The Australian justice system is an unholy mess. Nothing could be clearer, following the revelations of the Walter Sofronoff inquiry into the Brittany Higgins affair in the Australian Capital Territory.
The travesty of justice revealed by the me-too driven allegations against Bruce Lehrmann turns out to have revealed an iceberg of maladministration of justice across the land. The revelation that the (now, mercifully, retired, but alas, not sacked) Director of Public Prosecutions in the ACT (the Australian Communist Territory) withheld evidence from the defence turns out to be common practice! As a number of lawyers have recently revealed. This would be, err, breaking the law.
Also see Stephen Rice at The Australian, quoting the Labor MP Stephen Lawrence. “Not Just Drumgold: Prosecutors Rarely Comply with Law”. Paywalled.
Prosecutors rarely comply with law. Hmmm.
This all recalls the late 1980s pop hit, Little Lies, written by the late Christine McVie of Fleetwood Mac and the less well-known Eddy Quintela (her then husband). Little lies add up to big legal problems. Often this has been driven by noble cause corruption. By the desire to “correct” perceived flaws in the justice system. Or, sometimes it is driven by simple (traditionally understood) corruption.
Consider George Pell. John Jarrett (the Australian actor). David Eastman (the assassination of Australian Federal Police chief Colin Winchester). John Fleming (a South Australian case of false allegations against a Catholic priest). Craig McLachlan. Bradley Murdoch (the Peter Falconio case). Lindy Chamberlain. Kathleen Follbigg. Bill Spedding (the William Tyrrell case). Victims of Lawyer X. And the all the others. Each case worthy of a book-length treatment. The number of cases that have emerged suggest system problems.
Are there patterns here?
The failure of the justice system reveals a number of problems. Cops pressured to get convictions. The moral panic over child sex abuse. Anti-Catholicism. Appeals to false science. Corruption. Lazy short cuts. Me-too ideology now embedded in the criminal justice industrial complex. Malicious prosecutions and vendettas against particular individuals who have be either previously unindicted career criminals or simply innocent people the cops or their governments don’t like. The criminalisation of politics.
In the case of the latter, it might be assumed that the best example of this is Trump. Or the prosecutions of those who broke Covid lockdown rules. Well, it turns out that criminalising politics is a rather older practice. As Geoff Shepard’s excellent (2021) book, The Nixon Conspiracy: Watergate and the Plot to Remove the President, makes very clear. Watergate was always a beat-up, designed partly to action the Democrats’ vendetta against the hated Nixon and partly as career launching pads for then-suddenly-famous journalists. But Shepard’s book argues, the prosecution of the Watergate perpetrators and their assumed controllers involved legal chicanery on a grand scale. Those familiar with the views of Mark Steyn and Conrad Black – both victims of the American cesspit of a judicial system – may not be at all surprised by the Nixon conspiracy. (Yes Virginia, there are, indeed, real life conspiracies).
Nixon’s prosecutors broke just about every rule in the book. But one revelation in Shepard’s book sounded very familiar in relation to Australia’s own fetid judicial swamp. This is the apparently common practice by prosecutors to not pass on evidence to defence teams, which breaks and undermines one of the most central underpinnings of fair trials and, so, the whole legal system. The ACT’s now former Chief Prosecutor, whose career progression is an utter mystery to most observers, has paid dearly for being caught out doing this. Sadly for the thousands of cases (and potential victims of legal malfeasance who didn’t get fair trials) that, if the practice is as wide as has been suggested, they did not have the benefit (that Bruce Lehrmann and Senator Linda Reynolds did) of a white knight in the form of Walter Sofronoff to come in and expose the corruption going on. (And not every defendant has a great legal team, either. Not everyone gets a Whybrow, for Lehrmann, or a Bret Walker, for Pell. Those wrongly accused of something often are forced to get the second class defence offered through poorly resourced legal aid).
For corruption it is. It is just as corrupt as those in VicPol who knew of, even facilitated Lawyer X. And got away with it. Those atop Victoria’s amoral criminal justice dunghill – a “once in a generation” cabal of crooked cops, a lunatic, amoral dictator and a justice system peopled from top to bottom by feminist ideologues planted in the core legal institutions twenty years ago – recently caused the man sent in to sort the mess, Justice Geoffrey Nettle (through the Office of the Special Investigator), simply to walk away, frustrated and flattened.
Here was the headline:
Lawyer X scandal: special investigator’s office closes with chances of prosecution ‘effectively nil’.
