As I wrote in my piece today, there is a problem with seeing the case through the prism of the charges laid against Roseanne. The complicated Crown case is in tatters. It’s time to look at what the trial judge Jane Matthews referred to as the potential “terrible conspiracy” against her. It’s time to shine a spotlight on the Crown.

Before you read these questions, read my story Victim of a terrible conspiracy. Here’s some of the questions which the Crown and Police need to answer. The problem: Who is going to hold them accountable? At this stage, it seems the answer is: parliamentaries, citizens and the media

Questions for the Crown:

This first question is based on the fact that Peter Thomas committed perjury in a serious criminal case that was happening at the same time as the Roseanne Beckett (Catt) matter. In 1993, Crown Prosecutor Nic Harrison alerted the most senior NSW Crown Prosecutor to the existence of a tape that proved Peter Thomas and another detective had lied in case in which Christa Van de Meuwe and Ramon Bracamonte were falsely accused of conspiring to plant a bomb. Why was Peter Thomas not charged with perjury in this case? What advice did the NSW DPP give police about this matter? Did the Senior Crown Prosecutor Lloyd QC alert other Crown prosecutors who were relying on the evidence of Peter Thomas in the Catt matter and other contested cases to this evidence? If not why not? This information was available as fresh evidence by the time of the Roseanne Catt appeal was it shared with the Defence or the Court? If not, Why not?

Barry Catt’s children gave evidence that they had been present when police were watching pornograhic movies in Taree in the 1980s. Patrick Power was involved in negotiations with the two chidlren who withdrew their allegations shortly before Roseanne Catt’s appeal. Child pornography and sexual abuses were significant issues in the case. After Patrick Power, Crown Prosecutor in the Roseanne Catt case, pleaded guilty to possession of a large amount of child pornography in 2007, what steps did the DPP take to investigate whether his involvement in child pornography could have affected his conduct of, and attitudes towards the trial of Roseanne Catt (now Beckett),during which Power was constantly criticised by defence lawyers for being unfair and intimidating witnesses?

The then Attorney General Bob Debus forwarded a NSW Victims Compensation Board (VCB)file to the NSW Police for further investigation into allegations that a fraudulent claim had been made by Barry Catt who received $89,000. Did the NSW Police consult with the NSW DPP after receiving this referral? Once you became aware of the contents of this file, what action did lawyers representing the Crown take regarding inconsistencies betweeen the VCB statements and previous evidence in the case? Do you consider how the alleged fraudulent claim added weight to Roseanne Beckett’s claims that she had been framed?

For the Police:

At the time when Peter Thomas, lead detective in the case, resigned from the NSW Police force in 1991, senior police were aware that Peter Thomas had been found to have intimidated and threatened witnesses in the case. What steps were taken to warn the Crown against further relying on the evidence of Thomas in the case? Why did the police continue to actively support Peter Thomas during his appearance at the Davidson Inquiry.

From 1990, senior police were aware that allegations had been made that potential witnesses had been interviewed in a deserted house where one witness said Thomas’s partner Carl Paget had a gun. A number of witnesses had made it very clear that they were fearful of Thomas and Barry Catt. As intimidation of witnesses is a serious offence, what investigations were carried out into these offences?

After police became aware in 1990, that allegations had been made that Barry Catt had been involved in showing pornographic films when children and police were present, what further actions did police take at the time to establish if there was ongoing activity of this kind?

In 2000, senior officers informed senior police and the Minister for Police that they had reviewed the case and that they considered that Roseanne Beckett (then Catt) may have been framed and could seek compensation. What action did you take following that warning? Did you communicate that advice to the NSW DPP? If not. why not?

Justice Davidson referred scores of phone calls between Crown witnesses to the then Police Commissioner Ken Maroney for consideration for proceedings against some of the Crown witnesses. Given then there was already ample evidence of the tendency of the ex-policeman Peter Thomas to intimidate witnesses or induce them to give false
evidence, what actions were taken to further investigate this matter?

In 2007, a Crown witness Tracy Taylor swore a statutory statement that she had given false evidence at Roseanne’s trial after being intimidated by two detectives. The NSW Attorney General referred this statement to the Police. What steps did you take to investigate the allegations? Did you interview her to establish the identify of these detectives? Did you investigate whether Thomas was present in North Queensland at the time when she alleged she was intimidated? Did you interview her sister who she believed also gave false evidence. Did you reinterview any other Crown winesses who had given evidence at the 2004 inquiry into the case to see whether they were also intimidated?

The post Questions for the Crown and Police in the Roseanne Beckett case. appeared first on Wendy Bacon.

At the end of a 4 month trial, Justice Jane Matthews had summed up the case in this way: either Roseanne was an ‘evil and manipulative’ woman or she was the victim of a ‘terrible conspiracy.’

Our investigation began by reading the transcripts which were hundreds of pages long. Three characteristics of the case struck me.

• by charging Roseanne with 9 offences, it made it very hard for her to defend the case, especially because she was prevented from going to Taree from the moment she was arrested until the trial.
• there were many prosecution witnesses. Many of them added just a small piece to the case. She was specifically forbidden to contact any of these people.

These two strategies left the jury with a dilemma. It must have been clear to them that Peter Thomas disliked Roseanne who had previously complained against him after he falsely charged her with arson. But in order to accept the ‘terrible conspiracy’ theory, the jury had to accept that not only was Thomas lying but numerous other witnesses were as well. By the time Pillemer and I were investigating in 2000, there was plenty of evidence available of Thomas’s propensity to intimidate and threaten people. At the time of the trial, there was evidence of this tendency but not nearly as much as there should have been. What became clear later is that the police and NSW Director of Public Prosecutions had much more evidence of Thomas’s capacity to corrupt legal processes than was made available to the court at the trial. If the jury had believed that one or two witnesses had been threatened, they might have believed that they could not accept the Crown case beyond a
reasonable doubt.’

Our next step was to reinterview as many of the witnesses or people who knew Roseanne or Thomas as possible. these included people who had worked with or knew Thomas after he became a private inquiry agent in Queensland. Two of them became crucial ‘off the record’ sources in our investigative report.’

Here is the story we published in October,2000. I have added bold for points of particular interest and italics for comments added later.

Should this woman be in jail?

Wendy Bacon And Tracy Pillemer

24 October 2000

The judge said she was either an evil woman or the victim of a terrible conspiracy. Wendy Bacon and Tracy Pillemer explore the truth about Roseanne Catt.

PETER Thomas had good reason to put his days in NSW behind him. A 21-year police career in NSW had culminated in a judge finding that he would use “fair means or foul” to heap troubles on an innocent accused.(This is a reference to the Bracamonte case – see more on that in the previous blog post)

When he left the police force, he also left the State and joined the private inquiry industry in Brisbane.

As reported in the Herald on Saturday, since 1992 insurance companies have hired him for hundreds of investigations, each paying thousands of dollars.

But there is one NSW case Thomas has not forgotten. Those who know him say even after he moved to Brisbane he continued to talk about Roseanne Catt, calling her the “lowest form of life” and “a bitch’. (Thomas specialised in aggressive sexist innuendo against women.)

Roseanne has spent the past nine years in NSW prisons. Thomas played a crucial role in her conviction. After a gruelling four-month trial in 1991, the jury was told by the NSW Supreme Court’s Judge Jane Matthews it had a choice: either Roseanne was an evil and manipulative woman or the victim of a terrible conspiracy between her husband, Barry Catt, and his friend Thomas, a former detective.

