quote:

Qs: Was it common knowledge of [pedophile priest Gerald Ridsdale's] interfering with children at Inglewood?

Pell: "I couldn’t say that I ever knew that everyone knew. I knew a number of people did. 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"

Grouchio posted:

So. lovely little government down under. Ive got a question for you.

What's baking you harder? Your summer outback sun? Or your Chinese dependencies lighting themselves on fire?

Heres a better question: are you ready for a bad time?

MysticalMachineGun posted:

The amazing thing about Bullock was how he didn't come straight out and say "I hate gays" he danced around it so much I wasn't sure if he was quitting because Labor supported gay marriage or not.

Milky Moor posted:

I doubt it - he's too old.

Milky Moor posted:

http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/opinion/opinion-cardinal-george-pell-the-victim-of-a-witch-hunt-to-destroy-an-innocent-man-for-the-sins-of-others/news-story/2e4738669e01c120682d53256128bce3?nk=ab8e73b97ba34cd523ad5007691ab539-1456883821 posted:

Andrew Bolt - Opinion: Cardinal George Pell the victim of a witch hunt to destroy an innocent man for the sins of others

CARDINAL George Pell is the victim of one of the most vicious witch hunts to disgrace this country.

It is shameful. Disgusting. Frightening.

COMMISSION: Abuse victims ‘take fight’ to the Vatican

People pretending to be moral have competed with each other to slime Pell as the defender of pedophiles, if not a pedophile himself.

There is no mercy and no attention to the facts. There is just the joy of hatred.

Check the snarling glee on the face of comedian Tim Minchin as he sang a hymn of hatred to Pell on Channel 10’s The Project on Tuesday.

“Scum,” he called Pell, who is too ill to fly from Rome to give evidence (for the third time) to our royal commission into child sex abuse.

“Coward,” he jeered, vilifying Pell for more than four minutes of prime-time television, falsely portraying him as a defender – even a friend – of pedophile priests.

(Note to Project host Waleed Aly: would you have screened four minutes of unbridled hatred for a Muslim cleric?)

Meanwhile the ABC promoted a crowd-funding effort to raise the money to send a lynch mob – former victims – to Rome to “confront” the Cardinal with “face-to-face contact”.

To stoke up hatred of Pell, it also published a mocked-up picture of the cardinal driving a car of huge rock-spiders – code for pedophiles.

ABC news also falsely claimed “the Commission has heard from child abuse victim David Ridsdale that Cardinal Pell tried to bribe him to keep quiet” about his abuse by his uncle – when Ridsdale in fact told the commission “I never have said that he bribed me”.

And many media outlets sternly reported Pell wouldn’t “face the victims” in person at the royal commission, without adding he’d faced victims repeatedly.

Pell has met victims privately and twice given evidence with victims present – to the royal commission and a Victorian inquiry into child sex abuse.

Indeed, in 1996 he became the first senior person here – in church or in government – to confront the horror of sexual abuse of children.
In 1996 Cardinal George Pell became the first senior person in Australia – in church or in government – to confront the horror of sexual abuse of children. Picture: AFP

Just three months after becoming archbishop of Melbourne, he created the Melbourne Response to help victims. No bishop of any other church had done anything like it.

Yet no insult of this man has been enough in a campaign of public denigration – even dehumanisation.

Channel 9’s 60 Minutes interviewed an English abuse victim who’d never met Pell and seemed uninformed on crucial details yet still felt free to defame him as “a dangerous individual” and “almost sociopathic”, with a “catalogue of denigrating people”.

I know Pell. “Sociopathic” is a lie.

But this is the mob at its most vile: each person feeling licenced by the brutality of the rest to be brutal, too.

If “everybody else” hates someone then that person must deserve hating. You can surrender your own judgment and conscience, and give in to the pure pleasure of unbridled hatred, disguised as moral righteousness.


Viciousness dressed as morality: is there anything sweeter to the stupid, the resentful and the bully? Ask the “godly” who murdered the “witches” of Salem. Ask the jihadists who now behead “infidels”.

Pell’s accusers are not violent but flirt with that same pitiless sanctimony.

