It’s the age-old problem: Who watches the watchers? More correctly, when a technocratic elite is answerable only to itself, who is going to hold it accountable?
This is the glaring fault line at the heart of the self-serving notion of ‘judicial independence’. In theory, it all sounds well and good: making the judiciary answerable to itself removes the corrupting influence of politics.
The only problem is what happens when the judiciary itself is almost completely corrupted, but virtually untouchable? The results we see all around us, all the time: judges and judicial bureaucrats airily turning loose the most violent, predatory rabble on innocent citizens, and then standing aloof and unaccountable when the savages they patronise go on to prey on the innocent again, and again, and again.
And when the decent few somehow try to lift the system out of the muck, the swamp monsters exact their revenge with near-untouchable viciousness.
A NSW parliamentary committee has recommended a formal inquiry be established to determine whether the state’s chief prosecutor should be removed, in an explosive report declaring she likely authorised the leak of confidential information to a radio station to retaliate against a judge who had been critical of her office.
Criticism that was clearly more than merited.
In the extraordinary 75-page report, the committee found Director of Public Prosecutions Sally Dowling SC gave “false evidence” and “seriously obstructed” its efforts to understand how information was handed to 2GB by someone in her office to form the basis of a highly-critical report about NSW District Court judge Penelope Wass.
The leak concerned Judge Wass allowing an underage Aboriginal offender to perform a Welcome to Country during his sentencing hearing. At the time, judges had been criticising the ODPP for running meritless rape cases. Judge Wass had even reported Dowling to the legal watchdog for trying to exert influence over the judiciary.
Anyone who behaved like this in any other role would in short-order shunted out the door with their belongings in a cardboard box. But this is the judiciary, so taxpayers have to drum their heels while the system grinds through a rigmarole of inquiries and working-groups and committees, where justice is delayed and denied.
The committee found Dowling likely authorised the leak to retaliate against the judge, then falsely denied it. They described her conduct as seriously obstructive. The “most egregious” aspect was risking the identity of the young offender. Yet police somehow concluded no offence had been committed.
This is modus operandi of the same system that protects its own while the public suffers soft-on-crime outcomes. Judges and prosecutors operate in a cosy, taxpayer-funded lobster pot where accountability is for the little people. Dissenting committee members from Labor and the Greens predictably cried foul, claiming bias and insufficient evidence. The swamp protects its own.
Hands up who thinks nothing in the way of substantial reform will ever result. Even the most egregious offenders will at worst be shifted sideways like a predatory priest being quietly moved on to a fresh parish and fresh meat. The insiders close ranks, witter fatuous inanities about ‘independence’, and the revolving door keeps spinning. The public gets more lenient sentencing, more meritless prosecutions waste everyone’s time and the same unaccountable elite pats itself on the back.
The fault-line runs deep. Judicial independence was supposed to guard against political corruption. Instead it has delivered a self-serving caste answerable to no one but itself.
When the watchers refuse to watch each other, ordinary citizens pay the price in safety and justice.