The jury chose the former and convicted Roseanne of an avalanche of offences against her former husband, including several assaults, threats to kill, possession of a pistol and spiking his milk with lithium, a drug he was taking to treat a psychiatric disorder.

Matthews gave Roseanne 12 years.

At the heart of the case was the acrimony between Roseanne and her husband, a Taree motor mechanic, and his alleged treatment of his four children by a previous marriage.

During their brief marriage, Barry was scheduled to be admitted to a psychiatric hospital several times, charged with assault and ordered by a court to move out of the house. He had been charged with sexually assaulting his children before he met Roseanne. In July 1989, Barry was committed for trial on the sexual assault matters. The Newcastle Family Court gave Roseanne temporary control of the motor repair business and custody of her stepchildren, although Barry would be ultimately acquitted of the sexual assaults. (This is the heart of this case which from an alternative point of view can be seen as an attempt to obstruct the course of justice in the child abuse proceedings. More on that soon.)

But Roseanne’s life changed dramatically after Barry and a fellow motor mechanic and friend, Adrian Newell, met Thomas, who had spent many years in Taree before being transferred to the major crime squad at Newcastle. Thomas took up Barry’s cause with a vengeance. They knew each other well, having drunk in the same club for years. ( The dealings between Thomas and Newell are a key to the case and are connected to the sexual abuse cases above).

As Thomas acknowledged in court, he disliked Roseanne. They had first met several years before she married Barry, when her delicatessen had burnt down in 1983. Thomas had charged her with arson, but the charge was later dropped by the then NSW attorney-general, Terry Sheahan, because of insufficient evidence.

After she was charged with arson, Roseanne met Errol Taylor, who was collecting a dossier on police in Taree after also being accused by Thomas of serious criminal offences. (Errol was acquitted after he showed that evidence was fabricated in his case.)

Roseanne took her complaints about Thomas’s behaviour in the arson case to the Ombudsman. Roseanne told the Ombudsman’s inquiry that before she was arrested for arson Thomas had acted in a sexual way towards her, assaulted her business partner and had suggested to people in Taree that he knew she was guilty.

The Ombudsman finally dismissed the complaints in 1988, but found that Thomas had acted inappropriately when interviewing Roseanne, commenting he could well lack “discretion and maturity”. He also found that Thomas had given false evidence to his inquiry.

Just a year later, Thomas took up the fresh inquiry that led to Roseanne being imprisoned.

Instead of using Taree police station for his inquiries, he used a deserted house, lent to him by Barry’s friend Newell.

Here Thomas and a fellow detective interviewed many of the witnesses, including friends of Barry, some of whom would later testify Roseanne had said she wanted to get rid of her husband. ( One of these people later gave evidence that she was threatened by the Thomas and his partner Paget who had a gun).

One of the most serious charges against Roseanne resulted from some investigative work by Newell. He believed that Barry had been acting strangely, so Newell took some milk from the office fridge at Barry’s motor repair works, left it in his own fridge for some time and later gave it to Thomas for testing. Analysts found it contained high levels of lithium, but at her trial Roseanne denied she had spiked the milk. ( This case was a highlight of the 2004 Inquiry into the case. Judge Thomas Davidson accepted that this case was not proved and that Thomas, Newell and Barry Catt were likely to have fabricated evidence.)

There was also evidence that the same milk had been drunk by others who did not appear to be affected.

Thomas’s investigation closely examined the sexual assault charges against Barry for which he had been committed for trial. This was even though Thomas was not officially involved in the investigation that was being handled by the Newcastle police child mistreatment unit.

Two days before Roseanne’s arrest on the charges for which she is still in prison, Thomas wrote an unusual memo to police in Newcastle, which was subsequently tendered at the trial: “I fully investigated [the sexual assault allegations]. I direct that no action be taken as a result of those allegations. I accept full responsibility for the above direction and if any further allegations are made by Mrs Catt, that I be advised.” (This action itself could be seen as an interference with the sexual abuse court proceedings.)

Thomas also became involved in reinvestigating another matter that was partly heard by the courts.

In 1988 Barry had been charged with assault after he allegedly hit Roseanne during a family brawl. Barry, who did not deny hitting his wife first, received four stitches for a cut on his head. The cause of the cut was a major issue during Roseanne’s trial. Roseanne claimed Barry had been accidentally hit on the head by a rock thrown by his sister, Mary, during the brawl.( After Roseanne was arrested, the proceedings for assult against Barry lapsed.)

Barry told Thomas that Roseanne had hit him on the head five times with a 5.5 kilogram rock while he was being held down by her son by a previous marriage and an apprentice mechanic named Shane Golds.

On August 23, 1989, a day before Roseanne’s arrest, Thomas and another detective visited Golds. Golds told Roseanne’s trial that Thomas and the detective had come to see him at work and, without identifying themselves as police, had taken him to a deserted house.

He claimed they had said: “If you are telling lies [in the assault case against Barry] and we find out, you will be charged with perjury.” Golds then made a statement that fitted Barry’s version of events. He denied in evidence that he signed the new statement under pressure.

One month after her victory in the Family Law Court, and a year after the critical Ombudsman’s report, Thomas was ready to arrest Roseanne. On August 24 nine police raided her house and found a loaded pistol in the drawer in her bedroom. Roseanne later told the court she had never seen the pistol before, and no fingerprints were found on it.

The Herald has spoken to two confidential sources, one of whom says Thomas has told them both Roseanne did not have the gun. The other says Thomas told him the gun was planted. Thomas did not reply to Herald questions about these allegations.

Barry’s children were in Roseanne’s custody when she was arrested, but were under the supervision of the then NSW Department of Family and Community Services (FACS). The department’s staff became concerned when they heard Roseanne had been arrested, and the children were placed in the care of an important Crown witness, Newell.

The former district manager of FACS at Taree, Greg Baggs, would later record some concerns in a report to the Ombudsman in 1990. The report stated that Thomas initially refused to tell FACS where the children had been placed, accused FACS and the police who had charged Barry of “sloppy” work, and said that he was going to reopen the arson case against Roseanne and that the sexual assault charges against Barry would not proceed. Baggs said Thomas spoke in abusive and threatening tones, was shouting and incoherent, threatened to “drag” him “to the court house”, and said: “Once the children are out of the situation they will change their sexual assault allegations.”

Baggs wrote that he had contacted his regional director concerning “the threat, continual intimidation, aggression and pressure on himself and staff”. A written complaint was lodged by the regional director with Charles Parson, assistant commissioner of police. Thomas denied in court that he had threatened Baggs. (The NSW Internal Affairs police were going to charge Thomas with these attacks. The proceedings were dropped after the DPP advised there was not sufficient evidence to proceed. Thomas was allowed to leave the police force. This aspect of the case alone justifies investigation of the police and DPP role in this frame-up.)

A number of people involved in the children’s case say they were frightened. “I felt very, very scared,” says a FACS consultant counsellor, Sharon Cox. “We really didn’t know who we were protecting the children from. If we got too close to the truth what would be the consequences?”

Two weeks after Roseanne’s arrest and against Thomas’s wishes, Judge Colin Allen granted her bail. The judge said the case had to be seen in the light of a domestic dispute and that the Crown case did not appear strong. He expressed “some unease as to the objectivity of the investigating detective”.

Roseanne’s lawyer wrote to the police, complaining that Thomas was conducting a vendetta against her. “Certainly it is astonishing in the extreme that a detective with so patent a motivation to wish to seek revenge against Mrs Catt should be permitted … to continue to conduct this matter.”