“Die Pell,” urged a post on The Age’s Facebook page, and many of those now demanding he fly here don’t seem to mind if he does.

The Sydney Morning Herald published snide items urging Pell to get on a plane, despite being told by cardiologists that Pell’s medical advisers were right – it could kill the 74-year-old, given his heart problems.

No mercy in The Age, though. “Unwilling to trust his God,” sneered one headline.

Labor NSW Premier Kristina Keneally even taunted: “Jesus said there is no greater love than to lay down your life for another.”

Nor did anyone seem to care that Pell will give exactly the same evidence from Rome he would give if he flew here. He is not fleeing justice like, say, Julian Assange, the hero of this same Left.

No, the mob is just hungry for a scapegoat and wants Pell close enough to humiliate.

It’s the primitive moral calculus of the tribalist: that an injustice to one side can made good with an injustice to the other.

It’s enough that Pell now is our most senior member of the Catholic Church which once betrayed so many children.

But what makes him an even better target for the Left is that’s he’s a conservative who has defend traditional marriage, attacked global warming alarmism and correctly seen the green faith as a competitor to his own.

He’ll do, they cry.

How Pell has as a human being survived their onslaught astonishes me.
Gerald Ridsdale appears via video link from Aarat Prison for the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in Ballarat. Picture: Norm Oorloff

Worst of all, he was falsely accused of having himself abused a boy when a young priest, although an inquiry later into this highly dubious claim found no proof of any such thing.

It’s continued. A former child victim of one Ballarat priest claimed in the royal commission that Pell in 1969 heard him pleading for help but did nothing – only for Pell to later produce his passport, showing he’d been in Rome that year.

But hatemongers such as Minchin still claim the young Pell must have known his then Ballarat housemate and fellow priest Gerald Ridsdale was abusing children – an allegation Pell denies.

Yet none question the word of another young priest who shared a house with Ridsdale – Paul Bongiorno, a Leftist and now ABC commentator who says he had no idea, either.

“Ridsdale never came to the presbytery in Warrnambool and said: ‘Guess how many boys I’ve raped today?’” Bongiorno said.

“They hide it.”

And they hid it from Pell, who has repeatedly denied on oath protecting pedophiles or keeping crimes hidden.

Neither of the two inquiries so far has yet found proof that he’s lying. Even Gerald Ridsdale, the worst of the pedophile priests, failed to incriminate Pell in the royal commission last year.

His evidence, suggesting Pell knew nothing, seemed to anger the royal commission. Justice Peter McClellan even warned Ridsdale the commission could find out who visited him in jail before he’d given evidence, which seemed to suggest McClellan had expected more damning stuff from Ridsdale and suspected he’d been nobbled.

In fact, the royal commission has throughout seemed only too ready to doubt Pell’s word whenever his recollection conflicted with his accusers.

It has also asked Pell to give evidence three times – more than any other witness – in what is now becoming a punishment by process.

Pell knows his church betrayed many children and protected the priests who preyed on them. He knows he could have handled the scandal better but nothing I’ve seen so far shows he protected pedophiles.

Nothing.

If that changes, I will drat him then, but right now there is proof of only this: a witch hunt to destroy an innocent man for the sins of others.

Shame on every coward who joins this vicious mob. You claim you stand for good, yet you show such gloating evil.

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/opinion/andrew-bolt/cardinal-george-pell-went-by-the-book-and-not-the-heart/news-story/d991048345a7b669ce9fd078a31e5f68?nk=ab8e73b97ba34cd523ad5007691ab539-1456883648 posted:

Cardinal George Pell went by the book and not the heart

CARDINAL George Pell ­yesterday uttered words that will stain his reputation forever.

Referring to notorious paedophile priest Gerald Ridsdale, Pell fatefully declared: “It’s a sad story and it wasn’t of much interest to me.”

Here is the question now for the royal commission into sex abuse of children: is the Vatican’s third-most powerful leader a liar when he says he never knew what Ridsdale, his colleague, was doing in Ballarat?

CNN is confused about Australia

Or was he just dangerously indifferent to his responsibilities and to the warning signs that children were being raped?

The royal commission seems to think the worst, to judge by its rightly aggressive questioning of Pell yesterday.

