The Tamil was made redundant recently by management at The Australian, and along with him the legal affairs section of the newspaper.
However, he has been reborn as an occasional scribbler and his most recent contribution was a lecture about the erosion of “equality before the law” by the Western Australian parliament and legislation to thwart Clive Palmer recovering damages against the state following a decision to block the sale of a mining project to Chinese interests. The Tamil added:
“From a rule-of-law perspective, retrospective legislation imposing a legal detriment on a named individual is an abomination.”
And The Tamil knows about abominations. Turn your memories back to Jihad Jack Thomas’s case where we come to grips with his version of the rule of law.
Jack Thomas was found guilty in 2004 of intentionally receiving funds from al-Qaeda and holding a false passport. He was the first person convicted under legislation dealing with the funding of terrorism and was sentenced to five years in pokey, with a minimum of two years.
In 2006, the Victorian Court of Appeal, Chris Maxwell, Peter Buchanan and Frank Vincent JJA, quashed his conviction because Thomas’s “confession” had been involuntary. A retrial was ordered and Thomas was placed under a control order.
“Whilst nothing occurred in the interview itself that could be seen to overbear the will of the applicant, there can be little doubt he was, at that time, subject to externally-imposed pressure of a kind calculated to overbear his will and thereby restrict, in a practical sense, his available choices and the manner of their exercise. His endeavours to persuade the interviewers of his good faith and the extent of his co-operation up to that point indicate that he was, as the trial judge found, seriously concerned about what would befall him if he failed to do so.”
Before the interview he had been held in solitary confinement, threatened with torture and with being sent to Guantanamo Bay.
This was not good enough for The Tamil. He wanted Thomas locked-up, regardless.
In the Weekend Australian of August 19-20, 2006, he wrote:
“When the legal system allows a mate of Osama bin Laden to walk free in Melbourne something is terribly wrong …
There might be all sorts of nice legal arguments that favour yesterday’s decision. But try explaining those to the families of those who died in Bali …
Instead of freeing the enemy, the law should be doing more in the real fight for liberty.”
He added:
“Some responsibility must rest with the judges. Why could they not find a reason to protect society from this man.”
The people at the ABC’s Media Watch asked Merritt in August 2006 to explain his understanding of the meaning and significance of the rule of law.
He replied:
“I stand by every word of the commentary that was published under my byline in The Australian. If you disagree with my opinion, and believe a friend of Al Qaida deserves to be free, I look forward to hearing your explanation.”
There’s more here.
In other words, the Tamil thinks the rule of law should accomodate confessions made under duress – something that puts Speedy’s institute, on which he serves as vice-president, on a creaky footing.
But wait, there’s more. There was an unsuccessful High Court challenge to the constitutional validity of the control order, with a decision on August 8, 2007.
Justice Michael Kirby was in the minority in that decision, and during the hearing he said that Americans had become completely obsessed with September 11, 2001 and that more people died of AIDS each day than died in the terrorist attacks in the US.
Kirby’s statement was quite valid, as there is little doubt that the reaction to September 11 resulted in the misadventure in Iraq and the subsequent turmoil and displacement in the Middle East.
The Tamil’s responded that Kirby was “one of Australia’s most offensive judges”.
In October 2008 a Victorian Supreme Court jury acquitted Thomas at the retrial of the terrorism charges, related to receiving $3,500 and a plane ticket from a member of al-Qaeda.
He was found guilty of falsifying a passport document by altering a visa for Afghanistan. He believed that the Taliban visa would be a “one-way ticket to Guantanamo Bay”. His nine-months jail term for the passport falsification was suspended. See sentencing decision.
It was reported that Thomas continued with his job as a milkman, whose delivery round included the Melbourne’s prosecutors’ office.
The upshot is that Rule of Law Merritt was calling for the continued detention of someone whom a jury found not guilty. This is not the usual stuff we hear from rule of law advocates, but the traditional concept was probably looking a bit tired and in need of revision.
At the time of the Victorian Court of Appeal decision in the Thomas case, Merritt also stood by while other paleo-conservatives, such as Gerard Henderson and Alan (The Parrot) Jones, attacked Justice Chris Maxwell on the basis that he was a former president of Liberty Victoria and a judicial appointment of the Bracks’ Labor government.
Then there was The Tamil’s spume-flecked rage in his columns and when he appeared with luminaries, such as Peta Credlin and Rowan Dean, on Sky News following the High Court majority decision in the Aboriginal aliens case.
The decision was “lunacy” and Justices Geoffrey Nettle, Virginia Bell, Michelle Gordon and James Edelman were perverting the Constitution in an “illegitimate exercise of judicial power”, he claimed.
The decision “comes close to giving the Aboriginal community a rival form of sovereignty [and] endangers the community’s confidence in the High Court” by introducing a “new racist concept” into the Constitution. These Aboriginals are “foreigners” protected by “lunacy”.
All part of the new look rule-of-law-Tamil-style.
This was followed by his recent encouragement for an idea floated in conservative circles which now sees the IPA drawing up a list of suitable High Court appointments – people who will uphold the Constitution “as written”.
It’s uplifting to see Robin Speed these days sporting a little cross in his lapel, once again reminding us that God works in mysterious ways.