Richard Farmer’s chunky bits: actions will speak louder …

Remembering the days of hecklers. I am old enough to remember the days when politicians addressed public meetings and how the great ones such as Robert Menzies thrived on dealing with the hecklers from the crowd. Alas these days politicians largely confine themselves to controlled appearances where they don’t have to confront anybody although clearly something went wrong this morning:

Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s address to students at the University of Queensland on climate change was disrupted by protesting students and no doubt it will be the ejection of one of them and the chanting by many others that will feature on tonight’s news. Her actual words, which she steadfastly kept on uttering during all the fuss, will be lucky to get an airing. Which probably does not matter much for she really didn’t have anything to say.

It appeared like a clever thing at the time. Appointing Don Argus to a small group to work out the final details of a new tax on the mining industry might have seemed like a clever thing to do at the time. For the Labor government, as it struggled to get the subject off the pre-election agenda, it was a way of showing BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto and Xtrata that it wanted their views to be incorporated in the final proposal. But for those mining companies outside the tent there could not have been a more provocative appointment. With the best will in the world by Argus, there was no way that those who felt hard done by the agreement with the three majors to change the initial super profits tax would believe that the just retired chairman of BHP Billiton would have the best interests of small and medium-sized mining companies at heart. And so it is now proving as miner Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest, of Fortescue Metals Group Ltd, starts complaining that there is nothing fair about the government’s Mining Resource Rent Tax (MRRT) Policy Transition Group with Argus on it.

Forrest said said he had quizzed a senior Labor leader about the selection process that led to the appointment of Argus and “I was told ‘well, he’s independent, he’s no longer in the mining industry serving on the board of BHP’,” Forrest said at a media conference in Perth on Thursday. “I answered ‘well, that’s fine. Would you kindly appoint John Howard — he’s not in parliament either, he’s as independent as Don Argus is from BHP — appoint John Howard to be your campaign director and then you’ll know exactly how we feel’. The reply was ‘yes, that’s a point well taken’.”

Doing his job. Barristers are guns for hire and so they should be. Theirs is not to reason why, theirs is but to do the best they can for whoever hires them. We are all entitled to legal representation and if barristers are to retain their privileged position we should all be able to hire the one of our choice. No different to getting into a taxi actually except we don’t have to take the one at the front of the rank.

Hence, the extremely bad taste of the slant given in this AAP report of the use by the Labor Party of Bret Walker, SC, to give an opinion on whether or not a proposed $25 million funding cut for union ballots would undermine a Coalition campaign promise to leave Labor’s work laws untouched. Barrister Walker apparently argued that cutting Australian Electoral Commission funding for industrial elections would change section 464 of the Fair Work Act — disputing contrary legal advice given to the Opposition. I have no idea whether the Walker advice to the ALP is right or wrong but to suggest, as the AAP story did, that he was not a barrister to be trusted because he has appeared for disreputable people, was more than a bit rough. That he “recently represented a bikie gang and an alleged Serbian war criminal in the High Court” is surely irrelevant.

If ever I have read a story designed to promote feelings of hatred, ridicule and contempt about a barrister, this is it.

A Canadian example for public servants. What is a public servant to do when a government does something the public servant thinks is seriously wrong? Resign. That’s what. Quit the job and then explain why. Which is exactly what happened in Canada this week when the head of the Canadian statistics organisation reacted to budget cuts that he thought would make a nonsense of the national census.

I wonder if any Australian federal public servants will follow this example if we end up with a Coalition government intent on some serious cost-cutting while claiming that the quality of the work performed by the public service will not suffer.