of church assets, the archdiocese owns about $115 million of property in Melbourne's south-eastern municipality of Greater Dandenong alone.

When asked by Fairfax Media to provide a figure for the value of assets held by the church and associated entities, both the Sydney and Melbourne archdioecese responded that ''this information is not available''.

In the 2000s, many in the charity world had hoped accountability of all churches would improve under Labor’s proposed new regulator, the Australian Charities and Not-for-Profits Commission (ACNC) which was eventually established in 2012.

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But a 2013 Fairfax Media investigation revealed how a lobbying campaign by churches - the office of then Sydney Archbishop Cardinal George Pell was a key player - had been instrumental in restricting the new regulator.

The churches had demanded of the then Labor governmentreporting burden on parish priests. In 2013, parts of the church - the Sydney archdiocese in particular - wanted the ACNC abolished entirely, a promise the Coalition was happy to give ahead of the federal election that year.

World Vision chief advocate and Baptist minister Tim Costello recalls a meeting with then opposition leader Tony Abbott in which

drove the church’s argument to a sympathetic, budding prime minister.

Only a hostile senate prevented the Abbott government from acting on its promise to do away with the commission.

Managing upwards

"After God, the priest is everything," French Saint John Vianney declared hundreds of years ago.

This is clericalism - the belief that clergy are mystical beings, accountable to the Pope and God, not to civil society nor their own "flock". In the modern church this