The last stand of Gummow J

Many years ago I used to work as a lowly, underappreciated RA at a university here in Brisbane. One day, on a research project that the university shared with ANU, I went down to Canberra for a meeting with my fellow researchers there and, because the lady that was in charge of organising the few days’ of me being there could organise a f___ in a brothel, I ended up being there on a day that no one else was available to meet with anyone...a day off, alone in our nation’s capital...what oh what could I do? Yeah, i know, but that didn’t last long and I didn’t have the right shoes anyway, so I decided to go for a walk around the lake when the thought occurred to me that I could go sit in on the High Court, if it were in session.

To my luck, not only was the full bench sitting, they were hearing a very interesting case – the case of Jihad Jack (Thomas v Mowbray [2007] HCA 33 (2 August 2007)) What luck!

I sat up the back, in awe of the solemn nature of the place, scoffing at all the Clark Griswald-like tourists that were flowing in and out of the place, seeking to project and amplify their knowledge of Australian legal procedure. There were around thirty representatives sitting in a columns being the bar, with differing degrees of snootiness and pompousness. The lead QC for the appellant was being absolutely grilled by Michael Kirby J while presenting arguments that his honour would, and did, entirely agree with. He wasn’t letting her off without proving she knew what she was talking about though, and the rest of the bench seemed to range from a slightly engaged Gleeson CJ and Callinan J, right through to the seemingly detached attendance of Gummow J.

Gummow J at the time would have been an elderly man, and like many members of the bench, the years and changes in fashion have not been kind. Just then it appeared as thought Gummow, seemingly disinterested and detached from the debate, leaned forward and died. His head slumped further forward, to the side a little and let out a sought of pained “errrgh”.

No one else seemed to notice this. All the legal advocates were busy making it appear as if they were important or briefly trying to see who was doing the best at looking important (the trick is to look somewhere between angry and annoyed); the tourists around me were too awed by the giant portrait of Sir Samuel Griffith looking down his nose at everyone or wondering whether they bowed penitently enough, given the prowess at this of the over-weight security guards and seriously under-weight articled clerks

I was beside myself with fear and curiosity. What does one do in this situation, surely his clerk would have noticed if he’d died. I looked, they all seem to be heavily engaged in finding whatever precedent may be called into question in the main debate. I thought about quietly talking to one of the security guards, but that wasn’t something that I was keen on doing given that it would involve crossing the entire court to get them.

So I turned to the bloke beside me;

“Mate, I think Justice Gummow just kicked the bucket” I said.

Intensely interested, he removed all pretence of knowing anything about the court for a minute. “Which one is Gummow?” he asked.

“There, second from the left.” I said, pointing, but trying not to point at the same time, feeling like a college mook playing drinking games.

He immediately turned to his wife/partner and mumbled something.  I couldn’t hear.

Then a reply from her, then a clear “Oh, the one second from the left...geez, don’t you know who they are?”

I smiled to myself, but was still quite concerned about what to do. At least I wasn’t the only one that knew this now – I could take some comfort in that. Over the next ten minutes or so, every once in a while I heard this “no mate, I reckon he’s carked it” or “second from the left of course...” coming from up and down the back three rows of the court.

“Sooner or later, someone here is going to tell the security or someone” I thought.  So I became quite immersed in the theatre of the whole thing.

‘Had anyone ever actually died on the bench while the court was in session?’ I wondered. I couldn’t remember anything like that from law school, not that that sort of trivial info is taught very much.

I started thinking about designs for T-shirts... “I was there the day Gummow J made his last incorrect and stubborn decision on the bench” they may have said.

I looked again. His pale features and old face had now slumped right down into his hands as he appeared lifeless and at peace. Kirby J and the QC were still arguing about rights and stuff, I would normally have been really interested in that, but couldn’t focus due to what was happening elsewhere in the court.

All of a sudden, Gummow J jerked his head upright, belted the bench with his left fist and yelled “that is nothing but obiter and has no authority in this court!!!”

With that, the entire three rows at the back of the courts, all of us now intensely over-seeing his untimely non-death due to my Chinese whispers jumped out of our seats and said a collective “shit!” as though we had seen a ghost. Seven Justices of the High Court and about thirty of the country’s best legal advocates turned around to wonder what on earth had happened. I felt ashamed for authoring such a scene and slumped out back into the safety of the foyer soon after, not forgetting my over-the-top bow on the way out.

This post’s lame joke

Why don’t sharks ever attack lawyers?

Professional courtesy.

