The hot favourite to replace Pell is his handpicked protege Anthony Fisher, 53, now the Bishop of Parramatta and, like the Prime Minister, a product of the Jesuits at St Ignatius, Riverview and the dreaming spires of Oxford. The two are good friends. But Bishop Anthony, as he likes to be called, is also a bit suss on his response to child abuse. During the Pope's visit to Sydney for World Youth Day in 2008, he peevishly dismissed a family whose two daughters had been raped by a priest as ''a few people dwelling crankily … on old wounds''. Not a good look. Now for Qantas. When Fairfax Media reported a week ago that Alan Joyce's next round of slash and burn might see 3000 jobs axed, there was the customary hoity-toity response from the airline's PR machine. There had been a ''series of unsubstantiated and unsourced rumours swirling around ahead of our half-year results, ranging from estimates on job losses to route changes'', it sniffed. We heard on Thursday that it's actually 5000 jobs to go - although not those of Joyce himself or his chairman, the aloof and rebarbative former resources boss Leigh Clifford. Phoenix-like, they emerge yet again from the ashes of their own failure. *****

There has always been a mean and vindictive streak to the Tories. In the words of the historian Manning Clark, they are the punishers and straighteners. And they never change. We see this again with the Abbott government's cynical trick of tossing up two royal commissions, one to reheat the controversy over Kevin Rudd's home insulation scheme, and another, they hope, to go through the trade unions like a dose of salts. The purpose is clear: in these supposedly tough times, untold millions of taxpayer dollars will be spent to inflict damage on the Labor Party all the way to the next election. More cynical still is the decision of Attorney General George ''Soapy'' Brandis* to hand over Rudd cabinet documents to the home insulation inquiry. Bedrock Westminster convention holds that the cabinet papers of departed governments lie untouched for 30 years but, as ever, the so-called conservatives do not give a tinker's cuss if this gets in the way of bashing their foes. It is the politics of vendetta. What a shame the Rudd and Gillard governments stuck to the rules and resisted holding a royal commission into how the Howard government got us into the Iraq war. The cabinet papers on Saddam Hussein's chimerical weapons of mass destruction or on the AWB oil-for-wheat scandal would have been interesting. Not to mention the possibility of Howard and Lord Downer being put in the box under oath. Such a wasted opportunity. If there is money around to splash on royal commissions, though, let's see one into the failure of the Australian Securities and Investment Commission to regulate the shonks of the banking and finance industry. To give one of many examples, the collapse of Storm Financial in 2008 saw thousands lose savings of $3 billion and more, aided and abetted by those sandstone respectables, Macquarie Bank and the CBA and so on.

But the Tories always look after their own. Just before last Christmas, as stealthy as a thief in the night, Assistant Treasurer Arthur Sinodinos quietly scrapped Labor reforms that would have given stronger protection to small investors. 'Twas ever thus; not what you know but who. The Liberal Party's biggest private donor, packaging magnate Dick Pratt, should have gone to jail after a lifetime of corporate plunder, reviled as the crook he was. No chance. When he died in 2009, the lions of the Melbourne establishment turned out for his funeral. ***** The row over Stephen Conroy's attack upon Lieutenant-General Angus Campbell obscures an important point. It is not Conroy or Labor who have been politicising the defence force. It's Abbott and Scott Morrison who have wrapped themselves in khaki and cammo.

Conroy's sneer was below the belt. There is no evidence Campbell is engaged in ''a political cover-up'', and he was entitled to take offence. I don't know him, but high-ranking officers who do assure me he's a straight-shooter of unassailable integrity. No fool either. Beyond his boots-on-the-ground military career, he has a master's in international relations from Cambridge. But Morrison has shamelessly squeezed every drop of political advantage from having him run Operation Sovereign Borders. Campbell evidently has nothing to say at their press conferences. He is rolled in, in full three-star uniform, to bolster Morrison's supposed tough-guy reputation. No wimps here. The navy is also being wielded as a political weapon, but the defence chiefs can only grin and bear it. *Several readers have asked how Brandis came to be known as Soapy. I'm told it's a nod to Sam ''Soapy'' Ballard, QC, the effete and pompous head of chambers in Rumpole of the Bailey . smhcarlton@gmail.com