Drumgold still in trouble



If ever a man has been destroyed by his own political correctness, it is Shane Drumgold, SC. He abused his position as prosecutor to launch a very weak rape case against Bruce Lehrmann, because "believe the woman" was all the rage. And to help a weak case to stand up he said a number of things that have come back to haunt him.

I feel sorry for him. He clawed his way up to a prestigious position depite humble origins in Mount Druitt. But the battle apparently left him insecure so he was unable to resist media pressure to prosecute. He lacked the self confidence that would have come from a private school background -- the usual background for a barrister

I too have a humble background and went to no school at all for my university entrance qualification but I have never aspired to public prominence. Economic and academic success has been plenty for me. Good interpersonal relationships are the only important form of success as far as I can see and my record there has been mixed. One wonders how Drumgold's second marriage is faring

Five Australian Federal Police ­officers have begun defamation action against the ACT government over allegations by former chief prosecutor Shane Drumgold that they engaged in “a very clear campaign to pressure” him not to prosecute the alleged rape of Brittany Higgins.

Lawyers for the five officers have sent a concerns notice to the government and to Mr Drumgold over his allegations against them, which included that they had ­engaged in “consistent and inappropriate interference” in the trial of Bruce Lehrmann.

The allegations were made in a letter Mr Drumgold sent to ACT police chief Neil Gaughan on ­November 1, 2022, expressing concern over “some quite clear ­investigator interference in the criminal justice process”.

The letter sparked the Sofronoff inquiry into police and prosecution conduct in the Lehrmann case, which largely exonerated police and found that Mr Drumgold’s assertions were baseless.

One of the AFP officers told The Australian the letter had ­“destroyed careers and destroyed people’s lives”. “When you’re in a profession where integrity is ­pivotal, if you lose your integrity, if it’s suggested that you are corrupt or you’ve trying to pervert the course of justice or influence something, it just goes against the grain,” the officer said.

“I don’t think people appreciate the impact that this whole ­debacle over the four years has had on individual police officers. We did nothing wrong, and we are paying the price.”

The concerns notice – a precursor to defamation proceedings – comes just days after the ACT government apologised to former Liberal minister Linda Reynolds and paid $90,000 in damages and legal costs over accusations by Mr Drumgold in the same letter that the senator had engaged in “disturbing conduct” that included political interference in the police investigation.

Mr Drumgold authorised the release of the unredacted letter after talking to a journalist from The Guardian, who then lodged a Freedom of Information request.

The letter, containing the DPP’s suspicions of impropriety against the named police officers and Senator Reynolds, was ­released without any of the ­consultations or redactions ­required by law. The FOI application was determined and executed within four hours of being considered for the first time.

The Sofronoff inquiry found that suspicions Mr Drumgold formed during his early interactions with the investigators “predisposed him to see non-existent malignancy in benign inter­actions between the police and the defence at the trial”.

Mr Drumgold complained police were speaking with the ­defence at the trial during ­adjournments. However, it was not surprising police felt deep antipathy towards the DPP since the feeling was mutual, the Sofronoff inquiry found. “Mr Drumgold did not seem to appreciate that mutual trust is a two-way street. It was he who, at the first opportunity, formed the baseless opinion that the investigators were improperly trying to thwart a prosecution.

“This inquiry has thoroughly examined the allegations in Mr Drumgold’s letter. Each allegation has been exposed to be ­baseless.”

Late in giving his evidence, Mr Drumgold “finally resiled from his scandalous allegations,” ­inquiry chair Walter Sofronoff noted. Mr Sofronoff said that “any official writing a letter of that kind would also know that copies of the letter would have to pass through many hands and that there was a real risk that it would be made public”.

“In fact, it was with the help of Mr Drumgold himself that the letter defaming others made its way into a newspaper.”

Mr Sofronoff found no police acted improperly: “The evidence before me showed that the investigators consistently acted in good faith and conducted a thorough investigation … Nobody suggested to me that the investigation was flawed in any way.”

The police had made mistakes, Mr Sofronoff said, including conducting a second interview with Ms Higgins that was not likely to produce anything useful and which caused her distress.

“None of these mistakes actually affected the substance of the investigation and none of them prejudiced the case … I do not find that any police officer breached a duty or acted improperly.”

One of the officers bringing the defamation action was critical of the ACT government’s attitude towards its police force. “The ACT, it’s a bubble here. It is a very closed shop and I think some of the people in these positions are batting way above their weight. Two police stations are closed because the government hasn’t invested. They have no care for the police at all. The number of police that are off due to stress, or leaving, it’s phenomenal.”

