Free Republic

Lawyers for Cardinal George Pell are working to keep the 77-year-old Australian prelate out of jail pending an appeal of his convictions of sexually abusing minors. The highest ranking churchman to be charged with sexual offenses, Pell was convicted in December 2018, but details of his trial were under a publication ban until Tuesday. It has now been revealed that Pell was convicted of one charge of sexually penetrating a child under 16 and four counts of committing an indecent act on a child under 16, the BBC reported. Judge Peter Kidd lifted the ban after prosecutors dropped a second...

The best things about living in Australia are still good. The footy. And other sports. Genuine mateship. The mild climate. The open spaces. People of faith of many different kinds. But when there is Socialist Left leadership in both the state capital of Melbourne and the national capital of Canberra, the worst things are terrible. When I was in handcuffs and under arrest after standing up for the human rights of an aboriginal man and communing spiritually with him at the door to a major church on 9/11 last year during the Queen Elizabeth memorial service, one police officer put...

This morning I have tried to help a guy in poverty in Melbourne, Australia, find the right people to help him sell some amazing sporting memorabilia. And the police became involved. Ridiculous? Yes. But life in Australia is like that now. He wants $20,000 for one item. It is an autographed football which he tells me his father gave him. Some of the names are icons of the multi-billion dollar industry which is the Australian code of football now. I put him in contact with someone I considered a wonderful human being at what I still think is probably a...

Victoria Police are a disgrace. They roam safe streets in groups of five when there is absolutely no public danger or crime happening, while there are not enough nurses in hospitals or teachers in schools. They are arrogant or stupid. Or, at best, ashamed of what they are. When they commit crimes against people (false imprisonment, assault, perjury, to mention a few), they are rarely held to account. They dont get charged with these crimes and put on trial but are the beneficiaries of secretive "professional standards" investigations. Australia was a strong creative much freer society but ridiculous progressive misuse...

Australia is a cultural and historical brother of America. But now Australia is a warning to America of how much freedom can be lost. When Victoria Police attacked me legally in 2016 for wanting to commemorate WW2 with tree plantings, I woke up to The Left. Then they persecuted Cardinal George Pell. Now their police look like stormtroopers to conservative former Prime Minister Tony Abbott. Australia and America have a long standing alliance. But the defence of Australia is not the defence of freedom. Not in Socialist Left Victoria.

AUSTRALIAN police have been likened to members of the Ku Klux Klan in an inflammatory cartoon published in an Indian newspaper in the wake of the death of Nitin Garg in Melbourne. The cartoon, which ran on page 12 of Delhi's Mail Today newspaper on Tuesday, depicts an Australian police officer in a klan hood saying: "We are yet to ascertain the nature of the crime." The image is set to put further pressure on already fragile ties between India and Australia following the stabbing of the 21-year-old accounting graduate in a Yarraville park in Melbourne's west last Saturday night....