Barry was tried in the Supreme Court in Taree in November 1990. The court acquitted him of abusing his children. The prosecutor told the jury he did not think Barry should be convicted.

The following May, Roseanne’s trial began. The Crown case was that she had either hypnotised or brainwashed the children into making allegations against Barry, that she had manipulated police and doctors in Taree into arresting and scheduling him to enter a psychiatric hospital on several occasions and that she had deliberately set out to take Barry’s business from him.

Barry, Thomas and Newell were the main prosecution witnesses. Dozens of other witnesses backed them up on minor points.

Much of the evidence was circumstantial and there were weaknesses and conflicting evidence in both the prosecution and defence cases.

An important defence witness for Roseanne was Errol Taylor, who gave evidence that Barry had fixed a truck damaged by Thomas in a car accident. Taylor told the court Barry told him a deal was done with the truck owner to accept the blame in return for getting an insurance claim of $12,000. “He said he had Detective Thomas in his pocket he had done him a favour.” Barry denied this conversation. (Were the police protecting Barry Catt because of his business dealings with him?)

After Roseanne was convicted of assault, possessing weapons, threats to kill, perjury and fraud, a victorious Thomas told the media he was confident he would be cleared of fresh complaints she had made against him as a result of the case and that he might reopen the arson case.

Meantime, Barry, who had never been seriously injured, was back in charge of the motor repair business.

The children, who had given evidence for Roseanne, told the Illawarra Mercury that she had suffered only because she had tried to help them.

Two years later two of the children signed statements retracting their allegations of assault against Barry. (The Crown Prosecutor Patrick Power who himself was later charged with possession of extremely hard core child pornography was involved in organising for these statements to be taken)

In 1995 the Ombudsman found that Thomas had wrongfully disposed of Roseanne’s Catt’s property, but that, because he had left the force, there would be no penalties. He could not determine where the truth lay in a charge of stealing money.

In the same year, Taylor and ( Dr Sara) Williams took information on Thomas’s activities to the NSW royal commission on police corruption. Commission staff wrote to Taylor to say they were investigating. He never heard anything more.. (This may have been because the Royal Commission was overwhelmed with material and rural cases tended to get neglected.)

Roseanne, meanwhile, with no money and physically and emotionally exhausted, sat in prison.

Roseanne’s lawyer, Bruce Miles,is writing to the NSW Attorney-General, Bob Debus, asking for an inquiry into Roseanne’s case in the light of information that has come to hand about the activities of Thomas. ( Bruce died before the inquiry into Roseanne’s case.) ENDS

If you have any fresh information about this case, please contact me on wendybacon1@gmail.com

Other stories I’ve written about this case:

Peter Caesar one of the confidential witnesses in our story came forward to make a statement about Thomas telling him he had planted a gun on Roseanne. This was the fresh evidence needed to reopen the case. Here’s my report:

Justice on trial, July 13 2002

This story explains how Thomas denied his knowledge of NSW Police Internal Affairs findings against him. He even denied he gave evidence at the trial of Roseanne Catt’s son Peter Bridge’s trial even though he was shown a transcript proving his presence. I reported on these developments for the SMH here:

Internal Affairs charges hung over Catt detective, February 8 2003

Here’s a story published on New Matilda after the court case last week.

Justice Long Overdue For Roseanne Beckett, May 9 2013

This week the Attorney General Greg Smith who was Deputy NSW DPP during many of these events said that rather than resolve the case with an offer of compensation, the government would delay until a possible expensive malicious prosecution case next year.

The post Should this woman be in jail? Thirteen years on appeared first on Wendy Bacon.

In a last ditch stand to prevent her suing, the Crown had relied on a 90 year High Court old judgement to argue that unless she could prove her innocence of charges that were dismissed by the NSW Court of Criminla Appeal, she would not be able to successfully sue for malicious prosecution.

If the malicious prosecution case does go ahead, Roseanne will now only have to prove the prosecution, which caused her to be imprisoned for 10 years and endure a further 12 year battle to clear her name, acted with ‘malice’ on the ‘balance of probabilities’.

Yesterday, I published an article in New Matilda which provides some background and information about serious abuses of power by the prosecution in the conduct of the case.

In my view, the NSW Government should immediately negotiate a compensation settlement and hold an inquiry into police, Crown and judicial conduct of this case to find out why so much abuse of power was allowed to continue.

I reported on this case for the Sydney Morning Herald from 2000 until 2011.

I met Roseanne in Mulawa Women’s Prison in 1999 while Tracy Pillemar and i were researching an article for Fairfax about women in prison. Roseanne introduced herself to me. Her initial words were that she expected I would see her as an ‘evil’ woman, which is how the Justice Matthews had described her at the end of her three month trial in 1991. In fact, I knew almost nothing about her case. Later, an ex-prisoner who was convinced of her innocence brought me the transcript. After reading hundreds of pages, I could see lots of weaknesses in the prosecution case. But this was not going to be enough. I agreed with the then SMH editor Paul McGeogh that to realistically reignite public interest in the case, we would have to find fresh evidence sufficient to reopen the case. This is because a jury’s guilty verdict had been upheld by the NSW Court of Criminal Appeal in 1993. In this situation, court findings of fact tend to be represented in the media as ‘actual facts’. The court decision becomes like a ‘blackbox’ that is hard to prize open. So fellow journalist Tracy Pillemer and I set out to investigate the case.

The key detective in the case against Roseanne was Peter Thomas who had been a detective in Taree where Roseanne lived in the 1980s and was a mate of her ex-husband Barry Catt against whom she was alleged to have committed nine offences. Thomas led the group of police who arrested her in August 1989. But by the time of the trial in 1991, he had been allowed to resign from the police force, although he had been investigated for leaving the scene of an accident, intimidating witnesses in the Catt case and other matters. Back in those days, corrupt detectives who resigned could easily become private detectives. Thomas had starting working as a private inquiry agent, specialising in arson cases in Queensland. By coincidence, Four Corners started investigating Thomas’s activities in Queensland at around the same time as we began investigating the Roseanne Case. Before long, we were tracking his career in Queensland where he had charged a number of people with arson with insufficent evidence. The SMH and Four Corners stories were published during the same week and to some extent overlapped.

Here is a transcript of the Four Corners program: Burned. This program raised questions about whether insurance companies were using the services of private inquiry agents to falsely charge people with arson so they did not have to settle. Four Corners had some questions for the insurance companies on behalf of the people they’ve burned. Peter Thomas was their main case study. Reporter Sally Neighbour, now EP of ABC 730, asked these questions:

• Is the laying of arson charges a deliberate strategy to justify rejecting claims?
• Do the insurance companies know and do they care what methods their investigators use?
• And why do they continue to use investigators like Peter Thomas and others whose methods are well-known? Grant Mckay, an ex Federal policeman who was interviewed on the program called for a Commission of Inquiry. Unfortunately, the whole issue was swept under the carpet – as too often happens.

In the same week, the SMH published our three stories. As they’re no longer on the internet, I’m going to publish them on this blog over the next few days. The first one is Fire Trail which was published on 21/10/2000. In further posts, I will publish other stories.

The first article traces the career of Peter Thomas. It focuses on those who became victims of Thomas during his career as a private inquiry agent. All of them suffered at the hands of Thomas, some of them hugely. Goerge Nagy, the Bates and others came forward after Roseanne was released from prison offering to appear for her at an inquiry into her case.