This post’s identity seeking, groovy quote:

Every time you make a choice, you are turning the central part of you, the part that chooses into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing into either a heavenly creature or a hellish creature. C.S.Lewis

This post’s inappropriate over share:

I recently found myself uttering those eternally horrible words that mock our failings as fathers “I don’t care who started it, I’m finishing it.” There’s really nowhere to go further down from that point is there? I had once said “that music’s too loud,” but stopped myself as I was saying it, so it didn’t really count.

Social media: Trolling, Temptation, Temperance and Silence

I have been meaning to write something about this for a while now*, since being fascinated by a post “Why I’ll be kicking you off this blog” by John Birmingham got me wondering why people always seem to become the very thing they initially sort to destroy. I remember many years ago working as a researcher having a morning ritual of blog reading prior to starting the day’s work. The Blunt Instrument was one of blogs I used to flick through, mainly because, depending on how you define the term, it is trolling in its purest form. It’s kind of entertaining to see people get so upset about some things.

As you know, dear reader, this self-involved rant of a blog started after me being selected as a reader-guest blogger on the CityKat blog a while back. The post that I wrote, prior to it being edited was more than a little different from the one published. Don’t get me wrong – I am not whinging about editing or a ‘my words are my children’ type of nonsense – the edited article was considerably better than its pre-edited ancestor.  However, there is another key difference between the two  – the edited version of that article was considerably  more hostile and aggressive than the original. While the editing did greatly improve the article, it also completely removed two aspects of the original article: a brief point about my pre-marriage life – the removal of which made me look considerably more the puritan, churchie type than the reality. Secondly, and mainly, a few paragraphs were removed that, while they were a little graphic in content, softened the point of the article; these lines made the article a lot more an ‘all men die together’ type piece than the us v them, marrieds v singles type article that was produced and painted the whole “my sex life is better than yours’ comment as a leading, throw away line designed to do nothing more than win a competition. It rather, became the central feature of the article.  A huge number of the people who commented on that piece did so to object to or be sceptical about those two points.

Then you may say, ‘Well, the editors may not have intended that to happen...they wanted to make it a better piece, and they did that.’  Which is a true argument, but not a valid one as it divorces intention from consequence.

A while ago I was talking to the LoML about a photo on facebook of a friend of ours – she was asking who the other lady in the picture was – did I recognise the name in the tag. On my page, there was no second tag – so long story short, this second person had blocked me, which is why there was no second tag on my page. This lady, who I barely know, don’t think much of and wouldn’t  ever choose to have anything to do with, even in a facebook context, had blocked me. She must have deliberately gone out of her way to do this – we’d had no facebook contact and little real life contact. My reaction was one of being unfairly treated, being harmed or offended unjustly, which I find to be really strange because I would probably have blocked her if I could give a hoot about the whole thing, which I don’t. So why do I care what someone who in real life, I have no regard for her opinion as anything more than a dumb and useless trust fund brat, why would I care about an online treatment of me.

I guess maybe the answer is in the fact that I seemingly have no course of action to respond to this, except for something like trolling or pranks. So I guess that is the motivation, not that it was strong enough for me to do anything more than laugh it off and ponder a little about it, but in different circumstances it may well be.  But then maybe there is something considerably more sinister at play here, maybe online personalities are the inverse of reality.

Plato thought that the poets, unlike the philosophers should be banned because, basically, they inverse morality. Many other people have taken this point further, to identify people like Shakespeare and others as uber-poets, geniuses or the like because they don’t inverse morality.

I remember one of the first ‘Blunt Instruments’ that I read, can’t remember what it was about, but someone made the comment that part of the blog had been stolen from “He died with a falafel in his hand’, which it had been. The commentator simply didn’t make the connection. All these people then sought to make this the funniest thing they had ever witnessed. Strange, especially given that someone was reading and writing to a blog when they didn’t recognise the author – probably wasn’t taken that way, but could be construed as quite insulting.

I made a comment here and there, not very much as doing that gets a little addictive. In thinking about the recent ‘why I’ll be kicking you off this blog’ I remembered a few of the earlier posts that I had commented on which, like all Blunt Instruments, were designed quite specifically to incite an emotive and over the top reaction in readers (newspapers have been doing this for decades). The blurb about the blog itself prides itself on being “...unfair, unreasonable and often unbalanced, but in a good way..” It took me a while to track down the comments (I couldn’t remember the name I put on them) and once I had, I was amazed at what they said. I remember writing a polite, yet firm response pointing out why I thought whatever was incorrect. What I found, was that my comments were really rude and arrogant, to the point where I wondered if they had been changed, but probably not. But why would I speak so far out of place from my normal discourse? Who knows. Is this just the nature of human interaction, to be as edgy as you can be, and when that doesn’t work, be self-righteous and rude? Is that where trolling comes from? Journalists for decades, probably centuries have been doing this because they can get away with it. Interesting, if you take a decent look at the legal profession, we are a surprisingly polite-to-each-other industry. This is probably due to the culture that we can’t get away with treating each other poorly – the lawyers that do tend to not last very long.

