THE HISTORY CHANNEL James Plumridge

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death…

Shakespeare: Macbeth, Act V Sc. 5

Beware, monitor lizards on the loose

After the April Council meeting, I had a brief conversation with Commissioner Best.

He told me among other things that the blog is being monitored at the request of the Shire’s insurers’ lawyers. Every contribution is printed out and passed on to them. (Why can’t they do the job themselves?  Don’t they have access to the Internet?)

I have no idea what this process is meant to accomplish.  I can’t see that it would benefit the Shire’s insurers, the Shire or ratepayers in any way. 

Perhaps the plan is to intimidate contributors like David Taylor and me, who identify themselves by subscribing their names, with the veiled threat of legal action.  If so, it isn’t going to work.

Anonymous and pseudonymous contributors can’t be traced.  Even the Blogmaster can’t trace them.  So friends, if the thought of being pursued by monitor lizards worries you, ignore my previous requests to identify yourselves, and take cover behind fancy confected names.

‘Offensive’ comments on the blog

During our conversation, the Commissioner objected to comments posted on the blog that mention unfavourably members of Shire staff.  He also suggested the blog should go a bit easier on certain former Shire presidents.

Personally, I find it difficult to summon up much sympathy for councillors who abused their position and influence to bully and intimidate residents. Nor do I have tears to shed for Shire officials who carried out enthusiastically and apparently without question the more dubious instructions of a former chief executive.

These days the Nuremberg defence—‘I was only obeying orders’—simply won’t do.

More than once, I’ve asked my fellow bloggers not to give vent to rabid personal abuse—not on the blog, anyway.

I pointed out to the Commissioner that the verbal free-for-all that occasionally ran riot during the early days of the blog is now pretty well (though not entirely) a thing of the past.  The quality of comments has improved dramatically over recent months, with contributors these days generally more inclined to argue a case than engage in strident abuse.

From the beginning, this blog has acted as a bastion of free speech.  By all means, though, let’s exercise restraint where decency, fairness and objectivity require it.

Restraint—or self-censorship?

All the same, there’s a fine line between restraint and self-censorship. 

Where elected office holders or public officials are associated with wrongful or corrupt behaviour that has had a negative impact on the lives and welfare of others, they must expect to be identified, criticised, held up to scorn and pelted, figuratively speaking, with rotten tomatoes.

At first blush, it’s hard to see why DLGC staff have shown themselves so keen to dismiss corrupt acts of the past—like dishing out jobs, contracts and other benefits to relatives and friends, falsifying public records, misallocating public funds, credit card ‘anomalies’, and using Shire employees to intimidate concerned residents—as ‘historical issues’ deserving only to be buried and forgotten.

They are well aware that some people still around have a strong personal interest in burying the truth about those ‘historical issues’.  They would also know, or strongly suspect, that there is evidence in the files and elsewhere of corruption, even of crime.  Yet, astonishingly, they insist that nothing should be done about those things and nobody compelled to account for them.  Why?

Never mind history, shroud truth in mystery

I surmise that this attitude has everything to do with their having been well acquainted with York’s ‘historical issues’—which frustrated residents reported to them over several years—but choosing to ignore them.  Thus they made themselves, in some sense, accessories to what went on and now have to keep that quiet.

According to DLGC probity guru Brad Jolly, in a letter dated 12 January 2015 to a local ratepayer, ‘…in 2013, circumstances did not exist that warranted making a recommendation to the Minister to issue a Show Cause Notice to the Shire of York Council’.

Either Mr. Jolly had spent several years living under a coconut shell, or he knew, when he wrote that, that what he was writing was untrue. 

He and his colleagues would have known in considerable detail of the very poor handling by Shire President Reid’s predecessors of council meetings and public question time.  They would have known that there there had been for many years substantial non-compliance with the record keeping requirements of the Local Government Act, the responsibility in the first instance, it should be noted, of the Shire’s then CEO Ray Hooper.

If they didn’t know, they were negligent.  If, as I believe, they did know, they were culpable.  Either way, they did nothing until prodded spitefully into action against Matthew Reid by their old friends Crs Hooper and Boyle and former CEO Ray Hooper, with Cr Hooper’s poodle Superduper tagging obediently behind.

They joined with those dignitaries in bearing false witness against Cr Reid, for example by accusing him of authorising the release of the Fitz Gerald Report (he didn’t) and of signing two purchase orders actually (and obviously) signed by then Acting CEO Keeble.  They also accused him of ‘standing down’ and ‘terminating’ CEO Hooper, when in fact, as they must have known, Mr. Hooper had ‘terminated’ himself (though not ‘with extreme prejudice’) by resigning.

Readers might be interested to know that Brad Jolly is the officer designated to handle our FOI application to the DLGC.  I’ve protested, but so far in vain.

‘The past is a foreign country’ but sometimes we have to go there

Implicit in the department’s thinking is the argument that because bad things have happened in the past, they should be of little or no concern to the present. 

That argument seems to have been the basis of the brief the Minister, acting on departmental advice, gave to Commissioner Best before sending him off, like a colonial officer of old, to subdue and tame the ‘sullen peoples, half-devil and half-child’ running wild in the streets of York and on the slopes of Mount Brown.  

It underwrites the department’s determination to flush our ‘historical issues’ down the nearest available loo.

Luckily for all of us, our law enforcement agencies operate differently.  If I had committed a string of burglaries several years ago but had only just been caught, what good do you think it would do me to tell the police and the magistrate they should forget about my felonious forays into other folks’ homes because time has elapsed and they are now merely ‘historical issues’? 

Where a community has been done over and ripped off by people who were supposed to take care of its interests, retribution against those most responsible is an essential precursor to recovery, reconciliation and revival.

It’s a sad fact of political life in a democracy that sometimes we miserable forelock-tuggers are betrayed by the very people we elect or appoint to rule over us. 

Whitecollar crime really is crime, on the same legal and moral plane as defrauding Centrelink, armed robbery or knocking down an old lady and stealing her purse.  It isn’t just a bit of fun, a game for privileged players. It’s deadly serious, and people who engage in it may eventually find themselves drawing the card that reads ‘Go directly to jail’.