A really big question arises: Why was Thomas allowed to leave the police force and become a private inquiry agent, when many complaints had been raised against him?

Much more came out about Thomas during the inquiry into Roseanne’s case. I will publish more about that in later posts.

I have marked some particularly pertinent parts of article in bold and inserted some comments in italics in brackets.

The following article, Fire Trail, by Wendy Bacon and Tracy Pillemer, was first published in the Sydney Morning Herald, 21 October 2000

Fire Trail

The flames were cruel enough, but the methods of a policeman turned arson investigator proved worse.

George Nagy gets tearful when he remembers the night in February last year when his pub in Monto, Central Queensland, burnt down. Woken by thudding noises, George looked out the window. “I saw this amber-coloured flickering of light and … I realised the pub was on fire”. In panic, Nagy, his wife, Margaret, and Nagy’s mother, who was spending the night with them, escaped. “I just broke down and cried like a kid. I lost my business, I lost my home, I lost all my personal belongings.”

Monto’s Sergeant Colin Giles was one of the first at the fire scene. “There was certainly no evidence at all that linked George to starting the fire,” he says.

A Queensland coroner, Colin McKenzie, says he did not hold an inquest into the fire because there were no suspicious circumstances.

The Nagys’ hotel was insured by a Lloyds of London partnership, R.J. Kiln, which uses the insurance broker Stirling Risk to run its Queensland operations. Stirling Risk began an investigation into the fire. The man it appointed was an experienced Brisbane investigator, Peter Thomas. He made a strong impression in Monto, shouting drinks that he said were “on Lloyds of London”.

`He came across as one of the boys,” says Nagy. “He was very smooth talking; he displayed a sense of humour. Little did I realise he was going to turn that around and cast accusations at me.”

Nagy was surprised when his interview with Thomas about the fire was interspersed with questions about his sex life. Thomas asked Nagy whether he was sexually interested in boys and had ever been in a threesome.

Margaret Nagy alleges Thomas spoke of his own sexual practices and questioned her about hers. “He was jumping back and forth between the questions of the pub and then the sex life so it was confusing,” says Margaret. “He did say that George burnt the pub down.”

A long-time friend of the Nagys, Gina Hart, was interviewed by Thomas, too.

“He wanted to know if I was having a sex affair with George. He said, `Well, that’s a shame because I come fully prepared to offer you $10,000,’ if I could admit to him that George had told me in a moment of passion that he had lit the fire himself.”

Since Hart first made this allegation on A Current Affair this year, no-one from either Stirling Risk or the police has sought to interview her. “Basically he admitted to me from the outset that he believed George was guilty of arson,” she remembers. “I was horrified this man was investigating something and truly wasn’t objective.” ( Gina Hart later gave evidence in the Justice Davidson inquiry into Roseanne’s case. He accepted her evidence that Thomas had offered her a bribe.)

Late last year Nagy was told he would not be paid because the insurers suspected he lit the fire. He has never been told what evidence Thomas has against him. He has not been able to get copies of the statements prepared by Thomas based on interviews with him. The Nagys are suing R.J. Kiln for breach of contract. Stirling Risk was not prepared to make any comment about the case because of the Nagys’ legal action. A spokesperson for R.J. Kiln said the company had not been told by its lawyers about Hart’s allegations, but “would like to know more”.

This is the story of six fires and a private inquiry agent backed by big insurers who left all the victims feeling as much affected by the investigation as the blaze itself.

Thomas, who was president of the Queensland Association of Fire Investigators in 1993-95, has plenty of experience investigating fires.

Before he joined the private inquiry industry in 1991, he spent 21 years in the NSW police force, mostly in northern NSW where his father and grandfather were Anglican ministers. For six years Thomas was a member of the major crime squad in Newcastle and responsible for arson investigations. ( Thomas had specialised in arson and had falsely accused Roseanne of burning down her own delicatessen in 1983. That case was dropped but Roseanne complained about Thomas’s conduct.)

The Nagys are not the first to question his investigation methods. During Thomas’s stint in the police force he was the subject of dozens of complaints and at least four adverse findings by NSW Police Internal Affairs and the NSW Ombudsman, including failing to return an acquitted man’s property and giving false evidence to an inquiry. At the time he left the police service Police Internal Affairs were investigating other allegations that he had wrongfully removed and disposed of property during a search. These complaints were upheld.

Through his solicitors, Thomas submitted that he was stressed at the time. He was not penalised because he had left the police service.

Thomas also led a controversial police investigation into the bombing of a Byron Bay restaurant in March 1989, during which he charged the couple who owned the restaurant with planting the bomb.

The owners, who do not wish to be identified, were acquitted after Thomas had left the police service.

In December 1992 in the District Court, Judge Harvey Cooper described Thomas’s conduct during a taped conversation about the bombing as “reprehensible”.

The transcript of the tape revealed to the court that Thomas had told one of the owners she could “walk out” if she was prepared to “tie up” her husband. He said: “Inlong run, we will shake the life out of both of you …”
Judge Cooper found Thomas had “patently insufficient” evidence to support the charge and failed to understand “the distinction between evidence justifying a suspicion and evidence justifying the laying of a criminal charge”.

He criticised the “fallacy and circuity in his reasoning” and found that Thomas and another detective had given false evidence in the committal proceedings. ( This judgement occured before Roseanne’s appeal in the NSW CCA and was known to the Crown and NSW DPP were prosecuted both cases.Despite this, the DPP continued to rely on the evidence of Thomas.)

In May last year, under cross-examination in a Queensland District Court arson case, Thomas was asked why he left the NSW Police Service. It was “time for a change”, he said and denied being under investigation when he left.

In his police days Thomas had developed strong contacts in the insurance industry. When he left the force he first took up a position with National Investigators Partnership, part of a Queensland loss-adjusting business, before later setting up his own agency.

Anyone without a criminal record can register as a private inquiry agent. Private inquiry insurance work is more lucrative than police work because insurance companies have an economic interest in not paying fraudulent claims. At National Investigators he worked with an accountant, Peter Wyatt, whom he had met while he was in the service and both were investigating a hotel fire near Grafton in 1987.

The owner of the hotel, Sid Bates, today drives trucks, having lost $1 million worth of assets as a result of the fire and his fights with the police and his insurer, Trans Tasman Underwriters. “It’s hard when you’ve got to start again,” says Bates. He remembers walking along the streets of Grafton after a family birthday celebration at a local Chinese restaurant. “That’s when the fire engine came out,” says Bates, who pointed it out to his excited grandchild. “We didn’t know it was going to [our] pub.”

The investigation led to Bates being charged with arson. “He [Thomas] didn’t want to believe our stories at all,” says Bates.

The NSW Attorney-General accepted the submissions of Bates’s lawyers that the Crown’s weak circumstantial case was “completely consistent with the innocence of Mr Bates” and the case was dropped.

Bates was never paid by the insurer but, having spent all his funds on legal bills, did not have the money to sue. ( Bates was ruined by Thomas’s actions and was one of those who came forward to support Roseanne.)

This was not the case for a Brisbane couple whose home was gutted by fire in 1993. They have fought Thomas and won.

Bruce Gutteridge, a prominent pathologist, and his wife, Beth, lived in a grand colonial home called Mayfair.

A Vietnam veteran, Gutteridge had insured the house with Defence Service Homes, which is owned by the Federal Government.

