Terry Laidler

Terry Laidler is a psychologist and a former ABC Melbourne Drive presenter. He chaired the Victorian Road Safety Co-ordinating Council in the early 1990s through the Drink, Drive, Bloody Idiot campaign that saw a paradigm shift in road safety in the state.

Terry's recent articles

The Wrong Questions

The real issues of how the failure of the Victorian hotel quarantine program became the SOURCE of the States lethal second wave of Covid-19 infections have been lost.

TERRY LAIDLER. Stop the Fires

The old paradigm we used for fighting fires has failed. The new paradigm has to be that we decide to Stop the Fires and the new question is not how do we contain or manage them or wait them out. It is: How do we put these fires out?

TERRY LAIDLER. Reconstructing Juvenile Justice a 7 point plan

A major public storm has erupted in Victoria about the governments decision to locate a new juvenile justice detention centre at Werribee in the citys south west. Locals see it as demeaning to their neighbourhood, but, in my view, its the whole idea is wrong, NOT the site!

TERRY LAIDLER. 'Catholic Clericalism'

I heard the Archbishop of Brisbane, Mark Coleridge, a man I counted as a good friend many years ago when I too was a Catholic priest, speaking to Fran Kelly on RN Breakfast yesterday [https://tinyurl.com/rn170207]. Rightly, in my opinion, he identified clericalism as important among the cultural factors that contributed to the appalling scale and nature of abuse among Catholic clergy revealed by the Royal Commission. But I wonder if he really understands what clericalism is.

Terry Laidler. To Michael Pezzullo, Secretary, Department of Immigration and Border Protection.

Dear Mr Pezzullo, Starting to get through to you, is it? Great! Forget your law of the land, let alone your direction of the government of the day drivel neither of these is some sort of absolute that lets you suspend all moral judgment! For, make no mistake about it: the actions of you and your departmental officers in our name are a gross violation of basic ethics and of innocent peoples rights. To take legitimate asylum seekers (and it actually doesn't matter whether they are men women OR children), and to subject them to...

Terry Laidler. What George Pell Might Have Said

What George Pell Might Have Said Meanwhile, in a parallel universe Your Honour Please could I start by making a statement that I hope will help the Commission and that I pray will give some solace to so many people I now know to have been traumatised by abuse suffered on an horrendous scale. I have no wish to put people who say they told me about sexual abuse that was occurring in a position where their recollections need to be tested in minute detail against mine. They have gone long enough with their voices...

Terry Laidler. All Roads Lead TO Rome?

So, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse will take Cardinal Pells final evidence next week by video link from Rome. Tim Minchins song and the associated crowd funding effort will allow some victims of abuse to attend, but both are symptoms of fairly widespread community disappointment. Commissioner McClellan was also clearly disappointed at this outcome. Given the complexity and probable seriousness of material still to be canvassed with Pell and the varied reliability of technology, the cardinals prior commitment to attend had had the obvious advantages that observation of the totality of the free exchanges...

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