When is ACT Chief Justice Lucy McCallum going to at least be honest and stand for the Greens? The judge is clearly a frustrated activist. Of course, to stand for the Greens, she’d have to actually go through the tedium of having to submit herself to the test of electibility, rather than just handing down her opinions from on high on her unelected bully-pulpit.
McCallum has caused consternation and outrage in legal circles, by dubbing the presumption of innocence – the foundational principle of our justice system – an “intractable problem”. Not done, she then lambasted juries for not automatically believing without question the claims of rape accusers.
Now, the sticky beak is wagging her finger at Australian voters for disdaining racial separatism at last year’s referendum.
ACT Chief Justice Lucy McCallum, delivering the Paul Byrne Memorial Lecture at the University of Sydney on Wednesday night, told the crowd that it was a “shame” the Indigenous voice was not passed at last year’s referendum, and it was a “missed opportunity”.
Less learned but infinitely more sensible Australians, on the other hand, are firmly of the opinion that it was a bullet dodged. A post-referendum survey of No voters found that the overwhelming reason for rejecting the Voice was that it was fundamentally racist.
How dare these deplorable plebs disagree with the ineffably wise Chief Justice!
In giving the address, titled The Rule of Modern Law, McCallum said it was her “moral duty” to speak about issues relating to Indigenous Australians and the justice system, and help turn around the huge and disproportionate percentage of incarcerated Aboriginal people.
No, it’s her legal duty to shut the fuck up and apply the law. Just as it’s incumbent on Aboriginal Australians to stop breaking it in such disproportionate numbers.
It’s simple: if they want to avoid jail, stop breaking the law.
Instead, McCallum infantilises Aboriginal Australians by making excuses for when they break the laws that everyone else is expected to keep.
She suggested that “special measures are required in sentencing Indigenous offenders to learn the reasons they have become disengaged and to hear ... about the strengths they already have, and those that can be built upon.”
This condescending mindset, as C S Lewis pointed out, puts its targets ‘on a level with those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals’.
But to be punished, however severely, because we have deserved it, because we ‘ought to have known better’, is to be treated as a human person made in God’s image - C. S. Lewis
Not done with that, though, McCallum proceeded to pontificate on another left-wing nostrum: a so-called “treaty” with Aborigines.
Australia is a “long way behind New Zealand” on issues relating to Indigenous people, the ACT’s top judge says, including that “we didn’t have the courtesy” to enter into treaties with Indigenous tribes “when they first invaded their land”.
In fact, Good Oil readers will likely point to New Zealand’s experiences of the past few decades as exactly why activist judges should be let nowhere near such a treaty.
McCallum also appears singularly ignorant of both Australian history and the relevant law. As McCallum should know, the 1992 High Court Mabo judgement ruled that Australian was not invaded. Had that happened, native title would have been extinguished by right of conquest.
It’s also beholden on McCallum, pontificating from her judicial throne, to delineate exactly who Australia should have, or should now, enter into a treaty with. In 1788, Australia was inhabited by an often mutually-hostile patchwork of at least 150 major language groups along. The day-to-day “political unit” (as such) consisted of mostly small family bands of a few dozen people at most.
Hobson only had to get 40 Maori chiefs to stop fighting long enough to come to an agreement. A putative Australian Hobson would have had to convince hundreds if not thousands of tribal elders to stop spearing each other and thrash out an agreement.
As for the idea of a ‘treaty’ today, as former PM John Howard points out, the idea is constitutionally ludicrous. Treaties are made between sovereign states. A nation cannot, logically, make a treaty with its own people.
Anyone wanting to make a “treaty” today must first come clean and admit that they don’t regard Aborigines as fully Australian.
