Winner of the Thawley prize channels Dyse in tone and ideology … Essay about keeping wretched bureaucrats in their place so freedom may blossom … Keep an eye on this Dyson duplicate 

THE Dyson Heydon Award for Young Fogey of the Year goes to … (drum roll) …  Daniel Ward. 

Young Dan has been popping-up quite a bit in the media with carefully curated viewpoints to the right of the soup spoon. 

Last month it was The Spectator’s turn with a article from Danny headlined The telegram that saved us from technocracy.  

It was about section 75(v) of the Australian Constitution and how it allows citizens to drag officialdom into the High Court for a writ of mandamus or prohibition. Importantly, the essay came all the way from Magdalen College Oxford, where the lad is studying post-grad law, at Malcolm Fraser’s old college. 

The story goes that Tasmanian jurist Andrew Inglis Clark telegrammed Toss Pot Toby Barton to get him to reinsert s.75(v) back into the draft Constitution, after it was discovered that the US Supremes in Marbury v Madison found it had no power to issue a writ of mandamus.  

“Just as the seasoned roué can but guess at the number of his bastard offspring, the Commonwealth government gropes vainly for a tally of public bodies it has spawned. According to the 2014 Commission of Audit, there are ‘about’ 900 of them. Such is their rampancy, that the audit commissioners recommended a national register to keep track of them, like vexatious litigants or paedophiles.” 

[snip]

“But section 75(v) is not merely the plaything of refugee advocates and the human rights lobby. For it protects the ordinary, run-of-the-mill freedoms of Sir Robert Menzies’ forgotten people. The enterprising pharmacist whose attempt to open a neighbourhood pharmacy is smothered by a Canberra public servant. The business owner threatened with officious intermeddling by Workplace Gender Equality Agents. The pilot unfairly denied a licence by the Civil Aviation Safety Authority. The honest taxpayer hounded by the ATO. The hapless employer tossed before a Fair Work Commission bristling with former union officials.” 

Yes, those rotten bureaucrats at the ATO trying to grasp money from honest people like the Packers and the Murdochs, and their corporate extensions. 

This golden essay took out the Speccy’s Thawley prize, created by Michael Thawley’s family, an old Howard-era bureaucrat and now Tony Abbott’s hand-picked head of PM&C. 

Apart from a cheque for $5,000 the winner “will enjoy a lunch with the judging panel – John Howard, Rowan Dean and Michael Thawley – at a top Sydney restaurant during the first half of 2015”.   

Dan is the son of the Perfumed Steamroller, TV personality Jana Wendt, and her cameraman husband. He shot to fame in November 2013 when he scribbled an article for The National Rupert which said that Greens leader Christine Milne’s opposition to the repeal of section 18C of the RDA belongs in the “theatre of the absurd”. 

The Greens are one party that should support repeal of the section, he argued, because some of its members also belonged to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Campaign that targets Israel and Israelis. 

Without s.18C, Dan thought that the the BDS people could campaign without fear of being sued for offensiveness by Israelis. 

At the time the publication of the article caused a fuss because Ward was associate to James Allsop, CJ of the Federal Court and it wasn’t done for judges’ associates to be slagging politicians in the public tissues. 

Still, if Danny Boy keeps this up it’s just a matter of time before he’s speaking at a Quadrant dinner or getting an appointment from Soapy.