"One is never so dangerous as when one has no shame." - Oscar Wilde

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What do flesh-ripping killer whales, carrion-gnawing turkey buzzards and (very much in the news) entitlements-plundering parliamentarians have in common?

Perhaps nothing? Perhaps everything? Now read on.

Federal parliamentarians' shameful snouts-in-troughs pillagings of their travel entitlements are in the news yet again, this time with government ministers Anika Wells and Don Farrell especially in the spotlight.

These pillagings strike lots of us as "shameful" but of course these sorts of offenders have no sense of shame. When we talk about their breathtaking "within-the-rules" exploitations of their entitlements failing "the pub test", what we mean is that these sins fail the tests of those of us who (unlike the shameless ministers) actually know what shame is.

Those of us here in the ethical "pub" of everyday Australian life instinctively recognise and feel the shameful, when it manifests itself in public life and/or in our own ethically-alert bosoms.

Is possessing a sense of shame a gift, a talent? Is it something learned; perhaps learned from parents who themselves had strong senses of right and wrong?

Is an inability to feel shame a kind of forgivable disability, like, say, colour-blindness or like prosopagnosia, the neurological condition that leaves the brain unable to remember faces?

Or is it, this inability/this refusal to feel shame, a moral failing, a wickedness that in the cases of ministers Wells and Farrell should be punished with, say, their forced resignations and/or with their spending a morning in the stocks while aggrieved taxpayers pelt them with mud and dung and half-eaten Big Macs?

Your columnist, although wicked in so many other ways, has a very strong,........

© Canberra Times