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/police-officers-sue-over-shane-drumgold-claims-that-destroyed-lives/news-story/8ce9e4ca7168b4846a2355e6ba1a3c3f

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Understanding national conservatism

National conservatism sounds suspicuously like Trumpism, particularly on trade issues. "Free trade" has always sounded good to conservatives but Trump showed that it should not be an all-powerful consideration.

And Trump was not really being unorthoox in his trade restrictions. Economists have always recognized exceptions to the desirabiity of free trade: "Infant industry" and the "Australian" cases for instance. And the "supply-chain" difficulties presently besetting trade rather vindicate that


The Economist, the British magazine well-known for its particular metropolitan liberal worldview, had a pearl-clutching cover piece last week where it bemoaned ‘the growing peril of national conservatism’.

‘It’s dangerous and it’s spreading,’ the editorial warned its readers – making it sound like some new Covid variant.

What exactly is national conservatism?

Australians could be forgiven for being a little in the dark, for while there have been national conservative conferences in Washington DC and Florida in America, and in London, Brussels, and Rome in Europe, there has been nothing similar so far here. There are no mainstream Australian journalists who describe themselves using that label. Nor, unlike elsewhere, are there leading politicians or any groupings in any of our mainstream parties who march under that banner. I have found it a struggle to get those involved in the think tank world and in centre-right politics in Australia to even understand the concept properly.

The Economist labelled national conservatives as those ‘seized by declinism’, ‘the politics of grievance’, and those who see the ‘state as its saviour’. But that is unfair and does not do this intellectual movement justice. National conservatives have a deep philosophical critique of the assumptions held by policymakers in the capitals of the West. As some of the leading intellectuals of the movement, like Yoram Hazony, have explored in great depth, they are critical of aspects of classical liberalism and the dominant worldview which over-emphasises the sovereign individual, rather than the family, the nation, and our religious traditions as the source of our prosperity and freedoms. They believe the focus in centre-right circles has, in recent years, gone awry. In the words of Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni, it is time to ‘put conservatism back into its traditional sphere of national identity’.

Perhaps the most obvious areas where national conservatives differ from the current centre-right are in relation to immigration, trade, and foreign policy.

First and foremost, national conservatives reject the long-standing consensus on immigration. They believe that mass immigration perhaps poses more of an existential threat to the West than Soviet missiles ever did. Nations like Poland and Hungary recovered from years of communist domination. But it is far less clear whether parts of Western Europe and elsewhere will survive the ethnic conflicts and other threats to social cohesion that have been carelessly imported into their homelands. This is not simply about ‘stopping the boats’ or ‘building the wall’ – although many Western governments struggle to do even that. It is emphatically also about legal immigration. There needs to be a reassessment from first principles as to what level and what type of immigration, if any, makes sense for Western nations and our peoples going forward. In the Howard era, there was an oft-repeated line that because the government was able to control illegal immigration Australians welcomed higher levels of legal immigration. If that was ever actually true, it is not true now.

National conservatives also recognise that the trade and investment policies of the West need a serious rethink. They reject the idea that the end goal, beau ideal, should be open borders trade and investment between nations, without regard to their differing economic, social, or political circumstances. To be clear, this means large numbers of Australia’s existing trade and investment agreements, including but not limited to, the one we signed with China, will need to be torn up or at the very least significantly redesigned. Our trade and investment policies have created boom towns in places like Shenzhen and Bangalore and rust belts in places like Stockbridge, Elizabeth, and Youngstown. They have gutted our national industrial capacity and destroyed communities. They have turned us into exquisite connoisseurs of imported goods, rather than producers of anything other than primary produce or overpriced housing to sell to foreigners. The idea, so beloved by The Economist, that it should be as easy to import manufactured goods from China to Australia as it is to import the same from England to France needs to be consigned to the ash heap of history.

National conservatives also believe that our foreign policy needs to change. The reckless evangelicalism that has characterised Western military adventures for well over the last quarter century needs to stop. What is needed is a new prudence that is focused instead on our vital interests (narrowly defined) and which is far more selective about the conflicts we allow ourselves to be dragged into. Large numbers of our people are simply sick to the back teeth of endless and pointless wars in places like Somalia, Serbia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya and elsewhere. These are places that they do not really care that much about, but which they or their children have been expected to die for. These interventions always seem to follow a similar storyline: some bad guy is the ‘next Hitler’, a particular incident is the ‘new Munich’. Unless we get involved and offer unlimited economic or military support, we are Neville Chamberlain-like appeasers. Certain politicians then get to globe-trot around the globe pretending they are the next Winston Churchill. Inevitably what then follows, many years later, is a loss of blood, treasure, and national prestige, the destabilising of entire regions and a flood of refugees, and all manner of second-order unintended consequences. In nearly all cases these are not grand ideological struggles, but messy intractable ethnic disputes where there are no pure actors on either side.