The Guardian reported:
Barrister Nicola Gobbo and the Victoria police officers who recruited her as an informer during Melbourne’s gangland war will not face charges over the scandal as the agency appointed to build criminal cases against them is being disbanded.
The state attorney general, Jaclyn Symes, on Tuesday confirmed the office of the special investigator (OSI), headed by former high court judge Geoffrey Nettle, will wind down its operations.
Nettle reached the conclusion that he was simply wasting his time:
Geoffrey Nettle says Victoria’s director of public prosecutions rejected his call for several key figures to face criminal action.
… In a report tabled in state parliament on Wednesday, special investigator Geoffrey Nettle called for his office to be disbanded or he would resign, citing frustration with the director of public prosecutions (DPP), Kerri Judd, for refusing to approve criminal charges.
‘‘In light of the director’s past refusal of permission for OSI [office of the special investigator] to file charges of relevant offences … I consider that there is no longer any point in OSI persisting with investigating,” Nettle, a former high court judge, wrote.
Oh dear. It is hard to contemplate just how much more dirt could be thrown at the Victorian “justice” system. As always, to absolutely no avail. It is perhaps not a coincidence that one of the chief causes of Nettle’s ire was Kerri Judd, the Victorian DPP. This would be the same Kerri Judd who disgraced herself and her profession when she fronted the full Bench of the High Court to argue the case against Pell.
https://www.catholicweekly.com.au/fr-frank-brennan-anatomy-of-a-travesty/
When certain people cannot get a fair trial because of assumed characteristics, identity or views, we have a legal system that has hit bottom. It reinforces the growing perception that we are ruled by thugs who care not a jot about the ordinary citizens that, at least once upon a time, they needed in order to get elected. Now, they don’t. That explains how they get away with the things they do. Like presiding over a tainted justice system.
The system is riddled with sweet little lies. Take the Brittany Higgins fiasco. Little lies about an alleged rape, lies told by television programs and Logie winners. Lies repeated in the Parliament. Character assassinations. Bloated pay-outs based on nothing. Other than victimhood. Oh, and lies about likely future employment, a projection that has turned out to have about as much truth value as an Imperial College (London) Covid death modelling exercise. Lies told to the Judge by the DPP. Lies told by the gay buffoon who runs the Australian Capital Territory about releasing the full Sofronoff report.
Victimhood is right at the epicentre the legal system fail. We believe you! Whatever the evidence or circumstances, we just believe you.
The victimhood that has evolved over the last thirty or so years, that now drives politics. And lying. Bruce Bawer’s The Victims’ Revolution (2012) is a good place to start in analysing the most profound cultural change of the late twentieth century.
https://newcriterion.com/issues/2012/12/the-fundamental-question
Armando Simon at the Brownstone Institute brings Bawer up to date, including the Covid era. He digs deeper, and describes some of the sinister characteristics of victims:
Today’s toxic state in society is a cornucopia for psychologists. For example, Victimhood has become a status symbol in society to the point that non-minorities claim to be minorities in order to reap the sympathy and benefits of this status. Studies have shown professional victims tend to have negative personality characteristics, most notably the Dark Triad.
https://brownstone.org/articles/the-relevance-of-milgrams-experiments-in-todays-world/
The dark triad, no less. What is this? Well, let’s call it a combo of Machiavellianism, narcissism and psychopathy. Sounds like a pretty good summary of our current political class, as well.
https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fpspp0000329
Victims turn out not to be very nice people, according to some of the evidence from psychology.
And we are building our society and our politics on this?
The victims’ revolution is not the only problem, of course. The above cited cases bespeak corruption as well, on a truly grand scale, and more broadly, the abandonment of standards and good legal practice. Perhaps some worthy PhD student should do a thesis on the interaction of the victims’ revolution with the abandonment of legal and moral standards in explaining the decline of our judiciary. A useful starting point and focus might be the thing that is shared by each of these trends – a radical turning away from truth, in theory and practice.
And those sweet little lies. Just like the song said.
Paul Collits
14 August 2023
many thanks Melissa. I love all Melissas. I even have one of my own!
Another great article. The description of the corrupt Victorian legal system is spot on.
Feminist Jurisprudence has replaced Common Law and as that other notable academic, Stephen Baskerville has noted, it's about nothing if not the denial of due process. What goes on in the risibly titled "family violence courts" and indeed the granddaddy of them all, the anti "family courts" are a national scandal. The rules of evidence just don't apply. Anyone know what things are like in Guatemala?