Piers Akerman
MOST NSW traffic offenders who dutifully mail off their cheques to the Infringement Processing Bureau do so in the belief that the bureau is an arm of the law enforcement administration, a special traffic court, perhaps.
But, as last Tuesday’s decision by the Appeal Court to throw out five charges against former Federal Court judge Marcus Einfeld shows, the judiciary takes a rather more narrow view.
Justice as understood by punters in the street, and those who sit on the Bench, are two different animals.
In the street, the speed camera, the red light camera, the parking inspector, all have the power to issue penalties for infringements but according to the court ruling, the Infringement Bureau, which handles those penalties, lacks the status of a court.
That is the nub of the argument made by Justices Virginia Bell, Robert Hulme and Megan Latham in support of their decision on more than half of the charges Einfeld faced.
Last year Einfeld, 69, was committed for trial on nine charges, six relating to perverting the course of justice.
The first alleged that he made a false declaration to the Infringement Processing Bureau after a camera recorded an offence on September 4 1999 by the driver of a car allotted to him as a Federal Court judge. Einfeld said the driver was a US professor, N.D. Levick, who was not in Australia at the time.
The next two related to two allegedly false statutory declarations he made following an offence on February 4 2003 by the driver of a car he owned. He said the driver was Professor Theresa Brennan, of Florida. Professor Brennan died on February 3 2003.
Counts four and five were brought after the driver of a car owned by Einfeld was detected by a traffic camera committing an offence on November 29 2003. In two allegedly false statutory declarations he swore that the driver was Dr Tim Oliver of he UK. Dr Oliver was not in Australia at the time.
The Crown argued that making the alleged false declarations amounted to perversion of justice, which also encompassed obstructing, preventing, perverting or defeating the course of justice of the administration of the law.
However the Court of Appeals found that the statutory declarations did not come within its view of what constituted the administration of the law.
“In our opinion, the words ‘the administration of the law’ in s 312 (of the NSW Crimes Act) are not to be accorded their literal meaning, which, like James J, we take to include the exercise by a government body of its functions in applying and enforcing the law,” they wrote in their decision. - It was never going to be easy for an ALP administration to allow a living legend to be prosecuted. As with justice Shaw, there seems to be one rule for them, and another for the others. A recent election in Cabramatta and a good restaurant was fined a small amount for some transgression .. which was printed in the local papers. One isn't sure that the transgression wasn't related to a sign out the front wishing the local liberal candidate well. - ed.
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Nature disobeys warming models
Andrew Bolt
Renown climate scientist Roy Spencer compares the alarming predictions of the warming models to the warming we’re actually seeing:
The discrepancy between the models and observations seen in Fig. 1 is stark. If the sensitivity of the climate system is as low as some of these observational results suggest, then the IPCC models are grossly in error, and we have little to fear from manmade global warming…
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JOE JILLED
Tim Blair
The Herald Sun‘s Jill Singer – she of the flexible artistic standards – turns her mighty brain towards Joe the plumber:
As polls show McCain falling further behind, he’s called in back-up from another loopy loose cannon, Joe Wurzelbacher, a loud-mouthed plumber from Ohio who wants to be well-off and not pay tax. Joe could be the “greed is good” poster boy.
Wurzelbacher speaks up just once. Journalist Singer has been hectoring people for 24 years. Who’s the loud mouth?
He was raised in poverty but now he’s on his way up in the plumbing business he thinks society needs rich people so other people can work for them.
Singer works for Rupert Murdoch (as do I). He isn’t short of a dollar. Perhaps, though, she’d be better off working for someone with no money to pay her salary.
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DIG IT
Tim Blair
Pro-mining country rock from Tim Montana:
Buy it here.
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WHERE HAVE YOU GONE, JOE AND OBAMA?
Tim Blair
Andrew Sullivan has been wailing for weeks about Sarah Palin’s media unavailability. This should calm him down:
The candidate who has been criticized for having a bunker mentality when it came to the national media can now lay legitimate claim to being more accessible than either Joe Biden or Barack Obama.
In the past two days alone, Palin has answered questions from her national press corps on three separate occasions. On Saturday, she held another plane availability, and on Sunday, she offered an impromptu press conference on the tarmac upon landing in Colorado Springs. A few minutes later, she answered even more questions from reporters during an off-the-record stop at a local ice cream shop.
By contrast, Biden hasn’t held a press conference in more than a month, and Obama hasn’t taken questions from his full traveling press corps since the end of September.
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JUST THE CURIOUS FACTS
Tim Blair
James Lileks lists the curious facts of modern politics as they apply to Bill Ayers and King Barack the Wealth-Spreader:
1. Ayers was dedicated to killing American soldiers to ensure that Vietnam was ruled by Communists.
2. Ayers is unrepentant, and proudly posed for a photo standing on an American flag.
3. This is irrelevant. It is irrelevant to then, because the cause was just, if the execution was irrationally exuberant; it is irrelevant to today, because Ayers is now an educator, and a respected member of the intelligentsia.
4. This says nothing about education or the intellegentsia, except to attest to their broad-mindedness.
5. There is nothing wrong with Ayers, but nevertheless his associations with Sen. Obama – the fund-raising at his house, the Woods Foundation, the Annenberg Challenge, the book blurb – are circumstantial, tenuous, and meaningless, because A) Obama was 8 when the crimes occurred, and thus unable to give the full-throated condemnation he later felt, but managed to suppress while coming up the ranks of Chicago politics; B) one could not avoid Ayers in Chicago, which is a very small city; C) if Obama did feel deep distaste, there was never really a good time to bring it up, and D) many other respectable people had no problem associating with the fellow, and E) Ayers is not advising him now, any more than, say, Louis Farrakhan is.
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JOE THE DUMBER
Tim Blair
Joseph Robinette Biden – the wise old train-ridin’ plughead meant to add heft and experience to Obama’s ticket – predicts a first-term crisis:
“Mark my words,” the Democratic vice presidential nominee warned at the second of his two Seattle fundraisers Sunday. “It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. The world is looking. We’re about to elect a brilliant 47-year-old senator president of the United States of America. Remember I said it standing here if you don’t remember anything else I said. Watch, we’re gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy.”
Politics of fear, anyone?
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AT LEAST HIS SECOND NAME ISN’T “ROBINETTE”
Tim Blair
Of all the Plumber Joe takedowns, USA Today‘s must be the most devastating:
It turns out “Joe the Plumber,” the unexpected focus of Wednesday night’s presidential debate, has a different first name …
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