Pell has maintained he never knew about Ridsdale’s preying on children until around 1990, three years before Ridsdale was charged, and didn’t even hear gossip about it in the years he was a priest in the same diocese.

Gail Furness, SC, assisting the commission, was clearly sceptical.

She repeatedly asked how Pell could not have known about Ridsdale’s abuse of children when it was known by several fellow priests — including a cousin and friends of Pell — as well as by his bishop, a school principal, a doctor, a policemen, drinkers at the Apollo Bay pub, and several parents and children at schools in three towns in the Ballarat diocese.

And this when Pell was the episcopal vicar for education in the diocese. At the very least, he seems to have failed in his job.

Pell offered various reasons — or excuses. His role as vicar was not actually an executive one. The time he could give to it was “limited” by his full-time job running a teachers’ college.

He was often in Melbourne and so “I certainly was not plugged into the life of the diocese”. And he was not one for gossip, saying priests were actually “the most secretive of ­people” and quoting a church saying: “Those who know don’t say; those who say don’t know.”

More damningly, he also ­argued that a parish priest had a lesser responsibility to step in and save children from paedophile priests than did his boss, the bishop.

It sounded awful. It sounded too much like a mind-your-own-business excuse for doing nothing — which Pell denied, insisting he meant that bishops had extra responsibilities.

Indeed, it sounded in some ways like the authentic Pell, an authoritative or authoritarian leader who demands people do their job and follow the rules.

And that was when Pell said those awful words: that Ridsdale’s crimes, when they finally came to light, “wasn’t of much interest to me”.

His fate was sealed. That quote will be hung around Pell’s neck forever. The priest who went by the book, not the heart.

Explaining himself, Pell added: “I had no reason to turn my mind to the extent of the evils Ridsdale had perpetrated.”

No, that was really a matter for his bishop, Ronald Mulkearns, who Pell says was a liar who acted disgracefully and “inexplicably” by repeatedly moving Ridsdale from one parish to the next each time he was caught molesting children.

There had been a “gigantic failure of leadership”. But was Pell among those who failed?

And that is when things got a whole lot uglier on Tuesday for him.

In 1977, Pell was appointed one of the “consultors” to Bishop Mulkearns, advising him on things like the movement of priests. Pell has said he never discussed the many moves of Ridsdale — each time to flee scandal — at the meetings of the consultors. He was wrong — or he lied, say his critics.

The royal commission has uncovered minutes showing Pell was present at two meetings that discussed Ridsdale, including one in 1982 after the paedophile had to flee Mortlake.

No wonder. Parents had complained to Mulkearns that Ridsdale had molested children and was even living with a 14-year-old boy who slept in his bedroom. That boy, Paul Levi, says he was continually abused, and that Mulkearns had even seen him living there when he came over for dinner.

But it was Pell’s cousin, vicar-general Henry Nolan, who ­finally ordered Ridsdale to get out of town after finding him with Levi.

The minutes record that the consultors meeting — with Pell — was told moving Ridsdale had “become necessary” but they don’t say why.

Pell said he remembered nothing about that meeting, but this: “I can recall paedophilia was never mentioned.” Mulkearns “would have given some reason” to the meeting but only a general one. Had he mentioned paedophilia, Pell said he would have remembered.

He said Mulkearns had lied to him by instead proposing Ridsdale for a prestigious job that seemed “incompatible” with having to be removed for abusing children. “Some of us were kept in the dark,” he said.

But Pell’s problem is that not all were. At the meeting were at least two consultors who knew very well why Mulkearns was moving Ridsdale.

Pell points out — correctly — that others at the meeting deny the real reason for Ridsdale’s removal was discussed.

But Pell has not explained convincingly why he never asked hard questions about why Ridsdale was being moved on so unusually often.

Again, Pell reverts to his familiar faith in the old lines of command: “As always, the lead was given by the bishop and the presumption was that the bishop was telling the truth. I was happy to take the bishop’s word that it was appropriate for (Ridsdale) to be shifted.”

And is this, then, the best that his defenders can now say of Pell? That he really was just following his orders, not seeking to find those abused children who so needed his care?

