Clare’s epic shame job about to peter out

I’m still free and my embarrassment would know no bounds, except for the fact that it should be theirs that led long ago to the plug being pulled on the travesty that is my own saga.

The words “state” and “embarrassment” seldom go together, this we know. Modern terms of reference that conveniently constrain the state and its alter ego, “robust democracy”, do not allow for the triflings of compassion, wisdom or notions of a better society, so why do I think that the Northern Territory Government’s five-year pursuit of a group of human rights activists through the courts and into gaol has taken it armpit-deep through the swamps of embarrassment? Why should Clare Martin et al feel such a pointless emotion just because their apparently collective reaction to our five-minute disruption of their precious parliamentary procedure was at first based on a popular misconception and then, after a few weeks’ doubtlessly serious consideration, on one straight from the John Laws and Andrew Bolt book of do-the-crime, serve-the-time? The only reason a criminal charge was ever laid against us – and this I admit is supposition - was because of the subject matter. Numbers might have had something do with it. But even so, parliaments everywhere - robust democracies at work from here to Timbuktu – have been disrupted before by individuals and lobby groups so why have they never been charged with “intentionally disrupting the Legislative Assembly while it was in session”, for which, in the NT, there is a maximum three-year gaol term? The Network Against Prohibition seems to have proved the exception to the general rule of who cares (if and when parliament is disrupted)? Might the dubious precedent have had something to do with the fact that my friends and I were protesting (about) drugs, and specifically, protesting for drug law-reform? With judgment day past and gone, the ultimate sanction now awaits – incarceration for trying to prevent the commission of a wrongful act, it being the passage of the US-drafted and widely discredited “drug house” legislation. Was the charge that was a) clearly political and b) prompted by a spectacularly effective, albeit restrained, walk-in, the result of the immediate and undeniably pathetic assumption that the “parliament invaders” as the Speaker termed them, and as they became in next day’s banner headlines, were unemployed wastrels who wanted to see drugs legalised to further their own drug-peddling agendas?

This is the only conclusion that can be drawn following the passive (at least on our part) events of May 14, 2002 – the ones that apparently caused such shock and horror to the members, even though at least one in Opposition wears a broad grin on the parliamentary video of the incident. Perhaps the charge was prompted by embarrassment after all – embarrassment at the dishevelled abandonment of dignity displayed by the elected representatives, who disgraced themselves with their own lack of control. What they will never admit to, is seeing certain things - one being what was nothing more than a verbal altercation between the youngest member of the group, Aaron Stallard-Bryce, and Marion Scrymgour. The Member for Arafura was to perjure herself in court by declaring that he had assaulted her during that argument. Aaron was charged, found guilty and convicted.

Members would have seen – but again, never in a million years would they ever admit to seeing - Ema Birkeland-Corro grabbed from behind around her breasts by the parliamentary clerk Ian “Lumpy” McNeil, who suddenly changed hats for the day and decided to become a roughneck bouncer, frog-marching her toward the exit door, before letting her go and standing by and watching as she was assaulted again, this time by one of the security guards, who threw her around as he would a rag doll. All this after she had been kicked by then detective Bert Hofa, who happened to be in the chamber on other business. At least three times Ema came to helpless grief as men acted like thugs and targeted her because as a woman, she was obviously the weakest and most defenceless protester. Like Aaron, Ema was charged with assault. She was convicted of jumping from the Speakers table on to the back of another security guard, Aaron Wigmore, who swore under oath that she had injured him in the process.

None of these assaults is on camera. The sexual assault sure is. In any other circumstances, it would be, to say the very least, regarded as highly embarrassing and incriminating of the perpetrator. Strangely, Ema’s complaint was never followed up by police when she reported it. Yet it is these actions, not the walk-in, that remain breathtaking examples of supposedly responsible and cool-heads losing control. Did Lumpy lose his? Only Stui and he know if he really did say quietly in Stui’s ear, “get out of here cunt”. I know whose word I took.

That the “invasion” was later thrown into the arena of the NT police, proves that Clare and her bovver boys – then Attorney-General Peter Toyne and deputy Syd Stirling - meant that they were going to be seen to be tough on drugs. “Zero tolerance zero sense” might be what leftie criminologists say, but in the NT, zero tolerance rules is the official and well publicised line. They were going to show the disrespectful reprobates that their approach to crime was, if not responsible, certainly effective in dealing with the likes of us. The ensuing and indefensible transference of the case from the political arena into the hands of the NT police meant that just one more moral imperative – political and social debate about a subject of vital importance to society – went conveniently down the shooter.

