She was capering for the TV cameras outside Buckingham Palace. Mid-forties at a guess, loyally smothered in Union Jacks, grinning through a mouthful of those National Health teeth that suggest a picket fence hit by a car.

"It's a baby boy! Just amazin'!" she gurgled in glottal stop Cockney. The interviewer chortled with her. Royal events, births and marriages most of all, bring on an orgy of collective silliness. Being well within a very narrow range of possibilities, the delivery of a male human infant is amazin' only if you had been expecting something exotic - a penguin or a unicorn, say. But not when a royal does it. In hallowed tradition, the entirely normal, the bleedin' obvious, are accorded mystical significance.

Heavens, there will be no nanny and the Duchess of Cambridge will actually breastfeed. Granted, this is an improvement on times past. Unamused to hear that her second daughter had eschewed a wet-nurse and was suckling her own baby, Queen Victoria rather snarkily named a dairy cow after her: Princess Alice.

The media are complicit in the barmy excesses, of course. In fact we whip them up, for all the obvious reasons. "It's the moment the world's been waiting for," gushed a BBC reporter as the easel announcing the birth was plonked into place at the palace gates.

Imagine that: the millions toiling in polluted Chinese megacities, the lonely gaucho tending his herd on the pampas of the Rio Grande do Sul, the huddled hordes of refugees in the Horn of Africa, the warring Sunnis and Baathists of blood-drenched Syria, humanity everywhere erupting in spontaneous joy at the news of yet another addition to the British royal family. In the seaports of Java and on Nauru and Manus Islands, I daresay the asylum seekers speak of little else.

It is touching in a way. As visions of Empire recede ever further into history, the Brits warm themselves with the cheerful delusion that their monarchy fascinates other peoples as much as it does them. There are but a few dissenting voices amid the gush in the scepter'd isle : Private Eye magazine's front page headline read WOMAN HAS BABY.

The chances of George Alexander Louis Mountbatten-Windsor wearing what Professor David Flint and his ilk absurdly call "the Australian crown", must be slim.

As the lawyer Geoffrey Robertson puts it, in the 21st century a hereditary monarch makes about as much sense as a hereditary brain surgeon or a hereditary bus driver.

There seems to be a consensus that the republic should be on hold until after the death of the revered Elizabeth. After that we will move, respectfully and with gratitude, to erase foreign royalty from our constitution and to install an Australian as our head of state. Britain's George VII would still be a welcome visitor.

In a week of hullabaloo over Labor's supposed Papua New Guinea solution, some important economic news slipped through almost unnoticed.

Inflation is at record lows. The Bureau of Statistics reported that for the year to the end of June, the underlying inflation rate - the important figure - came in at just 2.2 per cent.

This demolishes the fear campaign that Tony Abbott and the Tories have waged for so long. Abbott, you will remember, stumped the country to brand the carbon tax "a wrecking ball with unimaginable and devastating consequences for the economy".

On and on he went, the horror mounting. Whyalla in South Australia would become "a ghost town, an economic wasteland". More stupidly still, Barnaby Joyce blathered that Australian families would be paying $100 for the Sunday lamb roast. Prices for everything would go through the roof.

The inflation figures expose these lies. The carbon tax registered barely a blip. But this is par for the Coalition course. With Labor on the rebound, Abbott indulges in ever greater hyperbole and folly.

Outflanked on the refugee crisis, he and Julie Bishop and Scott Morrison have managed to offend both the Indonesians and the Papua New Guineans with a volley of diplomatic gaffes.

His latest conjuring trick, the grandly titled "Operation Sovereign Borders" would be run by a three-star military officer - a lieutenant-general or vice-admiral - who, he says, would report directly to Morrison as immigration minister.

The Tories have always thrilled to the military solution: the march to the sound of the guns, the bark of orders, the flash of gold braid. The flim flam goes on. Having demonised asylum seekers as illegal queue-jumpers for so long, Abbott and the frightful Morrison have switched to shedding crocodile tears for their deaths at sea.

The hypocrisy is disgusting.

Sleek and well-tailored, radiating priestly good cheer to the assembled media, Father Brian Lucas looked as if he were off to an enjoyable lunch at the Vatican. But far from it. On Wednesday and Thursday he was in Newcastle to front at the inquiry into child sexual abuse in the Hunter. By all accounts it was a gobsmacking performance.

Lucas is what you might call the Catholic chief enforcer in Australia, then a non-practising barrister, who has long been the official spokesman for the church when the going gets tough, now the general secretary of the Australian Catholic Bishops' Conference.

One of his jobs from 1990, he told the inquiry, had been to persuade 35 paedophile priests to leave the ministry. The mind boggles. Persuade them to leave? Is that all? Did it not occur to Lucas or anyone else in the hierarchy to sack them, or to report them to the police for a proper criminal investigation?

Apparently not. Or if it did, Lucas rejected the idea. Didn't want to upset the victims, you see. He had, however, "seduced" more than 10 of these offenders into leaving, sometimes with "strong armed" tactics, he said. Other men were shoved off to other parishes or overseas, where they were free to offend again. This trained lawyer freely admitted he had taken no notes of these discussions, to avoid them becoming evidence in any subsequent legal proceedings.

Atheist though I am, at moments like this I like to imagine that there is a god as advertised. And that when the Brian Lucases of this world finally front up for the Judgment Day, the application for admission through the pearly gates is crisply rejected.

Mike Carlton