How Pell’s supporters would have choked on one of his final answers yesterday about the responsibility of priests to the children being molested by his colleagues. “He has a moral responsibility to do what is appropriate to his position.”

Really? Nothing more?

Royal commission head Peter McClellan seems not to accept Pell did even that.

He said he would have expected Pell to want to know the reasons for Ridsdale’s move from Mortlake.

And he gave a warning that will shake Pell: “If we were to come to the view that you did know (of Ridsdale’s crimes), you would be culpable, too, wouldn’t you? So we have to determine a very serious issue, don’t we?”

Very serious indeed, because Pell swore on a Bible to tell the truth. Now a royal commission seems poised to consider whether this prince of the Catholic Church is a liar.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/andrew-bolt-retreats-on-his-criticism-of-cardinal-george-pell/news-story/28599aa3bdf9a1529188ff5fc6bca396 posted:

Columnist Andrew Bolt has stepped back from his harsh criticism of Cardinal George Pell in his most recent column, after regretting he had “joined the pack” of critics.

In his syndicated column for News Corp Australia today, Bolt, who has secured an exclusive interview with Cardinal Pell at the conclusion of his testimony, wrote Pell had “uttered words that will stain his reputation forever” and the “rightly aggressive” royal commission now “seems poised to consider whether this prince of the Catholic Church is a liar.”

Pell’s testimony: day three

This morning on Sky News, for which Mr Bolt is reporting as a special contributor in Rome, he said he felt “embarrassed because I think I’ve joined the pack attacking Pell.”

“I joined that attack on George Pell, as you’ve just read, and I think for the first time in my life I’m trending positive on Twitter as a result,” he said.

“In retrospect, if you look at those comments of his, he spoke incredibly poorly but to think he didn’t care about abused children, which is so widely agreed to what his words suggested, is actually false,” Bolt told Sky News.

“I think I owe an apology and I’ll go back to being hated on Twitter,” he added.

Last night, The Australian revealed Bolt, who has empathised with Cardinal Pell through the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, had been given access by the Catholic Church for a one-hour interview with the highest-ranking Australian in the church’s history, to be broadcast live-to-air on Sky News at the conclusion of his testimony this week.

This morning on Sky News, Bolt softened the hard line of his column, reassessing Pell’s comment that one major case of repeated abuse “wasn’t of much interest to me”, noting “what he seems to have said, meant to say, was that he had no reason to look at what was happening in that parish of Inglewood by Gerard Ridsdale and as a result, those things slipped his mind.”

Bolt agreed Cardinal Pell was “incurious” and “I don’t believe he was plugged into his community as he should have (been).”

“Where the exaggeration has occurred is in thinking that he knows of abuse and he doesn’t care,” Bolt argued. “And that fits a stereotype. You’ve just got to think, I guess, in retrospect, really is that seriously contended a man like him (who) devoted 50 years to this church hears of abused children and he doesn’t care? You’ve got to really think he’s a sociopath, as some people clearly do, and I think that’s highly improbable.”

WhiskeyWhiskers posted:

I kind of hope it's not a DD. I want Ricky to stay on another 3 years.

SynthOrange posted:

A man has been found dead inside home of the former Health Services Union boss Kathy Jackson.

Solemn Sloth posted:

Victoria had a big win today against the pokies in the high court. Recouping over half a billion in compensation paid to Tatts and Tabcorp for removal of licenses.

http://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2016-03-02/high-court-rules-over-loss-of-gaming-licences-in-victoria/7212944

quote:

"It's a great outcome, it means the $540 million that had been previously allocated to Tattersalls will now of course be returned to the state," he said.

Shadow treasurer Michael O'Brien said the Government should apologise to Victorians.

"This decision brings to an end one of the greatest financial disasters in Victoria's history," he said in a statement.

Pickled Tink posted:

A new page deserves a new First Dog:

Gorilla Salad posted:

This has all the hallmarks of someone who has just been told to pull their loving head in or an axe will fall on them.

As much of a piece of poo poo as Bolt is, he just came face to face with the fact he's been defending a man who did everything in his power to protect child rapists and continue a horrific cycle of abuse which lasted decades and that must be a terrible thing to have to face. Bolt did everything he could to hide his head in the sand but the enquiry just rubbed his nose in the mess Pell left and that has to sting no matter how jaded a hack you are.


