Courtesy of Piers Akerman/Daily Telegraph: 

For more articles by Piers go to; http://blogs.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/piersakerman/

Piers Akerman – Tuesday, November, 13, 2012

WHILST the Royal Commission into “vile and evil” child sexual abuse approved yesterday by Cabinet is to be applauded, one has to wonder why Labor and the Greens took so long to agree.

Just 17 months ago, in June last year, an attempt to investigate the Heiner Affair was sunk in the Senate when former Family First senator Steve Fielding voted with Labor and the Greens to prevent a private members bill introduced by Senator Nick Xenophon from proceeding.

Today we see the Labor Party, at last, expressing concern over a real issue which it has steadfastly ignored.

A realist would ask why.

Obviously, there is the element of distraction from the flood tide of boats arriving, the debt, and Gillard’s own serious credibility problems about her activities as a law partner with a corrupt boy friend, Craig Thomson, Peter Slipper, etc …

But a cynic might only point to last night’s ABC coverage of the story.

On Sydney TV, the ABC newsreader announced with some obvious disgust that the commission was to be “only a broad one”.

What could have possibly be meant?

It became obvious when the 7.30 Report’s poisonously crippled presenter Leigh Sales asked Minister for Human Services, Brendan O’Connor: “Why is it not confined to the Catholic Church?”

That was the gotcha moment.

The other giveaway was the announcement of the commission without any terms of reference or even the name of the commissioner.

And no Catholic Church.

So what is it about?

It is about another Labor Party effort to smear the Opposition leader Tony Abbott, a practising Catholic, and to paint him as a member of an organisation which turned a blind eye, at the least, to child abuse.

The ALP knows a lot about child abuse, a number of its former MPs are in prison.

But it knows more about the dark tricks needed to smear opponents and it is now playing one of those with its media mates.

For weeks now there has been a concerted effort to link Abbott with scandals associated with Catholic organisations.

Labor’s strategists – the same people who attempted to catch Abbott in a race riot of their own construct in Canberra last Australia Day – hope that the media will pummel Abbott over his Catholicism in coming months and that voters will believe that he has somehow been engaged in the most disgraceful behaviour the commission uncovers.

That’s what the timing of this is all about. That’s why it has no framework, no commissioner, nothing but the ABC trying to point a bone at a particular church.

The Greens are playing along though they went out of their way with Labor to stop the inquiry into the Heiner affair last year.

Disgraceful, disgusting, true, but Labor and Green to the core.

One can only hope that someone other than lawyers will gain some dignity at the end of this Machiavellian abuse of political power.