When Mayfair burnt down, Thomas spearheaded the investigation for National Investigators Partnership, chosen by Defence Service Homes to investigate. The contents of the house were insured by New Zealand Insurance.

Beth suffers chronic severe facial pain from a skiing accident and had been injected by her doctor with the drug Largactil on the day of the fire.

Thomas was aware that Largactil is mostly used as a psychiatric treatment and suspected that Beth was psychiatrically disturbed and lit the fire herself. Past employees were interviewed about conversations with her.

Unhappy that local police were not pursuing the Gutteridges more vigorously, Thomas approached the Queensland Fraud Squad who took on the case. He handed them his file so that witness statements could be retyped on police letterhead. All the police had to do was get witnesses to sign them.

As a result of Thomas’s investigations, Beth’s entire medical history, including private conversations with doctors, was exposed during the inquiry by the coroner Gary Casey. Her barrister complained that the inquest developed into a trial of Beth rather than an inquiry into facts. Casey found the Gutteridges had no case to answer. NZ I’s loss assessor, Brian Dellitt, told the coroner that two months after the fire the two insurers had a meeting. He said his inquiries led him to be satisfied the Gutteridges should be paid. But Thomas argued that, on the balance of probabilities, Beth had lit the fire.

Dellitt said he told Thomas he did not have evidence to support his claims. He was critical that Thomas had not interviewed the crucial doctor who gave the Largactil injection.

NZI paid the Gutteridges for the contents of the home the day after this meeting. Defence Homes refused to pay and, in 1994, the Gutteridges sued the Commonwealth in the Queensland Supreme Court.

Some of the doctors who had treated Beth said there was no evidence that she would have lit the fire. However, Thomas introduced Defence Homes to a Sydney psychiatrist, Rodney Milton, an associate from his days in the NSW Police Service. On the basis of medical records, but without meeting her, Milton prepared a report that Beth “could have been motivated to light the fire”.

In June 1994, Milton was about to give evidence when Defence Homes agreed to a settlement of $1.9 million, at the time a record private fire-insurance payout.

After the case, Gutteridge said there should be more scrutiny of insurance investigations. Having the resources, he said, made all the difference. “It’s lucky I’m wealthy they just thought we’d crack,” he told The Australian.

“They’ll accuse you of lighting the fire, they’ll say your wife is mad, they’ll secretly record conversations with you and your friends and they’ll do everything to besmirch your good reputation.”

Despite the big payout and the bad publicity, when Defence Homes heard in December 1998 that another returned serviceman suffered a fire, they turned again to Thomas.

The house of an invalid pensioner, Jim Sprott, at Nobby in South-East Queensland, burnt to the ground. His is another case of an owner who was accused of lighting his own fire, was acquitted of the criminal charge, was refused his insurance payout and is fighting his insurer in the Queensland courts.

As court transcripts show, Thomas was commiserating with Sprott two days after the fire. “Bad luck, mate. We’re here to help you.”

Sprott told the Queensland District Court last year that he (correctly) understood that he would not be paid unless he co-operated with the insurer’s requests for information. He believed he had no choice but to assist Thomas.

Thomas reported that Sprott had lit the fire and the insurance company refused to pay Sprott.

Thomas handed his file over to the Queensland police, who charged Sprott. The Crown case was almost entirely dependent not on police evidence but on conversations with Thomas which had taken place without any of the warnings given to those suspected of crimes.

Sprott had made a comment that suggested he might have known how the fire began. But as the judge, Patricia Wolfe, found, “It is not so much the accused professing that, it is Thomas who regards himself as something of an expert considering those sort of things and then putting ideas into the accused’s mind.”

Sprott told Wolfe he had found Thomas “intimidating” at times. Sprott told the court: “I couldn’t say anything. It didn’t matter what, I felt as if I had to go along with what he wanted.”

Wolfe excluded a number of the conversations with Thomas on the grounds of unfairness, which left the Crown with no case. Sprott was acquitted and expected to be paid by Defence Homes Insurance. But still it will not pay and Sprott has sued.

Defence Homes Insurance referred the Herald to the Department of Veterans Affairs. A department spokesman said it was not possible to answer any questions about either the Sprott or Gutteridge cases or any other matters connected with Defence Homes Insurance while a matter was before the courts.

Another Queensland small businessman faced with the prospect of losing everything after a fire is a baker, Nigel Wilkinson, who says he is financially and emotionally devastated following his dealings with Thomas.

In the early hours of the morning of July 20, 1998, Wilkinson was baking for that day’s business. He went to the toilet outside his bakery in Mundubbera, Central Queensland.

“When I came out I was attacked,” he says. “I woke up chained and gagged in the toilet. When I heard voices out the back I started kicking on the door. I was lying on the floor still groggish.”

Firefighters used boltcutters to free Wilkinson. “The bakery was alight it was burning.”

Thomas, who was chosen by Zurich Insurance to investigate the case, alleges that Wilkinson’s story is a fabrication. The Herald has heard a tape of conversations between Thomas and Wilkinson, which casts light on how Thomas handles his suspects.

He is fast talking, seeming to be chatting on the run. He keeps reassuring Wilkinson that his building will soon be released by investigators. He inquires after his welfare (Wilkinson suffers from anxiety and depression as a result of the attack) and persistently tries to get him to say he would prefer a cash settlement to moving back into the bakery. (Desiring a cash payment could be construed as circumstantial evidence that a person suspected of lighting a fire needed money.) In the last conversation, his tone becomes harsher, although he never puts any allegations to Wilkinson.

Nearly two years after the fire, Zurich refuses to pay Wilkinson. The case is stalled because the police have not finished their report. The Queensland police say the reason why they have not completed the report “is a matter between the insurance company and police”. A spokesperson for Zurich says the company has not been “formally asked for information” by the police.

Wilkinson is living on the pension. “I’m very on edge and stressed out all the time,” he says.

Wilkinson and his wife, who insist they are innocent, have sued their insurer but despair for their future because their resources are almost exhausted.

The Zurich spokesperson declined to further comment because Wilkinson is suing the company. Zurich continues to use Thomas as an investigator.

Two months after Sprott was acquitted last year, Judge Wolfe had another case involving Thomas’s methods. Another fire victim insured with Zurich, Neville Wootton, was charged with arson. He was acquitted by Wolfe, but has not been paid by Zurich and is suing the insurer.

On the August 15, 1997, Wootton’s house caught fire and he was later charged. He remembers Thomas as `real pally with me to try and get me to say something just like police work with the goody and baddy and he was the goody”.

The case was committed to trial largely on the basis of Thomas’s evidence. Thomas presented himself during the committal as an investigator of such experience that he did not need to rely on forensic reports in this case. The prosecution case was conducted on the basis that there was no other report. Yet after Wootton was committed for trial, his lawyer Colin Hardie discovered the insurance company had commissioned another report that found the cause of the fire could not be determined. Hardie says the prosecutors had not been told about this report.

“I think there has been a deliberate cover-up by the investigator of the insurers not to disclose the report to the public authorities,” he says, “and the worst thing of it all is it resulted in the waste of public funds and subjected the witnesses to a criminal prosecution.”. (Thomas’s corrupt career has singled handely cost the public many millions.)

The Crown agreed Thomas’s evidence be excluded. Wolfe said, “I really am concerned that there is no evidence” and “I don’t know how it got past committal, quite frankly,” she said, before dismissing the case. . ( Wolfe demonstrated a critical capacity that seemed to be wanting in NSW, with the very clear exception of Judge Thomas Davidson.)

