On DaVinci Planes, really big crows and why the guy at 000 is a douche bag.

You know that the words we speak are the only thing that keep our feet on the ground.  The whole thing about gravity is wrong don't you ? The man just tells you that so you keep talking.  Apparently scientists have worked out that it takes about four weeks for the weight of our words to work their way through to our feet and then out our toes. We float off into the groove and then beyond the great beyond.  

No but seriously. ...

Have you ever thought about what four weeks is? What can we achieve in four weeks that can permanently change us forever? We could learn a language, perhaps start a really decent garden, lose a tone of weight and get in shape. What if we only had four weeks to live? Could we achieve ten years worth of goals in those four weeks? I believe so at one stage.  I still do, but only because i have never had four weeks.

The closest I ever came was three and a bit.  Then I did fly.  I flew over Bribe Island in a sort of daze and all the way as far as the hospital at Caboolture.
 
This was about six years ago.  I had just left a life in Brisbane.  Packed up a life and one of those swishy houses and hit the road, hippie style. We got rid of all the expensive crap that life in the city demands we have, the shiney stuff and the stuff that makes noise.

We meant to travel around the country in a campervan, but at the time, half of Queensland was underwater and half of Victoria was on fire. Maybe not such a good idea.

We ended up living on Bribie Island. Looking back now, we really did do the hippie thing way too much. While we still shirk extravagance or money stuff, we were floating too far out in to the cosmos. I am really glad we did though, not that we gained anything from it overly, just as living in the city and then the suburbs teaches some of us that we don’t want to live in the city and the suburbs.

One of the many things that Bribie has going for it is it was the beginning of the Brisbane Line. Part of the job I had left behind involved teaching about Australian political history. One of the essays for this course asked for an answer to when and how Australia became legally independent from Great Britain. 

There are basically five answers to this question That Australia was never really tied to Great Britain in the way many think it was; that this happened in 1901 due to section 128 of the Constitution providing for any changes to be made by a referenda of the Australian People, so theoretically, we could have had a referenda on 2 January, 1901 to get rid of the ties to England; thirdly, it happened on the battlefields of both World Wars;  fourthly it happened in 1986 and finally, it hasn’t happened yet.

I always meant to write up a book on this subject as I don’t think that it has been ever clearly reviewed by the academy in an all-encompassing way. I will write this book someday, maybe tomorrow. Nah, I’d doubt it.

Anyway, it is one of those areas where legal scholars don’t really take into account what straight political historians say or what sociologists and other parts of the academy says, and visa versa. My whole idea came about as a result of, and in response to AT Ross’s wonderful book, “Armed and Ready – The Industrial Defence of Australia 1900-1945. It’s a very interesting read if your a dork like me due to it painting a very different picture of Australia’s reliance on Great Britain and general niaiveie that main stream history, and certainly political and legal history recall.

The part that I wanted to check out was the Brisbane Line, which starts on Bribie Island. A few kilometres north of the main settlement on the eastern side is a gunner’s nest, then about ten kilometres further up the beach are other things, including an underground hospital that has been (and still is) lost to the world probably by the changing sand bank. I had previously elected myself a military historian of great knowledge yet had never had a lesson.

I set out to see if I could find this lost hospital, ignoring the fact that many people who actually did have some skills in finding such things had been trying for a long time. I think I figured that I’d just fluke it. But mainly what I wanted to do was to look at these gunner’s nests and see if I could figure out whether they were a rouse, that would have been only designed to get the invading Japanese forces to land, or whether they were what the army at the time would have put all the effort into.

I initially thought it was the former with all of them due to where they were and what they looked like –they stood up tall and were very visible, but since talking to a few people about how the sand dunes of the island have changed drastically  over the years, I am not sure there is an answer here.

I set out on a push bike and was able to ride about eighteen miles up the beach. I put my bike in the dunes right on the eighteen mile marker as I kept falling off it. Due to the four-wheel drives that cut through and up the beach, the tracks they leave behind create a gutter that will throw you off your bike. I set off further up the coast on foot. By this stage it was mid morning.