As it disappeared into the tropical ether, Ms Martin was able to blithely turn the blowtorch of criminal sanction on to the nine placard-wielding pinkos who, led by NAP originator Gary Meyerhoff and Ema, strolled into the hallowed parliamentary chamber.

Clare was not acutely embarrassed by any of this. Before anybody or any group can feel such a thing, they must be seen and exposed red-faced in a spotlight, and her government has seldom been subjected to a spotlight, certainly not the one of media scrutiny. Not really. Toohey, in The Bulletin, has kneecapped her two times that I know of. But the almost total absence of a credible, hard-questioning media has been a handy accomplice for recent Territory governments – robust democracies – like Ms Martin’s, which has been allowed to bleat and act with impunity on anything it wants, from redirection of a river for the benefit of mining, to the degradation and squalor in Aboriginal communities brought about by decades of racist government policy.

So unaccustomed to being nailed is the NT’s chief Minister, she didn’t even blush when I elicited an apology from her in the witness box during the initial magistrates court hearing when yet another video replay proved that she, like all the others, had exaggerated when saying we all ran and-or were running (through the chamber). Red faces are left for exposure on six o’clock television and “drug-user” is one of their primetime pigeon-holes. Even though few actually change colour, at least not from embarrassment at being sprung on national television for their recreational activities, their fuck-you attitudes generally make for good camera fodder because they enhance the audience’s hunger to hate, despise and scapegoat, and has the double advantage of boosting TV ratings.

Absence of exposure and lack of debate helps Clare and Co. avoid public scrutiny, too, so she can also remain acutely unembarrassed by the cost of the trial to the public purse. Each of the nine or so pollies we successfully summonsed were in the box for up to two and three hours, some for half a day. What would their presence have cost? Actually, they did do something – they gave us, the self-represented, the great satisfaction of seeing and hearing how otherwise once principled people change their spots when they acquire a bit of power. One, I’ve got to admit, did turn red. Poor Syd. Under cross-examination by the drug-pushers, he didn’t know where to look. It soon became apparent that up at the ceiling was his direction of choice.

No embarrassment was felt by the magistrate, or the prosecuting lawyers, or successive Supreme Court judges who read the transcripts – or at least should have read them – at the witness protection racket that had been conducted just across the way in the maggots court. Without question, that 20-day trial was unfair and a new low for the justice process. To use the usual metaphor, justice was bashed and left battered and bleeding in the gutter.

Yet nobody has flinched - none of the lawyers, none of the sheriffs, none of the bailiffs, none of the court staff and certainly none of the bewigged appeal judges, has given a damn about the criminality of the way the case was handled, and what transpired in it. I for one am curious to know what exactly the only other person apart from the Napatistas who would have read the original transcripts in their entirety, Peter John Thomas, thinks. He as well as us, would know what the magistrate did – or would he? Perhaps he didn’t re-read and cross-reference, which in lieu of having a superhuman memory, was the only way of recognising the cronyism. I will forever wonder what PJT, the unrelenting jackhammer of a cross-examiner, thought about Magistrate Dick “Zealous” Wallace’s conduct. It was obvious Wallace SM covered for all the witnesses – bullshit artists and wafflers everywhere would say he did a great job. But what did PJT think? Did he understand anything the politicians said, or any of the supposed evidence they gave? Mr Wallace certainly did, or at least he pretended to. He was the one, the only one, who seemed to have a handle on what was being said in his courtroom throughout the farce. And it was farcical not just because of frequent clumsiness by the defendants, or because they didn’t swoop when they should have. It was farcical in terms of a trial being seen to be fair. I never recognised what Wallace was doing because like most of my co-defendants, there were long periods when I was too jaded to care what was being said. Toward the end and fearing the worst, minds turned a little gloomy.

It had to be Wallace pretending. Transcripts show that much of the evidence was claptrap - circuitous gammon in Pythonesque prose. Some of my questions were stupid and irrelevant. But witness outpourings were Orwellian duckspeak. A typical example is this exchange on March 7, 2003, between me and the Member for Port Darwin, Sue Carter:

RIS: Okay, but you said that person was jumping, you specifically used - - -?