Insurance companies have an obligation to protect themselves (and the premium rates their customers pay) from fraudulent claims. But victims of fire also have a right to fair investigations and to knowing what evidence there is against them. ENDS

Thomas has never been held accountable for his actions in these cases. This story set up the background for our second story which was published two days: Should this woman be in jail?

The post Time for NSW to compensate Roseanne Beckett appeared first on Wendy Bacon.

So in the meantime, I decided to do an extra small research pilot on SMH iPad images and gender. The flick through was horizontally across from the front page tonight. Up to where I started bumping into yesterday’s stories, I counted 100 images of men compared to 13 women. Just 12% of the people I saw were women. Overall, the story is one of men who speak, men who represent, men who play sport and men who are always there.

The 13 women included a murder victim in another country, two women associated with fashion week, a woman who looked a bit like actor Gwyneth Paltrow decorating an article on clean food, a woman who is head of a health support NGO, the face of a woman TV star, one caricature of Australia’s richest woman, Gina Rinehart and four images of PM Julia Gillard. If, as looks likely, we replace Gillard with Abbott, we would be down to 8% of female images. As you flick through your ipad, the story of women is one of food, fashion, highly made up faces, carers and the odd woman whose has become powerful.

The dominant thread is men. Who are they? They are many things – leaders, politicians, sportspeople (all of them), journalists, entertainers, business people and just ordinary old people in the background.

Last week, the SMH’s section Life and Style ran an article about women sliding out of bed to put on make-up so their partners don’t see their faces. Yes, even long term partners.Could things really have got that bad? Can you imagine the strain and secrecy that would impose on a relationship?

The story about women waking early to get on their make-up (if indeed it is happening on a widespread level) could be a page one story, not a slightly daring comment piece on Life and Style It’s a great topic to discuss on breakfast and talkback radio.

The SMH’s gender biased image practices need to be publicly discussed. Despite Sarah Oakes strong resistance to having the word ‘women’ applied to her Daily Life section, is Daily Life just a new form of women’s pages with a soft touch of feminism, designed to hold advertisers and readers when paywalls come into place? This isn’t to reject the feminist stories that do regularly appear on Daily Life amidst the food and bodies, or the efforts of women who are trying to push editors’ and publishers’ boundaries. But whose editorial vision is being pursued in the selection of images for the SMH? Is selection determined by individual editors? Or is it the product of market research of readers for advertisers? Is Daily Life a sop to hide gender bias in the rest of Fairfax publications? A few add-on pages can’t disappear or justify gender bias elsewhere.

I’ve also got to be honest and say that our ‘Where are the women in the media’? project is coming up with far worse results than I expected. I think I believed that gender discrimination in the media was gradually improving for women. I’m no longer sure about that and we haven’t even started on women in broadcasting. I am thankful to Destroy the Joint which now has more than 27,000 facebook followers for pushing a public rewakening of these issues. They build on earlier research and feminist action.

You can follow our women in the media project on New Matilda and/or watch our progress by joining our Facebook page. Read Julie Posetti’s post on our facebook page written from her sickbed yesterday where she spent the day listening to a very male ABC. The results are also not good.

A Q&A with an all female panel plus male host for one night is not enough.

Note: In an earlier version of this post, I wrote that the piece about women getting out of bed to put make-up on was in the Daily Life section. Daily Life editor Sarah Oakes has pointed out that it was not. It was in the Life and Style section. The piece was arguing against the practice of hiding one’s unmadeup face from male partners. My point is that a few feminist pieces, whether in Life and Style or Daily Life could be seen as commercially based appeals to a female audience, otherwise turned off by the regular fare of content biased towards men. This is not a personal attack on female journalists who write or edit such stories or sections but an argument that these sections may also play a role in reinforcing and reproducing gender stereotypes. If you are not regular reader, have a look and see for yourself.We will be able to analyse this issue further in Part three of our Where are the Women in the media? series.

The post Fairfax’s sense of gender balance appeared first on Wendy Bacon.

Vintage Carlton. But then came the very good bit about Tony Abbott.

“Tony Abbott was oddly silent all week. Invisible, even. There was no silly TV stunt at a fish shop or a widget factory, no poncing around in Lycra or hard hat. He kept his head down, allowing his shadow ministers and his obsequious media claque to do the public gloating over the opinion poll.

It was clever politics. Any comment from him would have looked like smart-alec hubris, which is one reason that voters have so disliked him in the past. Abbott still believes he was born to The Lodge and will do anything to get there, but he is learning to disguise this. The election is still his to lose, as his former mate John Hewson managed to do in 1993.

With Labor in turmoil and the smell of blood in the water, the opposition blithely carries on as a policy-free zone and gets away with it.”

Now read this carefully. If you enjoyed it last weekend, you will enjoy it again.

“Yet you know exactly what the Coalition will do if it wins government in September. First up there’ll be the Gothic horror of a Labor budget “black hole” – even worse than expected, we’ll be told. This will be the pretext for a savage round of expenditure “savings” and the sacking of thousands of public servants.

That done, all the same-old, clapped-out Tory machinery will creak into place. Once again there’ll be grovelling deference to the Americans in our defence and foreign policies. Billions will be wasted on bright and shiny military hardware, just as the Howard government did by buying 59 useless main battle tanks for the army, the navy’s Seasprite helicopters that could fly only in daylight in fine weather, and the eye-watering extravagance of the struggling Joint Strike Fighter project for the air force.

Domestically, Labor’s reforms in healthcare and education will be scrapped, with money ripped out of the public sector to be shovelled back into private hospitals and private schools. Climate change will be crap again. WorkChoices will eventually re-emerge with a new name; there will be a swingeing ideological attack on the ABC, enforced by a whopping funding cut; the national broadband network will be gutted; social reforms like same-sex marriage will be further off than ever; and the gap between rich and poor will grow ever wider, as it does in the US.

Been there, done that, deja vu all over again.”

Hard to sum it up better than that. Many of us have been there before and those that haven’t, don’t need to. Tip for Labor. Get rid of the mindless repetitious ‘working men and women’ version of Howard’s ‘working families’. Carlton, perhaps jokingly, says that he emailed John McTernan, your PR “apparatchik from the British Labour Party” last Christmas suggesting a drink but he hasn’t heard back.  I would take him at his word and sit down and have a chat with him. He might have more ideas. I doubt he’ll charge you an arm and a leg, like those expensive lobbyists and advertising firms.

For a start, I’d ditch trying to jolly up those journalists who have been campaigning to get rid of you for years and deliver Carlton’s column to every home in Australia. Skywrite and tweet it phrase by phrase.

Then I would get try one last treatment for that terminal disease and instead of dumping on the Greens follow their advice – fix the mining tax, stop the appalling abuse of asylum seekers on Nauru and Manus, speak up about war crimes in Sri Lanka and restore the income Labor’s taken from single parents and give those on unemployment allowance a rise of $50 which just about everyone who has tried living on the allowance recommends as a minimum.

Note : The last 40 words in the first published version of this post were slightly different. Edited for clarity and accuracy.
 

The post Gillard should forget minders and listen to Carlton appeared first on Wendy Bacon.

I was just closing down for the night when this email arrived from asylum seekers on Manus Island.

Red Cross arrived on Manus today.

It was around 1p.m that Salvation army received a fax from Canberra. It was written that tsunami may is coming to manus around 4p.m and you should evacuate the center as soon as possible.