It was mid November and the sun was hot that day my friends. I reached the top of the island, pondered my pondering and the like and turned back towards home. I only had a litre and a half of water on me, but I knew that there was another three litres on the back of my bike, which was at the eighteen mile marker.

Then it got really hot. I started to get very worried. I had run out of water and was starting to feel the dizziness that that sort of heat brings. I had a phone on me, but it wasn’t able to reach my wife. I knew that the signal for 000 would be considerably stronger once I called it, but was I really in that sort of situation?

I thought not.

I kept walking. The tide was coming in and pushed me onto the soft sand, which greatly slowed my pace. Still it got hotter. I didn’t think it could. I set my phone alarm for twenty minutes and kept walking. I figured someone would drive by sooner or later. Then someone did. A pudgy bloke in a dual cab hilux ute. I waived. He pretended to not see me.

My twenty minute alarm went off. I thought about what to do. I reset it for another twenty minutes and figured that I’d reassess my situation in twenty minutes. I did this another two times.

By this time I was really worried. But it wasn’t life threatening yet and I knew that I had another three litres of water and some shelter and other stuff at my bike, which was tied to the eighteen mile marker. I had passed the nineteen mile marker almost half and hour ago. It was slow going on the soft sand, but I kept going, figuring that it would be just over the next dune.

I kept in mind that my phone probably would be able to call 000, but was it a life threatening situation yet? I did have water just up ahead ...didn’t I.

I kept walking and then it occurred to me that I was starting to run. I was starting to run because I was being chased by one of those DaVinci planes and this really, really big crow. He must have been about the size of a four storey apartment block.

Now my situation was life threatening I thought. I called 000. Funnily enough, even though I was still thinking quite clearly (except for the DaVinci plane and the really, really big crow) when the bloke answered the phone to ask whether I needed police, ambulance or fire, I couldn’t seem to speak. My mouth was very dry, which made speaking hard, but mainly, I couldn’t seem to control my mouth. The noises I was making were more like drunken grunts than anything.

The person on the other end of the phone became very cross. “This is a emergency line, you’re wasting our time.” he said and threatened to hang up on me and inform the police.
I still couldn’t really say anything. Then I realised my problem was I was trying to explain my situation, rather than just stating the word “ambulance”.

I stated “Ambulance

He stroppily put me through.

Thankfully the guy at the ambulance place knew how to speak to people, told me to check that my phone was charged, which it was mostly, then told me to take three deep breaths and then start again. We got to the end of it. Not too long later I got back to my bike, sipped water on the advice of the ambulance guy, and waited there for help.

I didn’t really ask what help was. I realised that I couldn’t move my legs. I hadn’t even noticed that I’d sat down. There were more cars going down the beach now. Even though I was lying in the middle of nowhere on the beach, they pretended not to see me. I must have

Still more cars came by. None of them stopped. I felt lost, abandoned, I didn’t know where I was but was greatly angry with these unfeeling people for not stopping and for wrecking the beach with their cars and inappropriate tyres.

Now they’re landing a fucking helicopter on the beach. I was really getting cranky. I mean, walking, sure; cars, maybe if need be, but a helicopter? And to make things seem more silly, they were dressed up in ambulance overalls.

Why Defamation should be a Crime, not a Tort

A few years ago, when I was in my early twenties, we traveled around for half a year and then moved back to the sleepy little town we’d lived in for four or five years previously for me to do my PhD.  

Then the strangest thing happened. We had phenomenal trouble getting work. For months, we looked and applied for anything that was open, regardless of what it was. It took forever, but we found work only after someone had told us that a previous employer (who we had listed as a reference) was saying nasty things about us behind our backs. This was very strange for us. We had left employment with him on amicable terms and because we were leaving town to travel for a while. We didn’t know of any ill will between us. I approached him about it. He was friendly to me, denied the whole thing and seemed too genuinely shocked considering he was a bit of an apathetic slob to be believed. 

It took forever for us to be told about this. This is a huge problem with something like defamation: the subject of it is usually about the last to know and by then, there is nothing much that can be done to repair or account for any harm.