SC: They were light in step.

RIS: Light in step?

SC: Mmm

RIS: So that’s not a jump, is it a jump or is it not?

SC: Perhaps not a strict definition of jump, but they appeared to me - and we are going back many months in recollection, but as opposed to stomping around on the table they were light in step.

RIS: Light in step. Well, there’s a big difference you understand between jumping and being light in step. So were they jumping or were they not - we’ve used the term jump?

SC: All right, well, I’ll withdraw the word jump and rephrase it as being light in step.

Wallace tolerated this. But whenever we tried getting to the heart of a matter – like asking the Attorney-General the direct question, who drew up the drug house legislation? – he cut us off, deftly changed the subject and generally sabotaged cross-examination. He tailored his interruptions depending on who was in the witness box and who was doing the cross-examination. Generally they followed a pattern with “just not an issue”, “I am just not interested”, “I have no interest at all”, and “who cares?”, his way of telling us that our questions were irrelevant to his court. Cavalier dismissals, arbitrary over-rulings, and veiled and not-so-veiled threats to defendants were obviously the gentleman’s agreement silently struck with the witnesses. How to respond to such stonewalling? You can only force the issue so much, which we did repeatedly. Then, not being able to recall exactly who said what, we were often forced to end our gambits with, “I’ll move on”, or “I withdraw the question”.

The death’s head of testimony came three days earlier, on March 4. It centred around duckspeak by Toyne who as it panned out, was the organ grinder; Syd Stirling, the monkey, even though he fluffed the script on one occasion, saying that the person who drew up the drug house laws, was “the Attorney-General”. This contradicted the man himself who, in answer to a direct question from Gaz, had said: “I don’t actually write legislation.”

Right.

Later, Wallace confirms this by saying: “No, he says he didn’t write (the drug house legislation)”.

He then adds, “Parliamentary council/counsel (does) . . . that’s the evidence.”

However, later in the day, with me questioning former police minister Stirling, Wallace announces: “On the contrary, the Attorney-General said it was his bit of legislation”.

He repeats the bombshell to me: “No no, he said it was his piece of legislation that was actually written by . . . parliamentary counsel that he put it through.”

Two days later, Wallace was still certain Toyne had drawn up the drug house laws, telling me, “it’s his Act”. Just in case I hadn’t got it, he added with only the slightest acerbity: “What more do you want from there?”

Unfortunately for us, it wasn’t until much later – long after our first Supreme Court appeal had failed – that we realised how Wallace had worked us over and how well he had done it.

Was he biased? Do ducks quack? This is what he said on May 19 while I was questioning the Chief Minister, a former ABC journalist:

HIS WORSHIP: Mr Inder-Smith, it’s a well known fact, I don’t know if it’s true but it’s a well known fact it’s reported in newspapers and in government reports that hydroponically grown marihuana is - I don’t know, the figures quoted are wild, but there - everybody says it’s greatly more powerful today than it was a generation ago. As I say, I don’t know that it’s true, but Ms Martin has access to the same material that you and I do read on that, whether we believe it or not is another question.

This was what I wrote for our Full Bench Appeal:

That must take the golden roscoe for the most absurd stream of consciousness to have emanated from any one set of human vocal chords during the entire three-week hearing. It is stellar in its banality. If there were a hall of fame for imbecilic utterances, that 90-word masterpiece would be welcomed with a red-carpet and canon fire. It is as disturbing in magnitude as it is jaw-droppingly ignorant and head-rattlingly convoluted. If the criminological tenet “language structures thought”, were at play during the emission of that flatulence, Mr Wallace’s tongue and cerebral cortex must have shared more than just a spliff of Clare Martin’s dreaded hydro, they must have dropped a tab of new-age LSD. If there had been a bullshit meter in the corner of his courtroom, it would have started smoking, then melted into a fused heap on the carpet. The really worrying thing is that it came not from the morons posing as witnesses, but from the man who was weighing up the evidence, with the view to sit in judgment and later pronounce sentence on the accused.

For asininity it beat anything from Elferink, Carter, Kiely, Toyne, Stirling, Aagard, Burke or Henderson as the biggest load of pretentious, ill-informed, vacuous bilge to spew forth from ANYBODY let alone a Darwin magistrate.

