldn't the daily papers publish 'Animal Farm' in installments?
 
All this nonsense has to stop. It all flows from the failure of the Left to find something sensible to do following the recent death of their truest love ... Communism. Their economic ideas were shown to be the ravings of troglodytes andso they have come back to us with a whole new set of social ideas. These social ideas are simply the warmed over twaddle which passed for social policy in the late unlamented Communist states. The personal drive of these people is hatred of free people, hatred of the Christian religion, hated of life itself with all its imperfections and inequalities.
 
Many of the problems of life and society are correctable and in Australia we have corrected many of them without the necessity of some Human Rights Commissioner telling me what I can and cannot do. These corrections in the past have all come through politics. Problems are raised in Parliaments, politicians with talent (admittedly thin on the ground today on both sides) make public waves about the problems and over time solutions ooze their way from the system into the community. This process involves ordinary people and officials ... members of parliaments ... who can be held to account by ordinary people (aka voters). It's a fine system and it does not need to be replaced by Human Rights Commissioners who are appointed to their jobs by their mates and who then set out to rule you and me, Henry.
 
One last problem glares at us in this matter: some of the problems in life are unsolvable. These unsolvable problems stem from human nature, generally. The Left has always thought that human nature is like plasticene and can be moulded any which way if enough pressure is brought to bear. (Interested readers taken with this thrilling notion can google 'Gulag Archipelago'). When politics is left in charge of solving our problems and Human Rights Commissars are left unemployed we will be able to discern between the solvable and the unsolvable. The sorrows brought about by the unsolvable problems of life can then be dealt with by the religious communities which exist to deal with these matters.
 
Henry, it is better if we don't have a Human Rights Commission. It will do no good for anyone except the lawyers and it will certainly nannify Australia further. Readers should seriously consider this creeping nanny state project and ask themselves why they, as adults, want someone to tell them what to do.

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Cardinal George Pell writes:

'THE Christian churches strongly support human rights and their attendant responsibilities. But religious freedom should not be eroded by stealth.

'The Brennan committee's report on human rights gives the government two options: an upfront charter of rights or a Trojan Horse version.

'The upfront charter is the committee's proposal for a federal human rights act. Committee chairman Frank Brennan already has acknowledged that parts of this proposal are unviable and unworkable because the High Court of Australia probably won't be able to play the part the committee wants to assign it. But that's OK, the report says. The Australian Human Rights Commission, with increased powers, should be able to fill the gap'.

Read on here.