The Tamil’s legal affairs section has closed-up shop, but he’s still scribbling for The Australian as a contributor … Lucky us … Paid private tours of the courts and cosy chats with judges organised by Robin and his Merry Men … Rule of law gets a libertarian makeover … Theodora reports 

The Tamil was one of the newspaper’s scribblers recently made redundant by the cost cutters at The National Rupert. 

The newspaper’s legal affairs section has crashed and burned and with it The Tamil’s weekly dose of thunderous declamations, dire warnings and fearless predictions. The school of over-egged journalism faces a crisis without Merritt at his cheer leader. 

However, it’s not entirely a calamity because he’s still on tap as a contributor and in that capacity he’s brought us his unique insight into the Peter Ridd case where James Cook University’s “snowflake bureaucrats” were given a good birching; and how Dyson Heydon didn’t get a fair trot from the High Court inquiry that found him to be a habitual sexual harasser. 

The young Tamil started in Newcastle and had the world at his feet after he was recognised at the city’s junior tap-dancing champion. 

Circuitously he wound up at the Financial Review where he was celebrated for his modest contributions and eerily quiet demeanour. 

The Australian invited him aboard to establish the paper’s Friday legal affairs section, in competition with the AFR’s well-established counterpart. 

Very soon he was drinking the Cool Aid at Murdoch’s bubbler. His tone became more shrill and his sermons more purple as he got in-step with the paper’s swivel-eyed rank and file. 

He was incandescent when the High Court in a majority decision found that Aboriginal Australians did not fall within the aliens power of the Constitution, declaring the judgments to be “lunacy” and an “illegitimate exercise of judicial power”.  

The Tamil was a barometer for many people. Whatever position he was zealously pushing, the polar opposite would be more considered and intelligent.

Robin Speed has been cranking-up his program to take school kiddies on tours of the courts. 

This is managed by Rule of Law Education, under the auspices of Australia’s Magna Carta Institute, an outfit top-heavy with reactionary drones. The board includes Speed himself, who campaigned against marriage equality; John Roskam from the Gina Rinoheart funded Institute of Public Affairs; David Lowy the progeny of the former shopping mall magnate; mining Tzar Hugh Morgan; and emeritus professor Geoffrey de Quincey Walker.  

Until very recently the board also included Dyson Heydon. The organisation exudes an overpowering whiff of paleo-conservatism. 

As we’ve noted before about Robin and his institute: 

“While appropriating the name associated with judicial independence and the separation of powers, the institute is in fact more closely aligned with pro-business, libertarian, anti-regulatory views that accord with the interests of Speed & Stracey’s corporate and tax clients.” 

The Magna Carta Institute has been offering students tours of the courts in Sydney, Parramatta and Wollongong, meetings and talks with judges or court officers, lectures, and a “professional development” program for legal studies teachers.  

The Rule of Law and Magna Carta people persuaded the NSW Judicial Commission to ask judges and magistrates to support their guided tours for school students. 

The institute collects a fee for arranging these “immersive” sessions – small groups at $88, medium groups at $220 and large groups will cost $396. 

Needless to say, the virus has played havoc with Robin’s Law Day Out agenda. 

Theodora is aware of one high school legal studies teacher who is less than impressed with the political tone of some of the articles posted on the institute’s website and suspects that the flavour of the talks and tours will be much the same. 

In June, NSW shadow attorney general asked the AG, Mark Speakman SC, on notice: 

We know the answers to those questions already, yet the attorney replied: 

It means the plague has put a temporary halt to these privatised court immersions or that Robin and his merry men are running Law Day Out operations covertly.