WA bar president pens feisty free-speech letter to preposterous backbench noise machine … Demands that silk be stripped of gongs … Loose thinking … WA bar reaches out in support of the right to express offensive views … Groper reports
Senator Sarah Henderson is another of those irritating Nasty Party politicians – regularly thrusting herself into the headlines only to reveal she’s not the sharpest tool in the shed – just another member of the great plodding political ordinariness with which we are saddled.
She lost the seat of Corangamite and when Mitch (The Human Toilet Brush) Fifield was shuffled off to the UN, she was eased onto the red leather in the Chamber of Unrepresentative Swill.
Among her recent posturing fulminations are attacks on the ABC and its journalists for posting tweets insufficiently flattering to the government; weighing into former Liberal MP Julia Banks and her book Power Play by claiming that women are treated by the Liberal Party with saintly reverence; and most recently her overwrought assault on Julian Burnside QC.
Burnside tweeted on July 28 that the “treatment of the Palestinians looks horribly like the German treatment of the Jews during the Holocaust”. He was responding to a Human Rights Watch report about violations of international law during 11 days of fighting with Hamas.
Various figures from the Jewish lobby were incandescent, prompting Burnside to delete the tweet saying he regretted the Holocaust reference – usually a dangerous analogy to invoke. Nonetheless, he stuck with his criticism of Israel and its provocations of the Palestinian people.
This was not good enough for Henderson. His tweet was “probably the most vile, contemptible and sickening statement ever made by a senior member of the Victorian bar”, she said in a foam-flecked statement.
At last, the Liberal Party has found its new Bronwyn Bishop.
Senator Sarah wants Burnside roundly punished by the bar council and “stripped” of his gongs, QC and AO. She seems to think that the eminent silk has diminished public confidence in the legal profession
Vic’s bar has flicked it to the Bureau de Spank, where no doubt it will languish in a bottom drawer.
To the rescue rides Martin Cuerden SC, the president of the Western Australian Bar Association who, in a letter to Henderson told her to pull her head in.
Quite apart from the fact that Vic’s Bar ‘n’ Grill doesn’t have the power to “strip” anyone of their post-nominals, Cuerden said that Henderson’s denunciation of Burnside’s free speech doesn’t sit well with her job as chair of the senate legal and constitutional affairs legislation committee – which is to examine and report by December 31 on the Constitution Alteration (Freedom of Expression and Freedom of the Press) Bill, 2019.
Cuerden added that whatever opinion is held about Israeli-Palestinian affairs, “Mr Burnside was entitled, like any Australian, to express his views on the subject, and to do so in strong terms even if others, including yourself, find them offensive. He did not forfeit his right to do so upon being appointed Queen’s Counsel or receiving an Australian Honour”.
The WA bar prez reminded her that she has a “political and moral obligation” to uphold the democratic, liberal values on which Australian society is based and that her attack on Burnside’s free speech is “inconsistent with one of the most fundamental of these values”.
“It is for these reasons that I write on behalf of the WA Bar to express our concern at your conduct.”
Bravo Martin Cuerden.
Henderson dug a deeper hole for herself on Sunday (August 8) with a reply to Cuerden suggesting that he should be sacked as WA bar prez. Two defenestrations in one swoop.
Stamping her foot she added:
This may be a distraction from the raping, pillaging, incompetence and corruption on the part of Senator Henderson’s colleagues in governmnt.
Strangely, the Victorian bar hasn’t supported Burnside or told Senator Henderson where to get off.