Watching Insight a few weeks back, Joe someone drew a line between journalism and trolling on two fronts. Firstly, trolling is a continued and sustained abuse of a stranger from an anonymous stand point. There was also a national and/or public interest argument given.

He stated, when pushed on the subject of his paper’s view of Peter Slipper being depicted as a rat as being fine because it was a reasoned debate and that because the paper is accountable and contactable by someone...by anyone.  But is this true? My understanding is that this type of argument is so far removed from reality, it is hard to discredit given the lack of reference. It’s like someone saying the moon is made of blue cheese – it is very hard to prove wrong given the lack of reference to the real world. Are blogs such as this one, and hundreds, if not thousands of other people who have recently focused on the media’s inability to report on the issue of the day responded to or even considered? I would doubt it. Is there going to be a response to this blog which, like many others would post the often-quoted explanation that “the problem with journalists is that they don’t read, can’t write and are unable to tell the difference between a bicycle crash and the end of civilisation.”

Why is it in the public interest that Peter Slipper is painted as a feral animal; one of the lowest in the natural world? What difference does it make? While he may have misbehaved, the media did not pick up on it at the time, neither have they since reported any information that would make it in the public interest. He’s a pervy old man who does pervy old man things...big deal. The media in the mean time are waxing lyrical about this, and a few other seemingly insignificant and personal issues while the country is plagued by different issues of various kinds that don’t get a look in. The reason perhaps is that to fill in an article about personal or emotional issues that someone has doesn’t require much research or any real work. It is lazy journalism. An article that points out how one political party’s representatives have labelled the other’s policies as silly, stupid, shameful or whatever doesn’t require any work. To actually report on the facts and expert opinions in a balanced way of whether this commentary is valid and why requires intelligence and effort. To “argue” for example, that there were lies about a carbon tax is easy to fill in a newspaper without any research or too much prior thought. To give a balanced and intelligent viewpoints for and against about whether it is a good thing in an economic, social, environment and/or other ways takes real work, research and intelligence.

The other argument presented was one of decency; that there are certain things you don’t do. A man whose fifteen year old daughter’s RIP page had been defaced by trolls making inappropriate comments went to the police, who incorrectly told him that they couldn’t do anything. While this is an awful situation, it’s not really something that is intrinsic to the internet. Police simply don’t know the law. If I had a dollar for every time I have tried to get police to act on a report of a specific criminal activity only to be told by some upstart loser in uniform that “there is nothing we can do...it’s not illegal”...well, I’d probably have around $67.35.

People need to be closer to their idealised self both online and in reality regardless of whether or not they can get away with being someone else.

This post’s groovy, identity-seeking quote:” All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake only in the day to find it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.”

This post’s lame Joke:
A doctor and a lawyer were talking at a party. As they talked they were constantly interrupted by people describing their health problems and asking the doctor for medical advice.

After an hour of this the doctor asked the lawyer, "What do you do to stop people asking you for legal advice when you're out of the office?"

The lawyer replied, "I give them the advice, and then the next day I send them a bill for the advice. They pay the bill, and never ask me for advice outside the office again."

The doctor was shocked but decided to try it.

The next day while the doctor was preparing the new bills, the postman pushed a letter through his letterbox.

The doctor opened the envelope and inside found a bill from the lawyer.

This post’s inappropriate over-share: When I was a teenager, I once accepted a deal/bet type thing with a guy to let him kiss me in exchange for a cigarette. I didn’t really give a toss about it, but I did get upset because the cigarette was a menthol. I know I, know you are saying “what kind of cigarette were you expecting from guy that would make that sort of challenge ?”

*and this doc has been sitting on my desktop for weeks now – throwing it together today as I am sick of letting it mock me in an unfinished type stain on my life...so sorry about the slapped-together flow of it.

Schools is the backbone of this country they is

sorry folks, but I promised to removed this post if a statement of claim were received... it has been, and it's now 7:35 on Wednesday 29 May, 2013...it will return when this matter has been dealt with fully.