Civil liberties in the old deep north

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Lawyers tend to be heavily represented in CL organisations, and most believe what they are taught at law school: the adversary system is the greatest legal system ever devised by the mind of man.

It follows that evidence is concealed for a good reason, e.g. that jurors are stupid. For example, evidence from the suspect.

When NSW police were campaigning to modify the “right” of silence in 2010, Cameron Murphy, president of the NSW Council for Civil Liberties, said that being pressured to answer questions would result in countless innocent people going to prison. Three points can be made:

• Justice Ken Marks noted in 1984 that the “right” is based on a lie by the first legal academic, Billy Blackstone, a morally bankrupt charlatan.
• The “right” gets off about half the guilty defendants who hide behind it.
• Cambridgelaw professor Glanville Williams said: “Immunity from being questioned is a rule which by its nature can protect the guilty only. It is not a rule that may operate to acquit some guilty for fear of convicting some innocent.”

The adversary system is solid for human rights; its firm position is that criminals have a human right not to be convicted, and that their victims have a human right to like it or lump it.

For example, organised criminal Emil Mendel (Eddie) Kornhauser (1918-2006). He came to Australia, via Poland and Germany, in 1939, with an unerring instinct for where the money was, and who could help him get his hands on it.

Abe Saffron, who had senior NSW police in his pocket, had an interest in the Cumberland Hotel at Bankstown. Eddie became the licensee in 1950. He later had hotels in Melbourne, and his instinct eventually led him to the Bjelkist Gold Coast, where honest citizens were daily at risk of being trampled by men in white shoes.

In 1976, Eddie got control of Paradise Centre, a considerable property on the site of what had been Jim Cavill’s Surfers’ Paradise Hotel. In matters of development, the go-to men were Bjelke-Petersen or Russell Hinze, who was no less an organised criminal, but lacked the Premier’s hypocrisy.

Following the Fitzgerald Inquiry, Eddie was charged with having corruptly paid Hinze $250,000 for help with the developing the Paradise Centre. He exercised his human right not to be convicted in 1991, and was said to be worth $345 million in 2005.

Finally, my credentials, however feeble, as a CLP include being invited to attend a Civil Liberties picnic in Brisbane in 1992. At the picnic, the famous Terry O’Gorman rebuked me for some mild criticism I had made of the legal system.

“Aren’t you the guy,” I said politely, “who got Eddie Kornhauser off?”