All people were scared. the staffs only took their passports and cellphones. All the families were stressful and scarred. they took some clothe and left by bus. Some of the families went by walk to the topest place. Some of the SAMS didn’t left the camp. Most of them were Iranian. Poul moulds stayed with SAMS in detention center.

Some people were crying and kids terrified. They all thought that’s the end of their life. There were PNG police around people. They were waiting for Tsunami.

At 3:30 they said that everything is fine and nothing will happen and we are safe! All people went back to detention by walk.

Who is responsible for asylum seekers on manus? What would have happened if tsunami came? 34 kids may died!

Thanks,

Asylum seekers on manus island

 

Note: Paul Mounds works for the Salvation Army.  The SAMS are single men, many of whom are very depressed and have been refusing food at times.

This terrifying incident meant that the asylum seekers were forced to leave the camp. This was their first visit onto the rest of Manus Island since they arrived. Up until now, they have been locked up inside the camp 24 hours a day.

If you want to know how they were feeling before today, read the letters that we published today on New Matilda.

The post Who is responsible for asylum seekers on Manus? Terrifying Evacuation. appeared first on Wendy Bacon.

Many women in Australia and other Western countries take for granted freedoms that are denied Hidaye and other Iranian women who are harrassed, arrested and imprisoned when they resist strict dresscodes and other forms of patriarchal discrimination. Hidaye has committed no crime. She has made a bid for freedom. She deserves the support of feminists and human rights activists everywhere. Instead she is locked up with no information about how long she will be detained or even how she can pursue her refugee claim. Yet, she continues to bravely send news of fellow detainees who self-harm, traumatised women who wail and cry out in the night, and children who ask their parents ‘why did you bring me here?’

Here’s Hediye’s story – please help make sure her voice is heard.

Patriarchy is alive and thriving in Iran where Iranian authorities take a hard-line approach to women, who don’t abide by the strictest rules set out by Islamic law. Women are not allowed to go to the stadium. Women are not allowed to drive a motorcycle. After divorce women are not allowed custody of their children. Lots of women are hit by their husbands but they don’t have any rights to complain about it. In comparison, a man and a woman with the same education, opportunity and skill, the woman has no chance at all and also they don’t get paid the same as males. If a woman cheats on her husband the government can stone her. Sometimes when they arrest girls they abuse them. In Iran, police charge you because of long nails. Men are allowed to have four wives. Women are not allowed to be a singer.

There was always something in Iran that stopped me from achieving my goals. Women have no rights in Iran. They are all dying slowly. Morality police travelled around in green cars, checking for boy/girl’s behaviour, making sure boys didn’t have western hair styles, etc. I was arrested in Tehran because I was not wearing my hijab correctly. They fined me many times. I paid lots of money. Whenever I saw a green car I ran away from them.

During my high school years I got into trouble. The teacher was always monitoring me and made me pray, read the Quran and appear in Islamic ceremony. I’m agnostic; I didn’t want to do those kind of things. My teacher told me “you are getting in trouble, Hediye”. Then I felt unsafe. The husband of the principle at my school worked for the SEPAH (Iranian Military branch that protects the Islamic systems and revolutionary guards) so I just felt unsafe and scared. I didn’t want to be separated from my family. I didn’t want to go to jail. I didn’t want to be hung. I didn’t want to be abused by the government. So I left everything; my friends, family and lot of things.

All I want is safety, justice, freedom and honesty. I never found them in my country.

I just want a life which is the same as any other 18 year old girl. I’m full of wishes and hopes but… Now I’m here in Manus Island without any future.

The post The story of Hediye, an Iranian girl our government has locked up on Manus Island appeared first on Wendy Bacon.

The visitors spoke passionately about their concerns about the Lynas rare earth plant. These Malaysians, who were supported by individual Australian Malaysians and Friends of the Earth Australia, hadn’t even been consulted before Lynas was granted a construction license in 2008. Knowing how angry our community felt a couple of years ago when we heard a coal seem gas drill was coming to Tempe in inner Sydney, I listened carefully to what they had to say and decided to investigate further.

Up until that time, I knew little about Lynas. Once I started looking it was not hard to find material and sources although much of the information was contradictory and confusing at first. I wanted to interview Lynas CEO Nick Curtis but as he was not available, I had to settle for a ‘spokesperson” who regrettably preferred not to be named.

Here are the first two parts of my investigation:

Part One: The Toxic Waste’s that’s not in our backyard. New Matilda Dec. 17, 2012

Part Two:Lynas’ Waste Plans a Toxic Pipe Dream. New Matilda Dec 19, 2012

If you are interested in this story, here are some sources worth reading and following:

For Malaysian coverage, Malaysiakini is good news site. It is more independent of the government than the Malaysian mainstream media. It publishes regular updates about the controversy and the campaign. You can subscribe ( including a free trial) but many stories go up free here. I was pleased that Malaysiakini followed up on our New Matilda investigation. here and here.  Here is their latest update following my second story.

Here are some other stories. This list is a reminder of the important role independent journalism in increasingly playing in Australia.

2012

A comprehensive feature by Joel Tozer in Global Mail: What a Battle Over Rare Earths Has To Do With Your iPhone July 20, 2012

The progressive US magazine Mother Jones has also just done a big feature, Your smart phone’s dirty radioactive secret on rare earths including the clean up of radioactive waste at an old Mitsubishi plant at Bukit Merah in Malaysia, as well as Lynas.

2011

A Backgrounder from New Matilda, May 2011.

Crook, A. Lynas cops heat from protestors, shareholders over Malay refinery plans. Crikey April 18, 2011

Crook, A.  Fresh Protests as focus turns to Lynas’s radioactive dump. Crikey, May 13, 2011

Here are three important New York TImes articles including reports about how concerned engineers working on the construction were about structural defects in the building. The engineers leaked documents to the New York Times. This was a breakthrough in the Lynas story.

Bradsher, K. Taking a risk for rare earths. March 8, 2011.

Gooch, L. Environmental protest becomes rallying point In Malaysia, June 18, 2011

Bradsher, K. Fear of a toxic rerun June 29, 2011

The Campaign

Green Left supports the campaign against the Lynas LAMP and has many reports, including video on their site. Here are two but the best way to find more is to search Lynas at Green Left.

Boyle, P. Malaysians resist Oz toxic company’s toxic plan. GreenLeft, June 18, 2011

Boyle, P. Malaysia: Stop Lynas campaigners challenge company’s licence to operate. GreenLeft, August 29, 2012

Peter Boyle has also taken many photos.

Stop Lynas protest. Photo by Peter Boyle

Save Malaysia, Stop Lynas campaign was formed in March 2011. Its site provide links to current coverage relevant to the campaign.

The Australian Stop Lynas campaign started in response to protests in Malaysia.

Friends of the Earth Australia are also campaigning against Lynas.

The company

Lynas company site tells the story from its point of view.

You can follow  Lynas share price and company announcements, including annual reports on the Australian Stock Exchange site.

I’ll be tweeting on Lynas and expect to do more reporting on this issue.

As a reporter, this was the first time I had experienced hate messages via twitter. These were posted by Lynas supporters. I can understand why shareholders and employees could be anxious but that doesn’t mean that the truth should not come out about the LAMP project. I guess this is just part of reporting in the 21st century. I don’t like it but prefer it to verbal threats.

I’ll do another blog post soon about some of the issues raised in the Lynas campaign.

The post New Matilda Lynas Investigation: Parts 1 & 2 appeared first on Wendy Bacon.

