There have been 351 allegations for the thirty-year period 1950-1980, a little over 10 per year. 
77 priests were accused, of whom more than half (42) were dead.

2 of those priests accounted for 77 of the 351 allegations.

Of those 2, one was found guilty of 49 child sex offenses and yet spent only 3 and a quarter years in prison before being released on parole. Australia’s legal system is clearly not the US in its Victimist and Stampede-friendly characteristics. 

And it appears as well that Australian public opinion is also not so Victimist and Stampede-friendly: nobody Down-Under allows themselves the sugar-plum fantasies of a million or more in settlement monies. For the Aussies, apparently, eighty thousand in cash is a pretty respectable sum. So much, then, for cross-cultural judging as to what is “shameless”.

And the article concludes with the inclusion of the tale of an 87 year-old who claims child-hood abuse (at least 70 years ago, then) at the hands of the Salvation Army. Which has nothing to do with the Church but which appears to be tossed-into the story for the larger purpose of manipulating Aussie public opinion into turning pro-Victimist and Stampede-friendly generally. 

It should come as a surprise to nobody that in Western countries – especially ones whose political elites and governments seek to maintain or intensify good relations with Washington and/or whose own economies are suffering through the post-2008 Western economic problems – the Stampede (in some variant) starts up. Australia is also an ‘outpost’ country, a member of the Commonwealth yet lying out there in the far Pacific, uncomfortably and strategically close to an ascendant China.

This possibility was discussed several times on this site.

But it appears that the Church’s response in Australia takes a different path – perhaps after having noted how the Stampede’s dynamics played-out in the US: the government itself will judge the amount of compensation that will be doled out to prospective and even already-compensated allegants.

But – at least as it is described in this SNAP-sourced article – there is no mention of any provision by which even the government will judge who is and is-not a genuine victim, as opposed to allegants otherwise-classifiable.

And this surely is the omission of so vital and key a step in any assessment-process that will render this new scheme profoundly problematic.

In the US, basic elements of what are called Victimist law ‘reforms’ were already in place in the legal system; indeed, it was the incorporation of this aspect into his Strategies that rendered Anderson’s scheme so impressive, taking advantage of the synergy available to him in this regard. Ditto the media infatuation with ‘victim’ stories generally, and the subsequent manipulation of public opinion toward this entire approach to any claim of victimization by a corporate entity.

But this is apparently not the case in Australia. Thus where in the US the government could participate ‘from a distance’ by weakening evidentiary principles and jurispraxis prior to any Stampede, in Australia the government will have to step in and do the job more directly.

Nonetheless, perhaps the Church in Australia preferred to take its risks in this manner rather than place itself in the position in which the US Church was placed by the Anderson Strategies.

But this remains the fundamental problem: if there is no provision for reliably assessing the genuineness (or otherwise) of any allegation, than this Australian gambit bids fair to turn into just a differently formatted version of the same old Stampede.

Is it possible that the media element of the Stampede is not so strongly in place in Australia? I would doubt that but I don’t know.

Is it possible that public opinion among Australians is not so deranged by Victimism as it is in the US? I don’t know but that is at least more possible than the media being more independent and both capable and willing to deal with this issue objectively and honestly.

And thus the standard tropes we see from SNAP (big ‘promises’ not fulfilled; words but no actions) and from JR (mostly male victims yet mostly female SNAP operatives, no input from the ‘victims’) stand out clearly as – at the very best – secondary aspects, distracting from the main problems with this thing. And each of the tropes is hardly un-problematic in its own right.

The comments by the Church representative – Mr. Sullivan – seem to indicate that the Church in Australia will simply cave-in differently from the Church in the US; he gives a great deal away by already referring to “survivors” and so on.

But there is much that is not-known at this point. Perhaps the Church has some legitimately-grounded confidence that the government will perform honestly and competently. Yet I would tend to doubt that such a level of performance is possible: once the piñata is hoisted up and open-season is declared, what government is then going to place itself in the ‘insensitive’ position of actually performing as an objective gate-keeper and exercising a robust analysis of each allegation seeking money?

And in the “Ellis defence” we see again an echo of the same legal theorizing that fueled the 2002 sue-the-Bishops phase of the Stampede that we have seen in the US: respondeat superior, i.e. that a corporate entity can be sued for damages (actual and punitive) for the actions of its ‘employees’, even if the actions of those employees were in violation of the corporation’s own standards and rules.

JR’s gratuitous and un-grounded and un-corroborated characterization of Australian SNAP’s ‘feigning’
“hostility towards the church” – trailing off as it does into a mush of ‘thinking’ that doesn’t make clear sense as written – remains as nothing else but a gratuitous and un-grounded and un-corroborated characterization that is self-serving as well.

And thus it does not in any way qualify as “proving [his] point about who works for whom”. It requires the utterly non-credible presumption of what has yet to be proven: that SNAP is nothing but a creature of the Church. But without this grossly problematic presumption, JR has no position at all, so it cannot be discarded even if it cannot in any way be demonstrated.

And then – to top it all off – the signature Abusenik innuendo: perhaps it is “the vatican” that has been squelching the (secondary and distracting) “debate within SNAP” as to what Australian “victims” really want. And yet JR has himself admitted on this site that he has no idea of what American “victims” really want, so I’m not going to imagine that he is any more reliable a guide to what Australian “victims” really want.

Perhaps the “debate” is not being had because what the “victims” really want is the money that the government – as I have said above here – seems poised to distribute to them without further assessment or examination.

And perhaps SNAP in Australia is making the best of a bad situation, since it would appear from this new Australian scheme that there won’t be overmuch room for the torties at all, except as mostly procedural representatives who might help aspiring allegants navigate the paperwork, thus largely cutting out the kick-back sharing of sizable attorney fees that the torties have made available to SNAP in the US.

It opens with agreement with the church on compensation hoping that the church will live up to it's promises. The question is: Were the victims asked how they feel about the agreement or did SNAP decide, all by itself, what victims want just like they usually do?

And again a women leader for SNAP Australia; with an 80% male to female victim ratio.. Also SNAP fiegns hostility towards the church after it first agrees "miraculously" with exactly what the church thinks is right. The caveats are window dressing. Again proving my point of who works for whom. Where is the debate taking place within SNAP as to if said agreement is what Austraian victims want? Could it be the vatican?

http://www.smh.com.au/national/catholic-church-recommends-new-redress-scheme-for-child-sex-abuse-victims-20140812-1037xm.html

This is the type of noteworthy psychic ‘economy’ that so often creates a certain rueful impressiveness in matters clinical: a certain shrewdness that bubbles up through the rocky psychic terrain and seems to do so without any deliberation or forethought.

And there is a PR value to tossing around that pop-psychology term ‘denial’ – from Kubler-Ross’s chalky schematization of ‘grief’ upon which the victimists so quickly glommed when it first came out decades ago (although they twisted it like a pretzel to their own purposes).

From everything we have managed to examine on this site, I would say that the Abuseniks are ‘in denial’ about the increasingly obvious and profoundly iffy and queasy nature of the Stampede, fueled as it always has been by their assorted stories, claims and allegations.

But – continuing the clinical thought – they are far too heavily ‘invested’ in the Stampede now (using that term in its monetary as well as its psychic sense) to do anything now except to somehow try to Keep The Ball Rolling for themselves.

So they will stay in “Egypt” (correction supplied) and try to keep everyone else there too. For them, that’s how the Game must be played at this point. Even if only by one-liners.