But honesty doesn't sell Murdoch papers, "white men are the real victims" does. The most charitable reading I can find is that some editor must have taken Bolt aside and reminded him why he was flown all the way around the world and given exclusive access to Pell - and it certainly wasn't to report the facts.

quote:

CARDINAL George Pell ­yesterday uttered words that will stain his reputation forever.

BBJoey posted:

haha

to elaborate, anyone who still takes Bolt seriously in 2016 will not be swayed by Bolt merely defending a pedophile enabler

Goffer posted:

For you keen poll watchers out there, essential just dropped 2% and it is down to 50-50 as well.

http://www.essentialvision.com.au/category/essentialreport

Side note, essential averages the last two weeks of polling, so there may be a little more momentum in the swing than just 2% as it was previously stable at 52-48.

LibertyCat posted:

If you're serious I'd be happy to make an effortpost that tries to be fair to all sides. Will post a draft here near the end of the month for approval if you want.

Cartoon posted:

I'm not the final arbiter nor would I (or, I hope, any other) insist on a preview. If you are honestly putting your hand up for it I don't remember anyone else claiming it. So April would, by default, be yours. If it isn't up to snuff a mod will gas it soon enough.

Starshark posted:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-03-06/abbotts-office-told-bishop-not-to-apologise-for-choppergate/7224596


You gotta laugh.

LibertyCat posted:

What do numbers have to do with my statement? Conceptually if you take things from society (that others have worked to create) but never give anything back, it's a deficit. If I'd said dole-bludgers were costing us $X per year, we could debate that, but I don't have numbers handy.

I don't get why so many here are rushing to the defense of the long-term unemployed. My philosophy has always been to treat people as responsible for their own actions and hold them accountable to that. If you are idiotic enough to feed your life savings into a machine that makes entertaining noises & lights when you press a button, it's your fault, not the casino's for taking advantage of your feeble-mindedness.

If you're a taxpayer the long-term unemployed are drinking the coffee you made, driving the car you repaired, dirtying the floor you clean etc without giving society anything back. If you're between jobs they're taking money that could go to you, who actually wants to contribute in a meaningful way.

LibertyCat posted:

So if the money was "given" (by Tax cuts etc) to working people instead, the economic effect would be exactly the same but at least it's the people that contribute to society that benefit.

http://m.theage.com.au/business/banking-and-finance/im-going-to-teach-these-f-pricks-a-lesson-the-fbomb-chats-that-landed-anz-in-court-over-rate-rigging-allegations-20160304-gnb8gj.html posted:

Sacked ANZ traders say bank tolerated drugs, strip clubs
By Jemima Whyte

The language is fast, profane and occasionally, damning. Even the best financial traders don't have respect without using the often impenetrable and macho lingo of the trading desk.

In ANZ's case, the recordings of its trading desk staff look highly damaging because they –the regulator is arguing, though ANZ is denying – show just how the bank allegedly rigged the market.

Whatever the outcome of this case, which will be highly complex and technical, the 79-page submission lodged by Australian Securities and Investments Commission in the Federal Court on Friday sheds light on the tightly knit world of bond market trading and its verbal shorthand.

I want this rate set as high as f-----' possible.

ANZ's trading room culture is already under fire after two court cases lodged by sacked ANZ traders exposed trading room chat that was salacious and smutty, though not illegal.
Advertisement

In the taped phone conversations and electronic chat included in the ASIC documents, the language is profane and alpha. The main question is whether it proves market manipulation.

Interestingly, ASIC brings ANZ's code of conduct and ethics into its case, the very issue that sacked traders Etienne Alexiou and Paddy O'Connor also raised in their "toxic culture" cases against the bank. Mr O'Connor has settled. Mr Alexiou is still pursuing legal action.
Link to manipulation

Another interesting outcome of these cases will be whether there is a link between the alleged toxic culture and market manipulation.

For those looking for colour rather than substance, one of the central figures in the court documents is Jason Pritchard, a former ANZ head of balance sheet trading suspended in 2014 before leaving the bank the following year.