There are other areas of policy where national conservatives have new and constructive things to say, including on social policy – where a reconstitution of family structures and traditional ways of life is going to be as important as the reconstruction of our national borders and identity. But if there is one theme that unites this movement, it is that they are anti-Utopian. The left was in the past the utopian ones, the ones who liked to ‘imagine there is no countries’. But since the great victory in the Cold War the centre-right has also become increasingly un-moored from reality. It has ignored the importance of the nation-state when it comes to trade, immigration and foreign policy and many other issues. All national conservatives are asking is that we get real again.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/03/understanding-national-conservatism/

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Transgenderism is an attack on women

The 21st Century Australian woman has greater freedom and opportunities afforded to her than at any other time in history, and to truly honour this legacy, we must reflect, be proud and thank those who led the way.

However, in the abundance of blessings, women face a new battle. It is not to do with votes or pay but an attack on our very being – an attack on the identity of a woman.

What is a woman? An adult female human.

Plain and simple I would have thought. Not so, according to some. Sadly, the movement to let men parade as women and demand female recognition has erased the uniqueness, beauty and femininity of a woman by claiming that womanhood is merely a subjective feeling that can be experienced by any person, notably men!

This modern tendency to question basic biology places women in greater danger than even the suffragettes would have thought possible. It disgraces the hard-fought battles women have mounted and won, to achieve equality.

Women deserve to feel safe and respected. We have achieved this through removing the marriage bar, criminalising marital rape and legislating against sex discrimination.

However, despite this progress women today now find themselves in a fight for the right even to be recognised as biological women. The right to safe spaces including single-sex toilets, change rooms and female-only prisons has now also been denied.

It is becoming increasingly common to have all-gender and trans-inclusive bathrooms to cater to a minority of men who feel like women. Women can’t even be guaranteed a safe place to champion women’s rights, including on the steps of Parliament House in Melbourne. This idea would outrage suffragette women and the early feminist movement and rightly so.

The fact is that today, feelings trump women’s safety and very existence. And for what?

The logical fallacy that people should choose the restroom that they feel most comfortable using over the protection of vulnerable girls is unacceptable. The fact that women can be raped in a woman’s prison by a man masquerading as a woman is deplorable.

The dignity of women is further disgraced by rhetoric that distorts the truth of motherhood.

The ability to produce and nurture life is a phenomenon that only women can experience. But today, inclusivity has overridden our right to be called a mother, in favour of ‘person who gives birth’, ‘chest-feeder’, or simply ‘parent’. For the record, I’m not a birthing parent but a proud mother.

Gender blindness, including the use of gender-neutral language, destroys the significant differences between men and women, a basic biological factor in life.

Our over-sensitivities today strip women of their dignity and right to existence.

I never thought that upon my entrance into the Victorian Parliament in 2018, I would have to fight to uphold the definition of womanhood and argue for the protection of rights for women and girls.

We do a great disservice to those women who achieved equality and respect by allowing the identity for which they were really fighting to be erased.

As we approach International Women’s Day, let us celebrate the achievements of women yesterday, be thankful for the blessings we have today, and proudly and boldly proclaim the uniqueness and dignity of womanhood for tomorrow and the foreseeable future. And we must also applaud our modern-day heroes, fighting at the barricades of social media and legislative halls to preserve the unique and precious identity of what is, a woman.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/03/women-back-to-the-barricades/

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Universality and the university

More selectivity needed for admissions, not less

Recently, the Australian University Accord met to discuss the manifest failings of our tertiary education system. The result has been a predictable raft of recommendations, couched in the langue de bois of our modern class: equity, innovation, agility, et al. In other words, all the things that got us into this mess to start with. These are words that, once they start tumbling from someone’s mouth, indemnify them against the risk of being identified as a genuine mind.

Established by the Labor Party, we should expect the Australian University Accord’s report would reflect Labor values. Those Labor values now apparently include the annihilation of the working man, with the recommendation that 80 per cent of Australians should pass through the hallowed doors of the university system. They, like everything else in a society driven by data-as-God, mistake quantity for quality.

In one respect, they are addressing a genuine problem. As a nation we are perhaps stupider than ever; PISA results continue to decline, and our primary and secondary education systems are mutual reflections of our tertiary system. Literary references, a command of basic mathematics, a sense of history, and the ability to write coherently: these all seem blue remembered hills.