Once we knew of it, we got my father to ring this bloke (sans information about exactly who Dad was) for a reference to confirm that there was foul things afoot there. I remember Dad got off the phone and was visibly livid from the conversation and he was not a man who ever really let emotion show at all. He refused to tell me exactly what was said. He simply said that I didn’t want to know (which made me want to know more).

Thankfully a friend of ours was a senior partner in one of the local law firms and agreed to smack this guy around the chops a bit. He got his office manager to ring for a reference for us, with no disguise on who she was but allowing an inference to be made as to why she was calling. She then wrote up what was said and was prepared to witness it. The content was ridiculous. 

According to this guy, we were “known to the police” who ran us out of town and would not let us come back to our hometown to live (even though we actually did live in the town and hadn’t ever had any involvement with the police or anything like that at all.

At the time, I remember being absolutely furious about this. The injustice, the cowardice and the deceit of it made me want to do everything from smash this guy’s face in to burn down his shop to start rumours of my own. And you know me dear reader – I am not a violent or vicious person. 

Time passed on a bit, we got on with things and my friend arranged for a barrister who specialised in defamation to meet with us to discuss the case as he was in town on another case.

The barrister was a nice and talkative old bloke. I remember he was wearing silk (literally) with the most hideously bright suspenders and socks. But then, it was the late 90s and we were still being blackmailed by fashion of the 80s. The barrister agreed that we had a good case. There was clear loss to us. There was no problem in proving it false. There were no evidentiary issues and there was little that could be taken from us if we lost. He agreed to take on the case.  But he gave us some good advice – don’t – just walk away.

He said that any lawyer that advised to take a defamation action to court is an idiot and should be shot. The reason for this was clear. Defamation, no matter how costly or large, is essentially statements that exist in a community with the relevance of gossip or innuendo. If that rumour and innuendo is ignored, it goes away, if it goes into a courtroom, in the eyes of the public it comes out as gospel. It doesn’t matter what happens. It doesn’t matter who wins, the court process, by the very fact that it allows the defendant to ignore everything, validates the rumour (which by that stage have usually grown considerably more saucy and specific than the instigators of the rumours started). He said we could get some money, but it would take years and after that, we probably would be run out of town quite literally. I am not sure if he was a fan of Schopenhauer (to be honest, I don’t really know what a Schopenhauer fan looks like) but I guess what he was saying was if a truth is violently opposed, it will become self-evident. If it is ignored, it will lose its reference point and become obsolete. The moon is after all, made from blue cheese.

At the time I thought he was wrong and I was upset about it. But I trusted my friend and he trusted this old bloke, so I took his advice and thanked him for it. Don’t get me wrong – we had our retort against our former employer – he got his ... and then some. We just didn’t need a lawyer to do it (mind you, we would have needed a lawyer if we were caught, but we weren’t).

Funnily, I have just been through the process from the other side. I have been a part time writer now for a while and the responses received from some people  are to be avoided if possible – they seem quite obscure: they are like exceptionally drunk friends – they only ever tell you one of two things – how much they love you or how much they hate you. You have people convinced that they were the inspiration behind character x or y and that is either endearing or insulting to them. You have people saying that a particular story was based on a mutually shared experience that you have no recollection of. ]

But defamation is different, in defamation, your words cease to be your words. They are taken out of context and owned by people who are not able to understand their meaning. That’s very frustrating. Being abused by some twit who thinks he is a thousand times smarter than me because he apparently read Descartes in the original French [sic] when his daddy was stationed in Belgium is annoying, but easy to ignore. He is not really criticising me, he is not really even criticising my work, he’s just a dick. He’s not right. He’s not even partially right enough to be considered wrong.

But defamation is speaking to someone who thinks that they own those words, because they think it is about them. You try to understand why he thinks it’s about him, but it’s just a waste of time, the answer is “obvious” yet not forthcoming. What was said was amplified, changed and exaggerated but it was still gossip and innuendo. Until he took it to court.

When this type of matter goes to court, the victim is no longer the victim: they are on the front foot, they are the aggressors, they appear as if they have something to hide. They are the agitators. Nothing will ever really come out of it. It doesn’t matter what happens, but if the slandered party can’t come out of it and tell everyone that the judge considered it the worst case she had ever witnessed and ordered the guilty party to go to gaol for ten years followed by exile to New Zealand, then the slandered party will be labelled as not only as whatever it was the rumour ended up after it had done the rounds, but there is a great potential that there will be implications that the slandered party is also a whinger/ dobber.  

