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From Richard Farmer’s “Chunky bits” in today’s crikey.com.au:

I know that Lord Acton had papal infal­lib­il­ity in mind when writ­ing to Bishop Man­dell Creighton in 1887 but given the flaunt­ing of their Chris­tian­ity by our two altern­at­ive polit­ical lead­ers that per­haps just makes his words more appropriate:

“I can­not accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men with a favour­able pre­sump­tion that they did no wrong. If there is any pre­sump­tion, it is the other way, against the hold­ers of power, increas­ing as the power increases. His­toric respons­ib­il­ity has to make up for the want of legal respons­ib­il­ity. Power tends to cor­rupt, and abso­lute power cor­rupts abso­lutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exer­cise influ­ence and not author­ity: still more when you super­add the tend­ency or cer­tainty of cor­rup­tion by full author­ity. There is no worse heresy than the fact that the office sanc­ti­fies the holder of it.”