However, furthering universal education is unlikely to fix the problems the proliferation of universal education created. For reasons entirely predictable, education proved vulnerable to the law of diminishing returns. An elite education cannot be made available to everybody; it is far easier to ensure that nobody receives an elite education. This is the cost of equity-above-all-else as a governing principle. People are not equal, and cannot be made equal. People cannot even be made to regard one another as equal. Equality, along with our obsession with data, is another false god of our age.

The problem with the university system is not one of scarcity, but one of inflation. We bend every possible requirement to allow people the opportunity to enter university, and do everything possible to prevent them failing once they’re there. We’re one step from conscripting the population into tertiary education, and the credentials required for entry-level jobs have changed to reflect this. This is to say nothing of adolescence extended, family delayed, and earning prospects limited for several years of study. A bachelor’s degree today is the equivalent of the school leaver certificate of yesterday; people collect master’s degrees today like they collected Pokémon as children. Credentialism for most of the population represents a ticket to the middle class and social respectability, as much as potential earning power in the future. These are powerful incentives, which explain why 60 per cent of the population has been pressed into the ivory tower at some point in their lives. Yet careerism is not the only purpose the university is supposed to serve.

Among those giving, everything produced by the university sector – certainly in the non-empirical world – has been through a peer-reviewed strainer to prevent anything original or novel emerging. They reference one another like incestuous monks and write in a bizarre argot to demonstrate their membership. Some faculties, and some universities, are worse than others. They bring to mind the scholasticism of earlier centuries, but without the rigour. And, as was the case in the Reformation, genuinely new ideas will emerge from outside the walls of what we consider epistemologically established. Many academics are reincarnations of apocryphal medieval theologians arguing about the quantity of angels that can fit on a pinhead. It is easier for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle than for your average academic to produce something interesting.

On the receiving end, the university system is no better. Every second person has a Mickey-Mouse degree from a Mickey-Mouse university, and few of them could hold an intelligent conversation with a secondary school graduate from half a century ago. Whatever the university is producing, it is not minds. But I’ve long held the suspicion that this is exactly the point. The last thing the postmodern West is interested in is a population with minds, and for most people what passes for wisdom today is browsing Wikipedia and calling out logical fallacies on Reddit. The snarky intellect of the educated Millennial or Zoomer, like a shallow and unbearably noisy stream, lacks blue water. We produce sophistry among those who should be passing on the knowledge of our civilisation, and encourage cynicism among those who receive it.

Aside from the turgid careerism of academics and the acquisitiveness of students – perhaps sellers and buyers of indulgences is a better term – there are two obvious reasons why The Powers That Be encourage this. The first is for financial reasons. Education is big business in Australia. Only mining has a larger output share. The university system doubles as a means of laundering citizenship and immigration, and siphoning money from overseas elites adds to the cash paid over the span of their working lives by native-born graduates. The government collects more revenue from HECS than it does from the petroleum resource rent tax. No government that values its bottom line is going to advocate for less tertiary education.

The second reason is an ideological one. The universities are captured institutions: an American report estimated that the ratio of conservative to liberal professors shifted 350 per cent in the latter direction since 1984. Even if you enter to study STEM or something vocational, they’ll still get you with the mandatory modules on diversity and Indigenous perspectives and all the rest of the postmodern religiosity we now accept as normal. The result is a braindead middle class composed of eunuchs and temple priestesses. If this sounds hyperbolic, remember how the university sector responded to the Western Civilisation courses offered by the Ramsay Centre. You’d think they’d like more money and more students, but to give them credit, occasionally their principles get in the way. Both ANU and the University of Sydney weren’t interested. They value the message above the money. Today’s liberal-Marxist elite, who live in constant terror afraid of their own shadows, will broker no competition in the world of ideas. They know it was thanks to that they got their stranglehold to begin with. They also suspect, in their heart of hearts, that their cherished ideas are terrible, anti-natural, and essentially anti-human.

The postmodern university is a house of cards. It would be too much to expect the Australian Universities Accord to admit as much.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/03/universality-and-the-university/

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Will no one rid us of the meddlesome mandarins?

It’s time to call a spade a spade. We no longer live in the democratic Commonwealth of Australia but in a federation of socialist states.

This federation is run by nearly two-and-a-half million unelected bureaucrats who intrude into every aspect of our daily lives. If you know what’s good for you, you will obey them and keep your opinions to yourself. After all, governments know best and better that you become dependent on them rather than take personal responsibility for your misfortunes and disappointments.

Without the public realising it, bureaucrats have successfully inverted the democratic system. They now set the policy agenda while left-leaning, elected representatives, from all sides, do their bidding.

