FREYA’S CRIME MAY BE ‘AT THE LOWEST END OF SCALE’ BUT IT HAS NETTED THE BLOODY BIGGEST FISH OF ALL Nearly all the newsprint media I’ve seen regarding this story concur in conveying the impression that Freya Newman is in the wrong and that the Judge’s ruling has been consistent with that fact. None challenge this assumption which has the status of fact but is actually a credo of convenience covering up as it does a potentially huge polemical situation for the PM and his war on the so called “culture of entitlement”. ‘The Australian’, for example, uses one of the Summaries in Teresa Sullivan’s ruling for its title, where Freya Newman’s ‘crime’ would be at “the lowest end of the scale”, but omits to mention the fact that the prosecution of this ‘little crime’ has netted the bloody biggest fish of all in its web! It is extraordinary that at the centre of this embarrassing juridico-political episode in Australian recent political history of outrageous policy proposals and embarrassing back downs, is nothing less than clear evidence of such ‘cultural misfeasance’ from the part of the Prime Minister and his family. As I told Channels Ten and ABC when they asked me for my opinion “I am here today because after all that has been said about the war on the culture of entitlement, this case reveals where it truly lies”. And, I add now: where it means to stay. The Freya Newman case has revealed what a phony ‘war’ it is (welfare entitlements) and that the war that Abbott is talking about is really a war on ‘the people’ (their rights, aspirations and requirements). The ruling handed down by Teresa Sullivan is really a compromise between the two, and I admit that had I been the judge, I would not have liked to be given such a case. One thing that it isn’t however, is a mere deterrent to future whistleblowers, but it is an endorsement – direct or indirect - of the privacy rights of individuals and corporations, no matter what dirty business their sacrosanct privacy conceals. What else could explain the twit intervention by that arrogant poontz – Christopher Pyne? (The sentence was not harsh enough). However, what people need to realise, is that privacy is a corollary of power and wealth, and that once everything has been taken from them, the idea has no meaning at all. The growing number of people sleeping rough in the streets of our cities are living proof of that. Ironically, though not ironically enough given the malevolence of the case, the sentence passed on Newman is really an indictment on the entire set up – the journalists who have(n’t) reported the case, the sentencing judge, and those Huns whom the Australian people, in their wisdom, put in government September of last year. Let these words also serve as reproof to those members of this stream that with the sentence over, and the leniency of the sentence, think the matter is finished and they can now say goodbye. The smugness and feeble complacency of some of the remarks I have seen prove that people get the politicians they deserve.
Posted on: Wed, 26 Nov 2014 11:24:54 +0000
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