He is now on the professional poker circuit, ranked 105th on the Australian money list after earning an estimated $336,245 playing in tournaments in Sydney, Melbourne, Monte Carlo and Las Vegas, according to poker website The Hendon Mob. He's dabbled in horse racing as well, part of a consortium that sold Zoustar for about $20 million to Middle Eastern buyer in 2013.

Pritchard's comments read as some of the most gung-ho in the court documents.

"If we can f------ jag , you know three points on 5 billion, that's half a million dollars just bang, done. People don't understand half a million dollars. Paul's up for that the year. You know? So we just need to f------ do that. Especially the f---king rate sets," he is recorded as saying to trainee dealer Mark Budrewicz in a phone conversation on June 10, 2010, the documents claim.

And this on the same day to head of rates trading Matthew Morris: "F-----' and just keep going until we find the bid ... and I want this rate set as high as f-----' possible."

There's also a bit of jargon ("a yard" is used to talk about one billion) and some banter:

"It feels like we're going into battle," Budrewicz said in a phone conversation in April 21, 2011.

"If people are going to play our games, right, we're going to f-----' go with you," Pritchard claims on the same day.

And Buderwicz again: "I'm going to teach these f------' pricks a lesson".
Nothing is private

This case is the latest reminder that nothing is private, particularly when it comes to the regulator and its compulsory gathering powers.

Whether it's enough to change the culture within ANZ's global markets trading division – which may or may not have fostered illegal activity – will play out for months.

Pickled Tink posted:

It has come to my attention that my recent posting quality has deviated drastically from that which is expected and tolerated within this thread. In order to redress the wrongs I have perpetrated upon this threads unsuspecting populace, I hereby present the latest First Dog. Please accept it with my apologies.

Lid posted:

between the two of us i'm the only one with a girlfriend but so long as we're throwing around ad hominem attacks because someone isn't thinking of the children

Lid posted:

wish they'd r&d a firewall around your posts

Endman posted:

I can't tell if you're serious or not. Auspol is buried under so many levels of irony and disingenuous rhetoric that I'm completely unable to interpret anything at face value.

Jumpingmanjim posted:

Consistent with the law of the land, and under direction of the government of the day, the Department of Immigration and Border Protection operates a policy of keeping children in detention only as a last resort, and releasing those children that might be in detention as soon as reasonably practicable.

This is a very contentious area of public policy and administration. Sometimes emotions rise and facts gets distorted. For the reputation of my Department and its officers, it is crucial that I set the record straight: the Department and its uniformed operational arm, the Australian Border Force, does not operate beyond the law, nor is it an immoral ‘rogue agency’.

Recent comparisons of immigration detention centres to ‘gulags’; suggestions that detention involves a “public numbing and indifference” similar to that allegedly experienced in Nazi Germany; and persistent suggestions that detention facilities are places of ‘torture’ are highly offensive, unwarranted and plainly wrong – and yet they continue to be made in some quarters.

In the same vein, any contention that prolonged immigration detention represents "reckless indifference and calculated cruelty," in order to deter future boat arrivals, do not pass even the most basic fact check. The number of children in detention would not be falling if that were the case.

The resources devoted to providing medical and support services, and the commitment of doctors, service providers and departmental staff to the welfare of those individuals, undercuts emotive and inflammatory claims to the contrary.

The Department’s operations are underpinned by the law of the land. In this regard, the High Court of Australia has upheld the legal foundations for both ‘turn back’ and ‘take back’ maritime operations (in a case brought down in January 2015) as well as regional processing arrangements (in the case known as M68, brought down in January 2016).

While policy can be debated, there should be no place for falsehood, rumour and unfounded speculation. People smugglers are constantly poised to jump on any relevant mistruth in order to convince prospective asylum seekers to pay them to get to Australia.

That is also why official statements on this issue have to be precise and unambiguous as to the essential objective of government policy. The maritime path to Australia is closed; and people subject to regional processing will not be allowed to settle in Australia.

What is often overlooked in so called commentary on this issue (and even, regrettably, in some media reporting) are the facts. Significant progress has been made over the past year to move children and their families from detention into the community. As I write, there are now 58 children who arrived by boat in held detention, down from a peak of almost 2000 back in 2013.