Form over substance is a self-serving public servant’s stock-in-trade. They are driven by woke causes, internal politics and enhanced authority. The bigger the department, the more they are paid. As well as handsome remuneration they enjoy some of the most generous work-from-home rights in the country.

Woke activism has become a particular preoccupation. Climate change, Aboriginal causes, LGBTQIA+ observances and diversity, equity and inclusion are central to policy formulation.

Women now comprise 50 per cent of the total federal senior executive service cohort. It is unknown how many of these appointments were appointed on merit and how many are there to fill quotas.

Privileged employment conditions usually carry superior performance obligations. However, that remains a consummation devoutly to be wished.

Take the head of the Defence Department, Greg Moriarty. Previously the chief of staff to prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, he received $1,006,474 last year for presiding over a department which deemed it unnecessary to inform the government of a $100 million cost over-run on a $50 million classified programme; where eight years is considered acceptable to assess urgently needed armed drones. And where, according to the Auditor-General, a $423 million cost blowout on a frigate project was due to lack of focus during the tender process.

Recasting military culture into a gentler, more caring cohort is driving out traditional warriors. Uniformed numbers shrank by 1,161 last year leaving the ADF 3,400 under strength.

The first object of the Australian Public Service, set out in Section 3 of the Public Service Act 1999, is, ‘to establish an apolitical public service that is efficient and effective in serving the Government, the Parliament and the Australian public’. A noble objective to be sure, but in practice there continues to be an unrelenting decline in efficiency, transparency and neutrality. For example, the Grattan Institute found since 2016, of 22 large federal government projects, just six had a business case.

It is no coincidence that the government’s Productivity Commission reports that over the past decade growth in GDP and income per person have slipped to their slowest rates in 60 years. While not all of this is due to growth in government, it is a major factor.

Not only does government not conform on efficiency, it also fails the apolitical test.

Federal Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications and the Arts chief, Jim Betts, who earns $928,340 a year, wore a t-shirt featuring the Aboriginal flag and a fist at Senate Estimates during the Voice referendum campaign.

While not federal, many local governments lowered Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags to half-mast following the referendum defeat. Some fly the Palestinian flag; hardly demonstrations of political neutrality.

Indeed, post-modern activism is observable throughout the public service. In education, politically motivated curricula have been developed to subtly indoctrinate children as young as five. State universities are intolerant of views which run counter to their post-modern orthodoxy. The government broadcaster, the ABC, is a shameless activist for socialist causes. The one million dollars a day Australian Bureau of Meteorology’s modelling and forecasting faithfully follows a global ‘boiling’ narrative.

Socialism is also deeply imbedded in Australia’s failing ‘public’ health system. Epitomised by the NDIS, it is the result of a ‘know better’ authoritarian culture and a disdain for the laws of economics.

Meanwhile, as bureaucratic red, green and black tape proliferate, criminal sanctions feature with increasing regularity. This year it is estimated the number of federal employees engaged in regulatory roles will increase nine per cent overall with some agencies upping the number by 30 per cent. Since 2005, 97 per cent of new regulations have avoided parliamentary process. No wonder. Coercive powers enhance bureaucratic authority and give reasons for expansion. Political interference is unwelcome.

The enormous cost burdens now borne by business from ever increasing environmental and workplace laws seem to matter little. After all, fewer businesses are easier to control. Australia has become a net exporter of capital, meaning investors see better opportunities overseas.

Yet corporate Australia meekly surrenders and is now a standard-bearer for bigger government and post-modernism. Reminiscent of 1933 Germany, business leaders accept that when their organisation’s future is inexorably linked to being on one political side, they must pay close attention to the new doctrine. Crony capitalism has attractions, at least for a while.

Although authority now resides within Marxist-Leninist bureaucracies, headline announcements are left to elected representatives. They are mainly theatre and used for election purposes. The execution is left to unaccountable public servants. Meanwhile, the ballot box has just become a place for voters to register protests.

Where to from here?

Buoyed by booming exports, Australian governments have bet the shop on the minerals boom continuing. It’s a dangerous bet, made more so by environmental laws which generously gift Australia’s competitors significant cost advantages. Regulatory obsession has also resulted in a massive decline in Australia’s manufacturing sector. It seems national security is the last thing on government minds.

Unless and until a political leader with the courage and support of its party takes on the public service like Javier Milei has done in Argentina, the will of the people will not be represented, nor prevail.

Hopefully Australia takes action sooner than Argentina did.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/03/will-no-one-rid-us-of-the-meddlesome-mandarins/

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM -- daily)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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