Did High Court loss trigger Monis siege?

The one thing Monis still had going for him,  his last bit of credibility, was the High Court case. The prestigious case would have given him an inflated sense of his own importance.

If his hopes had not been extinguished in the High Court Friday 12 December the siege may not have occurred at all. Given his record of attention-seeking behaviour, he probably would have tried to turn what would have been, in the circumstances, a minor High Court success, into something more profound.

A likely conclusion is - no legal aid High Court case - no Monday 15 December attack.

Could this sequence of events been anticipated?

In 2009 Radio National’s religious affairs broadcaster, Rachael Kohn, published a pointed critique of Monis.

Referring to the videos cited above, she said: ‘The trouble is that Sheikh Haron, as he calls himself, can be seen to be a bit too loony to take seriously, but this is a mistake. The self-styled mufti is no shrinking violet when it comes to promoting hatred of the West and justifying violence in the name of Allah.’

Any reading of that critique, freely available on the internet, as were the videos cited above, would have given pause for thought about funding Monis all the way to the High Court. He was not facing gaol time on this particular charge. For her trouble, Rachael Kohn was threatened by Monis.

Whether he would have carried out an identical, or some other attack,  prior to his pending criminal cases, is an open question. No one could say with certainty that would have happened. I suggest that is a sobering thought.

Monis received taxpayer funding somewhere well north of $100,000, possibly as high as $300,000, to take his case through two lower courts and  then up to the High Court to make a constitutional point about free speech. Why?

There may have been a legal point to this case. But the decision to run it contrasts very badly with Monis’ prior public support for Islamic terrorism, not to mention later revelations concerning cuts to legal aid, causing the termination of  other complex criminal cases, leaving defendants floundering.

 (‘Cuts to legal aid hit NSW courts’, Sydney Morning Herald, 9 February 2015)

On 19 January 2015 our Association (NSW Rationalists) submitted a Freedom of Information request to Legal Aid NSW asking for the reasons for their decision to fund Monis, and his partner, Amirah Droudis.