Much recent commentary has centred on a group of asylum seekers temporarily in Australia for medical treatment. A large number of this group are family members accompanying those in need of treatment. Consistent with policy and law, they will be returned to Nauru or Papua New Guinea at the conclusion of their treatment. The policy of the Government is that these persons will not be allowed to settle in Australia. No child will be returned to a place of harm, and we will exercise appropriate discretion and compassion in making decisions on a case-by-case basis, without fanfare.

Those returning to Nauru will return to a full open centre arrangement for all transferees and settled refugees. All are free to come and go from the accommodation centre 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Within the Department we have taken significant steps to enhance oversight, advice and scrutiny being applied to the care of those in detention, including children. The Department’s Chief Medical Officer, Dr John Brayley, provides me and the Commissioner of the ABF with impartial professional medical advice on health matters.

We have also increased our engagement with independent oversight bodies including the Minister’s Council on Asylum Seekers and Detention, the Australian Human Rights Commission and the Commonwealth Ombudsman.

Consistent with advice provided to me by the Department’s Chief Medical Officer, all transferees and refugees in Nauru and Papua New Guinea receive appropriate mental health care. The Department’s service provider’s support these Governments to provide health services, including mental health care, broadly commensurate with Australian community standards.

Recognition of an individual's mental health needs is particularly pertinent because many individuals in detention arrive with pre-existing mental health issues and may have experienced traumatic events in their country of origin or on their attempted journey to Australia.

For this reason the Department and its service providers support individuals with a range of specialist care options including mental health assessments and individualised care plans. The Department provides access to mental health nurses, counsellors, psychologists and psychiatrists to individuals transferred to Australia for medical care.

The Nauru and Manus RPCs both have mental health care staff onsite, including mental health nurses, counsellors, torture and trauma counsellors, psychologists and a psychiatrist. There are also additional mental health care staff based at the Nauru Settlement clinic.

Since December 2014 significant improvements have also been made to infrastructure, education and health and welfare services in Nauru.

Around $37 million has been spent upgrading medical facilities in Nauru, which has a population of about 10,000 people. This includes, at the Republic of Nauru Hospital, a new surgical inpatient ward and medical building as well as the installation of a CT scanner which is also available to transferees, refugees and local Nauruans.

This is supplemented by improved neonatal and obstetric services and the establishment of visiting specialist consultation and surgical services to transferees.

The Australian government has also provided additional settlement accommodation in hard-walled buildings, expanded the Nauru Primary School, built a new Community Resource Centre and upgraded the island’s water supply. To support education, we have provided expatriate professional development and teacher support services (a total of 11 teachers) in Nauru schools and five school counsellors.

I must also address ongoing and consistent claims that those expressing opinions on immigration detention are “risking jail by speaking out”. While often repeated, this claim is also wrong and unsupported by any facts.

The secrecy and disclosure provisions in Part 6 of the Australian Border Force (ABF) Act are not unique. These types of provisions are similar to those which apply to partner agencies and a wide range of other Commonwealth agencies with responsibilities for the management of confidential or protected information. They do not prevent, for example, medical professionals from seeking the best clinical outcomes for their patients.

In the midst of this debate, the Department will continue to focus on the fair, dignified and humane treatment of people in our care. We make decisions compassionately, consistent with Australian law. We will continue to reduce the number of children in detention as soon as practicable, within the law, as we have done in recent years.

Ultimately, the Department shares the same goal as its critics – to have no children at all in immigration detention, consistent with the law of the land

Tomberforce posted:

Yeah I just spent 12k on getting my PR last year.

Maybe I should have gone hom.....

Recoome posted:

Look this is where I'll bite. It's not just dumb eco volunteering and poo poo, but can also mean the provision of mental health services to disadvantaged youth (which otherwise may find it difficult to seek help). As a psychology student, I can absolutely do this kind of volunteering but either a) the pay is crap because it's not about the money or b)they can't pay you. A real life example is behavioural therapists for kids with ASD, normally parents wouldn't be able to access therapy for them but student therapists can basically do it for the fraction of the cost.