Justice Rares found:

Mr Ashby instituted the proceedings without reasonable cause because they were and are an abuse of the process of the Court.

The court also found that Ashby’s co-worker Karen Doane and ex LNP Mal Brough acted with Ashby for the purpose of inflicting political damage on Slipper. But Slipper also alleged that News Ltd’s senior Daily Telegraph reporter Steve Lewis was part of Ashby’s plan to damage the Speaker. Justice Rares’ finding in favour of Lewis will be a relief to reporters who are often accused of being involved in political games. Lewis, he found, was just doing what reporters are expected to do – chase stories.

Rares subjected the actions of Lewis to detailed examination and found his actions as a reporter played an important role in the affair. But he found there was nothing unusual in a symbiotic relationship between journalists and people involved in politics. ( This is certainly true).

Lewis had been reporting on Slipper unfavourably for two years. Ashby and Doane would “have believed that Mr Lewis would give their stories attacking the person for whom they were working a sympathetic, if not enthusiastic, airing.” Nevertheless, Rares concluded that Lewis was merely acting as most reporters would do in vigorously pursuing a story and that there was no evidence that his actions were politically motivated.

His findings in relation to Lewis can be found in the judgement from Par. 142 onwards:

Mr Lewis appears to have pursued, enthusiastically, the stories potentially available to him based on Mr Ashby’s and Ms Doane’s information. However, I am not satisfied that Mr Lewis shared with them the purpose of advancing the political interests of Mr Brough or the LNP or of aiding Mr Ashby or Ms Doane in their future prospects of advancement or preferment. It is more likely that Mr Lewis was focused on obtaining good copy for stories to sell newspapers. He may not have been so naïve that he was blind to the motivations of Mr Ashby, Ms Doane or Mr Brough. Mr Lewis was no doubt wanting to encourage them, as sources, to continue to provide material which he could use to publish. But, that did not involve him in seeking to achieve the same end as his sources, despite some overlap. Publication of significant or sensational news can have significant impact on the public perception of persons or bodies referred to in the stories that favours one side rather than another in the political debates of the day. However, that consequence does not necessarily suggest that the journalist or publisher is seeking to aid or support the side of politics that benefits from the publication. Rather, it is more likely that, by publishing the story, the journalist or publisher is simply fulfilling his, her or its role of reporting news. Once presented with sources such as Mr Ashby and Ms Doane, together with the prospect of a story such as in the originating application, it is difficult to think that any journalist would have acted differently to Mr Lewis in pursuing and publishing that story.

The question many will ask is whether Lewis would have been as enthusiastic if he was pursuing Abbott, Hockey or Bishop.The truth is that News Ltd’s agenda is so well known that sources seeking to damage the Coalition would have been less likely to approached Lewis and News Ltd would not have encouraged him so keenly to pursue such an investigation or paid the sources’expenses. News Ltd’s disdain for the Gillard government has been open. Political reporters act within professional boundaries but are often used to meet the poltiical goals of media companies that employ them.
The role of Lewis needs more examination.

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The decision to allow 56 of those awaiting deportation to stay followed an application to the High Court to examine whether the Tamils had been given a proper chance to make refugee applications. Rather than go ahead with the hearing, the government “screened” them back into the refugee process.

On November 30, another group of “screened out” Sri Lankans were deported. On arrival, they were imprisoned outside the capital of Sri Lanka at Colombo in Negombo prison. While some have now been released, they are likely to be subject to continued surveillance and discrimination.

,Hummingbird Stories published an account of what happened to these asylum seekers at the Northern Immigration Centre before they were released.

The asylum seekers say they were taken at 4 am for brief interviews and expected there would be further interviews with case managers. They have since said that they had been constantly interrupted and accused of being liars. Serco guards then refused any further requests for interviews. Some asked for access to documents in which they had alleged persecution in their property but were refused, exposing them to further risk on their return.

On December 3, the Bishop of Mannar, Dr Rayappu Joseph wrote to the Australian government: “it is highly dangerous for the asylum seekers from the North and East of Sri Lanka to be sent back to Sri Lanka in the prevailing political situation in our regions.” According to Dr Joseph, threats, discrimination, restrictions, surveillance and questioning are routinely used leaving those who are deported living in fright and fear. It is hard to see what good reason the Federal Minister for Immigration Chris Bowen could have for disbelieving the Bishop and believing the Sri Lankan government which has got a proven record of suppressing the truth and is accused of committing and covering up war crimes.

Human rights groups have documented cases where those returning to Sri Lanka have been severely tortured. As The Independent reported in September, Human Rights Watch has detailed 13 credible cases where failed Sri Lankan asylum seekers from Europe have been returned and tortured since the end of the civil war in 2009. Freedom from Torture  has uncovered a further 24 cases where voluntary returnees have been tortured.

It is this sort of evidence and scrutiny that the Australian government is avoiding by its deportations and decision to avoid court action. As Refugee Action Coalition spokesman Ian Rintoul wrote in a press release:

“This has been a victory for the 56 men who had been denied justice by the federal government. But others in detention still remain potential victims of the dubious practice … The government has lot of explaining to do. It has been desperate to avoid the court and any public scrutiny of its screening out process. It has virtually admitted that it cannot defend the way in which screening out decisions are being made. Now the government has to act to ensure that safety of those deported as a result of the dubious screening out interviews … The Australian ambassador should be instructed to attend Negombo jail to ensure that all those jailed by the Rajapaksa regime after being returned from Australia are safe and that they are immediately released and given Australian government protection.”

In a further release, Rintoul said that although deported asylum seekers had been released from Negombo prison, some still had to report to intelligence. “If the Minister was confident of the legality of the screening out process, he would reveal the details of the screening out interviews. He won’t reveal the details because they are arbitrary and indefensible.”

Asylum Seeker Resource Centre spokesperson Pamela Curr told the ABC that she had  spoken to a staff member at the detention centre who was appalled at the way in which Sri Lankan men were being interviewed. She said:

“The most serious and basic tenet of the Refugee Convention is non-refoulement, a French word meaning that people cannot and must not be returned to persecution.
What this says is that the Australian Government is breaching that most basic tenet of the Refugee Convention….When they sent people back to Sri Lanka, and they’re imprisoned and beaten – and I have contacts in Negombo who have reported to me that people are being beaten in that prison – then we are sending them home to be persecuted and we know that.”

There is no way that the Australian government could not be well aware of what can happen to forcibly returned asylum seekers. In July this year, a SMH investigation uncovered instances where of both Sinhalese and Tamil asylum seekers sent home from Australia, or stopped by the Australian government from ever reaching the country, have been sent back to systematic state-sanctioned abuse including beatings, imprisonment and torture. As one man told SMH’s Ben Doherty:

“They hung me upside down with ropes and put a pole behind my arms, then they hit me with batons. They hung me upside down at 11am and they took me down at 3pm. They hung three of us up, but only two of us came down alive. The other man died.”

Reports by several Australian journalists  have provided strong evidence that there are economic migrants amongst the Sri Lankans who have arrived on boats. But they also acknowledge that others are political refugees who will be in danger of being killed, imprisoned or denied work if returned to Sri Lanka.  By punishing a whole group, the Australian government, urged on by the Opposition puts innocent lives of persecuted people at risk. There is a long history of suppression of dissent and persecution of those who do not support the government in Sri Lanka. We deny their rights and risk their lives if we discriminate against asylum seekers, just because not everyone is a political refugee.

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