But think about it this way – what if defamation were no longer a tort? What if it were solely a criminal offence? It basically is a form of assault, so it does fit in there somewhere. If it were a criminal offence, the victim would stay the victim. The involvement of the police in investigating it would be enough for the victim to justify to people that there was some seriousness in it. The gossip would then be mostly dismissed, if not entirely. The police would give it the integrity that slip-and-trip lawyers lack and the accused would not be bound to respond. S/he could stay silent, as s/he should be allowed to do. In the tort of defamation, every claim has to be pleaded and responded to. If it were a crime, it would simply be a case of “not guilty your honour” and then watch the prosecution try to bumble through a committal.

If found not guilty, the victim can claim that there was just not enough evidence or just bad luck, but be stoic about the way it all happened and the accused can just say, “well, I told you so.” If the accused is found guilty, the victim is vindicated and the accused can be badly done by and suffer some harm at the hand of the state. The punishment would not need to be much as it would be real, as opposed to the very hypothetical punishment that appears in most tort cases where there is no  actual outcome.

That would suit everything a lot better.

Damn the Man, Save the Empire - A Tragedy of the Commons.

It has been said of journalists, but I think it more apt to say of lawyers that – the problem with lawyers is that they don’t read, can’t write and are unable to tell the difference between a bicycle crash and the end of civilization. 

I ponder this thought as I am having to put up with being unsuccessfully sued by a creepy looking chick and a guy that looks like he could be his own grandfather. I write as I am waiting in court, listening to two barristers with pasty skin, looking exceptionally cheap in expensive suits, argue one way and the other for whether a bloke could get his driver’s licence. The person in question isn’t actually in court today, as is too often the case, but listening to various arguments he is described in simple facts.

He is in his early thirties, had lost his licence eight years ago after a string of driving offences and other crimes. Both barristers and the judge muse that these were “obviously” concerned with his involvement with drugs that was the cause, and all else was the effect. 

Does it strike you, dear reader, that when someone says “such and such is obviously...” what they really mean is “please don’t ask me to explain what I mean, cause I don’t understand it”?

But anyway, I digress. At the time that he lost his licence, the judge ordered that he never be able to get it back again. This decision was made because of his history, including the then latest event, which involved speeding away from police in a stolen car and colliding into another car causing serious injury to the lady driver. She had to spend seven days in hospital due to her injuries. 

In this situation, you immediately feel for the other driver don’t you? You put yourself in her shoes, in her car. She was probably on her way back from the chemist caring for a sick, orphaned child while knitting socks for lost puppies. When simple facts are presented, they result in simple truths, and the truth is never simple, only misunderstandings are. For all I know, she could have been a crack smoking kiddie fiddler on her way home from murdering a string quartet.

But she is the victim, so she is nice. 

The guy lost his licence as a result, apparently the law has the ability to permanently deny someone their driver’s license, but the law also provides for this permanent decision to be cancelled, thus making it kind of stupid to use words like permanent. But the law deals in absolutes and simple truths, which is why it uses these words and may be half the reason it is quite useless. 

In the eight years since losing his licence, our boy has been in and out of gaol and still might have a thing with drugs (apparently we can presume that fact because his affidavit doesn’t specifically say otherwise). In recent times, he may be turning things around: he is a bit older and wiser and has found employment that may lead to a plumbing apprentice providing he can get his driver’s license (thus the whole process began). His boss has also told the court that if he can’t get his license, there is little chance that he will be able to continue with his current work. 

Now we all feel for him don’t we? We think about the stupid and reckless things that we did when we were kids and think “well, that could have been me”. Surely he (I) deserve a second chance. 

This story takes a little over an hour for the court to deal with, mainly because there is so much speak of tiny little legal facts: standards of proof, standing of the people in the court, the actual name of the case - apparently the police don’t know their own name and filled in the initial form wrong which takes another five minutes to deal with.