Whatever that tripe was, it manifested in his consistent ability to decipher the indecipherable and comprehend the incomprehensible. It’s all there in the 2000 pages of transcript, which ironically, we were able to acquire and post on the web free.

That’s democracy for you.

If PJT noticed anything untoward, he probably wouldn’t admit it. He’s part of the state, he and his beard don’t do red face. And besides, he and Dick are mates - that came out in court before the trial even began, and was the basis for our repeated requests for him to stand himself down. But in private, I wonder if PJT flinched at the lie his mate told for the Attorney-General. When it came, which was during his summing up, I don’t think any of us spotted it. Even if we had done so, we would have been powerless to challenge it, anyway. The lie came two days after Wallace’s champagne moment of oratory. This is it:

“The evidence consistently was that (the drug house legislation) was the Department of Justice, Attorney-General’s bill, not a police bill.”

Following is another extract from the appeal Stui, Gaz and I took to the Full Bench:

How dare he lie like that. That was the second shocker he told on the subject. How can he get away with that? Consistent?! That is an outrageous statement. The chance of it being a police bill wasn’t even RAISED in evidence, so why should he mention the police? And wasn’t it interesting how ownership was now with the Department of Justice as well as the Attorney-General? That in itself is ridiculous, an ambiguous and inconclusive furphy. One is a department, the other an individual. Which is it Mr Wallace?

Amid all the disgusting mayhem one common denominator stands out like the proverbials and that is me – Rob Inder-Smith. That’s because Wallace didn’t like me. He hated me from the first time I asked, nay demanded, that he stand himself down from hearing the trial. It was a request I made several times. He couldn’t contain his festering antipathy for me, which exploded at several points during the trial. And that’s the result – lies and fabrication and smug assertions that HE had a handle on the testimony. Each time I tried to get a name from Toyne, Stirling and-or Burke, Wallace haughtily put me in my place as he “clarified” what had clearly become the unclarifiable. He was spiteful and vindictive, and many of his remarks to me were uncalled for. His silent rage brought him undone more than once, the Scrymgour and Elferink questions being two disgraceful cases in point.

The pathetic charade demonstrates the whole incestuous nature of the trial. Wallace’s manipulations seemed innocuous at the time. Indeed, they were so innocuous that they never rang alarm bells with the Justice Angel. I doubt that Your Honours have had your alarm bells set off by them. Yet they came from the man who was to sum me up as “unwilling to be explicit in . . . answers, professing failure of recall (and) deliberately misunderstanding the drift of questions” (May 22, p.39).

Certainly it was me – us the defendants – and not the witnesses who were on trial. But Mr Wallace’s failure to mention THEIR evasiveness speaks volumes. Once again, one could speculate that this failure was deliberate.

Mr Wallace covered himself, in that he was SEEN to be conducting a fair and open trial. He gave us our head – me included - in what was often clumsy cross-examination and irrelevant questioning. But what he gave on one hand, he took away with the other by constantly overriding and generally subduing otherwise determined attempts to get to the truth of relevant matters. In the bitter end, it all came down to the mysterious committee – the same one I was referring to all along.

The whole insidious display dragged the case to hitherto un-plumbed depths, reeking of back-scratching, bastardry, cowardice and duplicity as it went.

What was that about separation of powers?

Financial costs of the whole catastrophe can only be guessed at by those in the know. Five-years’ courtroom procedure, paper work and backroom preparation wouldn’t be peanuts. What do court orderlies, the equivalent of ball boys and ball girls, get a week? The NT Government’s Crown Prosecutor, Greg McDonald, made intermittent appearances - what does he cost per hour?

More than 12 months after Wallace’s unsurprising finding of guilty as charged, the hearing moved up to the Court of Appeal before a Supreme Court Judge (Angel J), with a new pair of more senior prosecutors and more senior black-jacket ball boys and ball girls. Still guilty, Angel J declared, and gaol terms remained unchanged. Higher up again to the Full Bench (Thomas J, Martin CJ, Riley J) went the co-appellants, who were down to five and still free on bail. We struck out again: still guilty, still going to gaol. The three wise agents of the state went to script, unashamedly, and oh so gravely. Repeated attempts beginning early last year to reach the High Court of Australia involved many hours’ work by the Registrar Ruth Cheetham, who ultimately ruled that the application filed by appellants Highway and Inder-Smith was again unsuccessful. The last roll of the dice was the appeal against sentence, which was where NT Legal Aid lawyers were engaged. That final step, handing our case over to Legal Aid to appeal the sentence, was exactly how Gary intended it would be, at least for him Stui and me – events had followed the Gaz Plan to the letter.

