ARTWORK: I.P. Letters in formation / Letters, information (info).
once again see a craven silence from the federal opposition.
Former Australian Secret Intelligence Service officer Witness
K has pleaded guilty to one summary offence, while Collaery at great personal cost is to fight on in a closed court trial into allegations he leaked information to journalists about Australia’s spying operations in Timor-Leste.
National security has morphed into anything that exposes the regime’s abuse of power. What is at risk is public trust in a legal system – prosecutors and attorneys-general included – that would pursue people who have heroically acted in the public interest.
The law has a tipping point, where if it acts perversely and without public acceptance, its findings and rulings are less likely to be respected.
Leading the charge in the Collaery– Witness K protests is Susan Connelly of the Josephite Sisters. She rallies the troops outside the court and with ceaseless missives from her bunker in Lakemba.
“J’accuse.” Where’s Émile Zola when you need him?
Code words
And don’t expect the High Court to be any help when it comes to free speech. The finding on Wednesday that the Commonwealth can sack a public servant who anonymously tweets concerns about immigration policy sends a disturbing message not only to the sacked twitterer, but also to God-botherer Isileli Folau and his camp followers.
Their highnesses thought the public service code of conduct needs to be respected and twittering leftist views about refugee policy is not on. Specifically, they said, unanimously, that the code “did not impose an unjustified burden on the implied freedom of political communication, with the result that the termination of [her] employment with the Commonwealth was not unlawful”.
What does that tell Isileli, who is complaining he was sacked from playing football because he breached his contract? If a code can get you sacked, you’d think that a contract could get you even more sacked.
Curiously, the British Court of Appeal recently said the University of Sheffield could not discipline one Felix Ngole, a Bible-bashing postgraduate student who posted homophobic rants on Facebook. That case involved a breach of a “Health and Care Professions Council’s student guidance on standards of conduct and ethics”.
Things are getting complicated and weird.
Black remarks
Meanwhile, the Poms are having loads of fun with their new PM. Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson’s rise to the prime ministership has given old hacks a marvellous opportunity to write eviscerating columns about each other.
Gadfly mentioned recently that Max Hastings, former editor of London’s The Daily Telegraph, had written in
The Guardian that de Pfeffel is a “weak character” who “cares for no interest save his own fame and gratification”.
He’s morally bankrupt and a “cavorting charlatan”, et cetera et cetera.
To de Pfeffel’s rescue rides no less a sponge bag than Conrad Black, Baron Black of Crossharbour, a Boris booster and probably the most preposterously pretentious and pompous person ever to own a newspaper.
In The Spectator, he writes that he asked Max, then editor of The Telegraph, to “help organise my small wedding to Barbara Amiel in 1992”. Black goes on to observe that Hastings is “an ill-tempered snob with a short attention span. He has his talents, but it pains me to report that when seriously tested, he was a coward and a flake. I think Boris will be fine.”
In a jaw-dropping aside, Black described his imprisonment on a fraud conviction in the United States as his “legal difficulties”, which have now been “withdrawn and expunged”.
Presumably, he is referring to President Pussy Grabber’s pardon, a case of one fraudster excusing another.
In any event, this drew the equally horrendous Paul Dacre, former editor of The Daily Mail, into The Spectator’s fray. Calling a spade a spade, he described Baron Black as a “jailbird” and a “megalomaniac monster”, who offered him the editorship of The Telegraph
“in his palatial Kensington drawing room, every inch filled with Napoleonic memorabilia”.
Dacre went on to confirm that
“Max is an egregious snob” – something journalists, whose job it is to puncture pomposity, should never be.
Now a side dish of excitement has broken out with allegations that Crossharbour interfered in an exposé of his friend Jeffrey Epstein written for Vanity Fair by former Telegraph scribe Vicky Ward. Black was an uncle to Ward’s then husband, and his employer, so the oleaginous proprietor had leverage.
Vanity Fair’s editor at the time, Graydon Carter, obligingly cut out of the profile any reference to Epstein’s involvement with two young sisters, one of whom was underage at the time. Carter explained, “He’s sensitive about the young women.”
For good measure, London Review of Books has published a new edition of Heathcote Williams’ volume Boris Johnson: The Beast of Brexit. A Study in Depravity.
Mad, mad world
Meanwhile, the rest of the world is going to hell in a handbasket. Crazed gunmen are wreaking death and havoc; the president is not sure about the extent to which he now supports white supremacists; financial markets are in disarray because of Trump’s tariffs; deplorables are running large chunks of the world; and war is on their breath.
In Britain, the head of counterterrorism says 80 per cent of those who want to attack the United Kingdom are British-born or -raised and it is beyond the security services’ ability to cope.
On home soil, the prime minister thinks it is unchristian to increase the Newstart allowance because it’s only a fair go for those who have a go; while the Catholic Church, recently drenched in an industrial-scale child sex scandal, wants to tell women what to do with their reproductive agendas.
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Christ almighty.