The judge then, in a very long winded judgement, allows the bloke to get his licence back while making me cringe because he used the term “for all intensive purposes” (which we’ve discussed before haven’t we?). We always knew he would give the bloke his licence back, but just had to figure out the reasoning – the rules.  We knew because to say no would be unreasonable.

“No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?”

Now, the thought occurs to me that the guy was always going to get back his licence, the decision was made on grounds that in no way resemble what the rules are.  We like to pretend that we are above our base instincts, and the more removed from how we live, the more this is true. 

However research such as the Kill Whitey Project and the various Trolley dilemmas prove that our decision making faculties have little if anything to do with our reason. We are just monkeys with car keys. The less we have to provide for our own lives, the more we forget this and sitting here in the Supreme Court building, I am surrounded by people who are so greatly removed from having to look after their own lives.

“Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals. He sets them to work, he gives back to them the bare minimum that will prevent them from starving, and the rest he keeps for himself.”

Things that allow us not to look after our own lives also seem to convince us that we are more developed. People who choose to cook their own food are seen as less evolved than people who pay for others to do it. The same can be said for most facets of life: growing or catching food, cleaning, gardening, building...

The best one we have come up with is rules. A series of rules allow us to think that we are making reasoned choices about things. We can give this guy his licence back because the rules allow us to. We are not deciding his fate, we are simply observing the rules.  If the rules apply to everyone, then they are apparently fair. Their true genius lies, as John Stuart Mill pointed out, in the fact that if there is a complete system of rules that could cover the events of life, they could never possibly be known by anyone. The list would be too long and contrary. 

That same contrary point can be seen in the current case: is it fair or just that the guy gets his licence back? That is really what is being asked here. It’s not a question of law, it is a question of opinion. Does his want to keep his job outweigh the want of safety on the roads or vengence of the prior events' victims? In our hearts, we think that eight years is long enough.

The contradiction in the answer is hidden by the rules. The rules say that this guy is capable of having a driver’s licence, but they hide the claim that a driver’s licence exists to stop people from driving away from police, in stolen cars and crash into our puppy-sock-knitting orphan nurse.  

The rules say that people can feel safe on the roads due to the rules allowing for it. There has to be a ‘defcon one’ for this to have any chance of working. If there is no absolute, then what is the point of having a driver’s licence system? Why don’t we just burn down the courthouses, kill all the lawyers, remove safety labels from everything and let nature take its course?

The answer- The rules don’t allow for people to be safe, or even feel safe. That's not the point. They allow for the state to own what was once owned by the people. If you need a licence to drive on a road, you have to respect the courts and the whole system. The state has purchased the roads and the very concept of travel from us. We now rent it back from them at a great cost. At one stage, roads and tracks were able to be trodden on freely. We built them, not the state. There was a time when we grew and caught our own food. Now we purchase it from people who don’t grow or catch it, but they have licences from the state to ensure that the food is not going to make us sick, or be misleading  or the like – the state, the law guarantees us this. 

The people that get sick or are mislead are seen as the exception to the norm, rather than the norm itself. It is never much considered that this is mere proof that the whole system doesn’t provide for us, it takes from us. The state gives out mining leases to large corporations so that they can dig a massive whole in our land and put up a big fence that says “get out and stay out” with more force than we currently advise refugees. I ponder if this is the same feeling Indigenous Australians had when white settlement first arrived. So many people were slaughtered mainly for killing a sheep or a cow that “didn’t belong to them”. Imagine being brought up in a tribe, catching or collecting your food, then these people come and tell you that they own that food. How can you own food you would ask? Those people must be crazy. Then those people have, somewhere along the way, convinced us that they do own the food, water, shelter and everything there is. If we would like to be, we cannot be and be free.

“Comrades!' he cried. 'You do not imagine, I hope, that we pigs are doing this in a spirit of selfishness and privilege? Many of us actually dislike milk and apples. I dislike them myself. Our sole object in taking these things is to preserve our health. Milk and apples (this has been proved by Science, comrades) contain substances absolutely necessary to the well-being of a pig. We pigs are brainworkers. The whole management and organisation of this farm depend on us. Day and night we are watching over your welfare. It is for your sake that we drink the milk and eat those apples.”