Back in the Court of Appeal (Southwood J) the co-appellants, down to four following Gaza’s death last October, watched and waited as another Supreme Court trial caravan lumbered from the blocks. Like the lower-court hearings, that, too, dragged on. But this time, successive adjournments – a re-sentencing procedure that went for another month – made it seem as if even the state at last, was finally beginning to feel a bit giddy, just a bit weary from it all. Stui said to me, “they don’t want to put us in gaol”, and he was probably right. But a judge’s gotta do what a judge’s gotta do. This, even though the whole fiasco could have been aborted at any stage, simply by dropping what was clearly a trumped-up charge to begin with.

When the appeal was upheld and Wallace’s sentence finally set aside, it was on one hand a huge victory for NAP. Two appellants – Highway and Corro – had their five-month gaol terms fully suspended. Me and Ishmael Lambe, however, must serve a month together – me, because I was free on bail at the time of the offence; Ishmael, because the judge properly recognised him for what he is, even declaring in his judgment that he had to be incarcerated.

I therefore am on the threshold of becoming a political prisoner. But as Gary used to point out, because most laws are gammon, most people behind bars are political prisoners, so I’ll be no Robinson Crusoe. My sentence – reduced by three days because of my wrongful imprisonment - will cost the tax-payer how much? When I eventually get out in mid-April, what will this whole roller-coaster ride have cost? Hundreds of thousands? Millions? And Clare’s red face? The agents’ red faces? They remain at large, as they have done since European colonisation. Do they know no shame? You bet. Do they feel guilt? Give myself an uppercut at the absurdity of the question.

I didn’t have a life to catch and was very tempted to appeal my re-sentencing on the grounds that I’ve already suffered enough, what with five years’ stress, harassment and inability to find long-term work. Almost as bad are the conditions Southwood J imposed on us, and these are/were worth appealing alone. Stui and I are not to associate for 12 months and both of us are banned from parliament for two years. That, one might think, would not faze me. But the State Reference Library happens to be part of the Parliamentary building and I’m fond of its facilities, especially its excellent newspaper microfilms. So, once I’m back out, I’ll have to go back to court to try to sort that mess out. I believe such conditions are egregious and unjustifiable because they are useless to lowering and-or deterring crime.

Yet they are common. Learned judges everywhere, apparently, impose them to sever “criminal ties”. Outside court, Ian “Rocker” Read and Glenn Holden, our re-sentencing lawyers, said they disagreed with them but hey, that’s the story Rory. Tough luck Stui and Rob.

“Have you thought about a sea change?” Rocker asked me, still in his cloak.

Stui’s and mine are one thing. But what Chief Justice Brian Martin ordered another activist-friend and parliament invader, Scott White, to do while sentencing him last year, was off the graph. Scott lives in Tasmania, his parents are long-term Darwinites. Scott was told not to come to Darwin, lest the suspended 10-week sentence he had just been handed be activated as a prison term. The unasked question of what if Scott wanted to visit his parents?, did not even register on the embarrassment meter.

Crime and punishment, embarrassment and shame. Which formula applies here? One of the longest-running, most expensive trials in NT history is about to peter out and end not with a bang but a whimper, and if it weren’t for the immutable chronicle of the internet, would have gone entirely unnoticed by the outside world. Not one Australian newspaper deemed the case newsworthy enough to investigate or even monitor, and the only paper that paid it anything more than lip service was the Grimsby Telegraph, in England. To its great credit, and in classic tribute to good old-fashioned local-boy-makes-headlines news sense, the “local rag” published several stories over the years because it featured Gary, the former Grimsby boy who still has relatives there. They even did a tribute on him when he died, aged 31, from AIDS.

Despite appearances, I am not bitter. Nor is my anger terminal.

