Lawyers for Heydon Findings of sexual harassment against former High Court judge Dyson Heydon have unleashed a much-needed wave through the legal profession. But a few archly conservative lawyers are digging their heels in.
Battling the woke mob is a brave anonymous barrister, who wrote in last week’s Spectator that the allegations against Heydon are “low-level sexual harassment,” and that “we are not dealing with an alleged crime”. (ACT police are investigating Heydon).
Our brave correspondent then suggests bias might have sullied the High Court’s independent investigation because Heydon was on bad terms with current chief justice Susan Kiefel.
He — because it almost certainly is a he — concludes that the “cancellation” of Heydon is seen by the law’s “Quiet Australians” as a “capitulation to the fashionable and illiberal #MeToo Movement”.
The Heydon affair has caused a fair few ripples on Phillip Street, where the judge’s offensive behaviour was apparently an open secret for years. A tipster sent through a criminal defence barrister’s posts in a private social media group, which defended Heydon as a “socially inept but brilliant lawyer.”
In a deeply conservative profession, support for Heydon seems alive and well. But like our brave anonymous barrister, most aren’t ripping the mask off just yet.
Dewey Beats Truman Labor’s Kristy McBain hung on to retain the marginal seat of Eden-Monaro on the weekend. But not if you read The Sunday Telegraph, which declared victory for the Liberals on its front page. “Scomo’s Scorcher,” the Tele roared (appropriate headline for a region still recovering from bushfires), claiming the prime minister had delivered Labor “a brutal byelection lesson”.
Even accounting for the Tele’s print deadlines, that headline was never true. As the votes came in on Saturday night, most pundits had the result too close to call. And despite a small swing against Labor, McBain was narrowly ahead most of the evening. Only state Nationals leader John Barilaro was calling the seat for Liberal candidate Fiona Kotvojs, despite no firm evidence. After midnight, the ABC’s election guru Antony Green called the seat for Labor, with McBain claiming victory the next morning.
Q Believers in Eden-Monaro Saturday’s byelection might also have seen one of the first believers in the QAnon conspiracy running for an Australian parliament. Independent Riccardo Bosi, a former special forces lieutenant colonel, regularly drops Twitter hashtags related to QAnon, an unhinged far-right conspiracy theory centred on the belief that US President Donald Trump is fighting to save the world from a Deep State cabal of paedophiles.
Bosi, formerly of Cory Bernardi’s Australia Conservatives, only garnered 502 votes on Saturday. But QAnon believers are entering the political mainstream in the US, winning Republican primaries in safe congressional districts. And in Australia, one of the prime minister’s close friends is a Q believer. Watch this space.
Come on Pauline Breakfast TV’s favourite reactionary senator was back at it this morning, telling Nine’s Today Show that people in Melbourne’s locked-down public housing blocks were “drug addicts” who couldn’t speak English, and should be fine with a lockdown because they come from war-torn countries and are used to such things.
It comes days after Hanson’s billboard declaring “all lives matter or bugger off” was pulled down in Rockhampton.
The show must go on While Flemington was one of the Melbourne suburbs to lock down last week, that didn’t stop the races running over the weekend. The Victorian Racing Club says the new lockdown won’t affect racing and training at Flemington Racecourse, which is just a stone’s throw away from the public housing block forced into lockdown on Saturday.
How interesting – an article that includes reference to Dyson Heydon where the Comments section has not been switched off. This is the first time that Crikey has done it and I am guessing it is inadvertent. Nine/Fairfax has certainly been vigilant in keeping its Comments on Heydon articles switched off. It’s not hard to understand why.
Meanwhile, I note that in The Age today, there is an article about Collingwood footballer Jordan De Goey being charged with an alleged indecent assault five years ago. The Comments section is switched on although, more than 19 hours after the article appeared, no comments have been published. I know they have received comments because I sent one remarking on how the article on De Goey is open for comments but those on Heydon have not been.
Nine/Fairfax has been keeping comments closed on many issues as it journeys to the right to become a mirror image of the Murdoch stable. They also seem to specialise in holding comments back from publication until many hours after the article has gone cold and outdated.
Today’s lead on Cormann indicates that 20 comments have been posted…now those comments are gone and at the bottom of the piece it says that comments are closed.
This is not the way to keep subscribers in the fold IMHO, Crikey is becoming( has become ?) a bad joke.
I agree, Azzif!
Most days you have to ‘log in’ on most articles, not just once for the edition.
And if Crikey is going to give us no comment pieces for half the publication, then it’s just NOT worth it.
And why on earth would we want dozens of articles on Geoffrey Rush? Who cares…the court has spoken, and that should be the end of it. Or are we challenging the Rule of Law here???
CML – I complained last week about the failure of the revamped website and email links to Crikey and they said their IT people would look at it. Nothing heard since and no improvement either. You can up the pressure by emailing boss@crikey.com.au
I cannot see any justification for all the Geoffrey Rush articles either CML.
As you say …who cares ? I doubt that many would be rushing to read about Rush and without any comments we’re unlikely to ever know if they are.
Toby Ralph is taking up space here too…that’s the revolting icing on the mouldy cake that Crikey’s serving up today, time to get my news feed elsewhere.
Before I shuffle off my mortal coil I sincerely wish that commentators and journalists would cease using the touchy feely feely word “conservatives “to describe regressive and reactionary members of many professions including politicians,lawyers and others. We get enough Americanisms to debilitate the English language without this wretched terminology.
Nine spokesperson on no longer using Hanson in a regular Today show spot: “We don’t shy away from diverse opinions and robust debate on the Today show.” That’s nice, probably, but Hanson doesn’t represent “diverse opinions and robust debate.” She’s a professional racist, that’s her shtick and you only invite her on when you want some really nasty, no-messing-about-with dog-whistling, out-and-out racism and anti-minority scapegoating. When you want that on the program you invite Hanson because you know she’ll perform. When you want “diverse opinions and robust debate” you invite somebody with carefully thought out, evidence based views who is prepared to state those views and defend them if necessary. And you research their views so you can challenge them in “robust debate.”
Having never actually seen the Today show I’m curious to know, if someone can save me the trouble of getting a TV set and watching it, do they actually encourage “diverse opinions and robust debate?” Being on a sponsor-dependent channel and under the management it’s under that seems a bit unlikely.
Couldn’t agree more with your first comment Rais , as to the second comment…from the snippets I’ve caught in the past there’s no such thing as “diverse opinions and robust debate”on any Nine news program and certainly not anything like it on Today.