Has it all been worth it, we might ask. Before I try to answer that, I must advise caution and pre-empt anybody who wasn’t there by suggesting they defer to history and let that be our judge. I am on record as saying I have no regrets and of course it was easy to say that before the spectre of gaol reared up as it has done now, well down the track. In one way, I still am unrepentant, no question. But as Stui told the ABC as he was walking, he probably wouldn’t repeat the stunt knowing what we know now, and I guess the same applies to me.

I know one thing: being locked up for walking into a big room and climbing on to a table is not and will never be anything to boast about among hardened cons. And doing a paltry three weeks four days – now that will be the embarrassment.

One day in the future I’ll undoubtedly see the past five years in a different hue. Hindsight puts things into a new perspective, yeah? Right now, I have no regrets about what I did, and indeed, remain proud of what I did. I am proud of everybody else who went in with us and I am most of all proud of Gary Meyerhoff and will be forever grateful to him for what he did for me. He opened my eyes to a new reality, a shocking and merciless reality that’s called the war on drugs. It is prosecuted by violence of a different nature to that in Iraq – courtroom violence, which is manifest in inhuman and unjustifiable jail sentences handed down by barbarians called magistrates and judges. If society knew the horrifying cost of this war – financially, spiritually and morally – people would immediately call for the release of all non-violent drug offenders. Then they would rage against those who have hoodwinked them so long: the media, the politicians, the judges, the maggots, the cops – the state. The mainstream media is probably the most culpable. It is “journalists” – my former breed – who have perpetrated this ignorance by leaving the issue of illicit drugs unexplored, and not pressing editors to report on the legions and legions of victims all around the world. Instead, they have focused on the minority, the problem drug-users, demonising and damning them to the roar of public approval. The Jews crow whenever the word holocaust is mentioned. Well when Bush snr and Regan ratcheted up the war on drugs, and the “civilised” world followed suite, nobody listened to voices of reason that predicted this holocaust, of which Schapelle Corby and the Bali Nine are victims, and for which Indonesia is simply doing its bit by hanging traffickers. Ignoramuses who swallow everything they read and see, the huntin’ and fishin’ rednecks, would say, “well gaol is at least better for them than being shot dead and having their bodies dumped on the side of the road”. That’s what the state does in Thailand, all in the name of the war on drugs. Closer to home, my co-crusader Stuart Highway has written at length about Margot Laughton, a grandmother and victim of the stolen generation. If ever a disgusting shame job of police entrapment, law enforcement and judicial procedure played out in Darwin, her case is it.

If Mr and Mrs Public knew about her and the Vicki Rosepilers of the world, they would do more than just walk into parliament and climb on a table - they would demand an immediate end to drug prohibition and call for the dismissal and summary execution of they who wage this relentless campaign with their hysteria, lies and misinformation.

Confucius said that at the end of every long journey a traveller finds only himself. This journey has been replete with mystery, and questions abound. Two of the more curious are:

● Why was one of our nine-party crew – a strapping young Aboriginal man – never charged, providential as this “oversight” was?

● Why did the cops not investigate the sexual assault of Ema?

ABC journalist Rebecca Morse told Ema she had seen detective Hofer kick her while she was on the floor. It remains speculation, therefore, as to why Ms Morse happened to be transferred interstate a few days after the incident.

Another question is, why did no lawyer want to touch Stui’s, Gaza’s and my initial attempt to get compensation for being wrongfully imprisoned for 46 hours on the night of November 1, 2004? The arrests were the result of a Supreme Court bungle, while we were still free on bail between appeals. In the ensuing weeks, at least two lawyers interviewed us in their offices, but both meetings ended with us being shown the door and told that they couldn’t help us. Our letters of demand for compensation to Peter Toyne resulted in him writing back telling us to wait for the case to take its course. It has now taken its course, and while my “compensation” is a slight reduction in my month’s gaol term, Stui remains in limbo. Will he be compensated for an act that is generally associated with the words Gestapo and which used to take place only in the formerly Eastern Bloc countries of the Cold War?

On Monday, March 12, my bail runs out and I shall invade the nearest cop shop to hand myself in. How ironic that this whole protracted nightmare began with a quiet walk and is about to finish with one.

For now, I’m philosophical. But see how I feel this in a few days’ time. That’s when memory and lots of time for hopefully quiet contemplation will be put to the test as I begin my vegetable-only diet and dry out in my four walls wash basin prison cell.

ROB INDER-SMITH

Darwin

Saturday, March 10, 2007