Category: Opinion

- Originally published by Ocean Road Magazine edition #45, Summer 2022. On the morning of Sunday, 13 August 1961, the citizens of the German capital, Berlin, awoke to an unfamiliar flurry of activity on their streets. During the night before, at the witching hour of midnight, under the orders of the East German Communist Party leader Walter Ulbrict, police and military units had begun sealing off the border between the Soviet-controlled east of the city and the west. By daylight, they had torn up the streets along the border, rendering them unusable, and lined them with barbed wire entanglements and fences that would ultimately stretch all along the 156 kilometres surrounding the three western sectors of the city.
The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic have been vast, not least of all in the development of digital communication all around the globe. It is now the norm for enterprises large and small to go online, working from home, holding meetings virtually by Skype, or Zoom, or TeamViewer, and rarely, if ever, speaking with their colleagues face to face. It’s easier, cheaper, and far more convenient, and business leaders everywhere have heralded the virtual communication revolution as the brave new world.
This week, as we paused to remember, on the 102nd Remembrance Day, those who fell in foreign fields to defend and preserve our liberties, hopefully we also reflected on a great deal more.
Is it just me, or are we maybe making things just a little more complicated than they really need to be? In the context of litigation, lawyers sometimes need to access and disclose copies of their clients’ financial and other records held by various government bodies. That means getting the client’s written authority to access their records, and then getting in touch with the relevant government institution. That should be pretty simple, right?
With COVID-19 directives flying thick and fast from both federal and state institutions, many of us may be getting a little confused about precisely what we can and can’t do, as a matter of law. Every day, someone asks my advice about the fine detail – "Can I drive in a car with my friend/spouse/lover/sister/workmate?", "Can I walk on the beach with a friend?", "Can I stroll in the park for fresh air?" – and it's not always easy to give a definitive answer. The reason is the day to day requirements at law are not set in stone but rather, like the crisis itself, they’re in a state of continual flux.
For the past couple of months, I have been receiving messages and calls from concerned relatives and friends back home in Malaysia wanting to know whether I have been affected by the recent bushfires. Thankfully, like most Gold Coasters, I wasn’t physically confronted by the crisis,  but of course we have all been touched by the devastating news of loss and destruction suffered by so many around us. It is awful to think the fires have claimed lives, destroyed homes, impacted at least a billion animals, and laid to waste more than 25 million acres of land.
Don’t you sometimes miss the good, old-fashioned Moral High Ground? As a post-war baby, the world I was born into seemed a brave and righteous one. Our fathers had just fought and died to free us all from fascism and oppression. The world had paid a terrible price, but it was all worth it.  In the end we won, and the Bad Guys lost.
About ten years before the birth of Christ the great Roman poet Publius Ovidius Naso, in his collection of epistolary poems known as The Heroides, coined the Latin phrase Exitus acta probat, which translates roughly to the often-quoted mantra ‘The end justifies the means’. It is a sentiment celebrated by the Italian Renaissance writer Niccolo Machiavelli in the 1500’s and enthusiastically embraced by a long list of authoritarian dictators throughout history. Thankfully, it has no place in the criminal justice system of any modern western democracy.
In February 1692, in a secluded village in the isolated British American colony of Massachusetts, 9-year-old Betty Parris and her 11-year-old cousin Abigail Williams, began to behave very strangely indeed. It seems they had recently taken to screaming, ranting and raving, throwing objects hither and thither, making weird noises, and generally behaving in a way the local reverend described as “beyond the power of epileptic fits or natural disease to effect.” When other young females in the same village started to exhibit similarly disturbing symptoms, the good folk of Salem quickly concluded there was witchcraft at work in their town, and decided it was time to take action.
This week Sky News aired the explosive documentary “Lawyer X: The Untold Story”, recounting the sorry tale of the now-notorious double-dealings of former Melbourne Barrister, Nicola Gobbo.
I was very saddened to hear this week of the passing of Rick Carter, the great Australian actor and comedian, with whom I worked on Gettin’ Square, a film I wrote and co-produced in 2003. A veteran of scores of classic Aussie films, including Muriel's Wedding, Babe, Rabbit Proof Fence, The Great Gatsby and Mad Max: Fury Road, and a long list of successful television series, Rick was an icon of the Australian entertainment industry over four decades of work.
They say confession is good for the soul. That may be so, but sometimes it seems there's a whole lot of things it's not nearly so good for. Just ask Liam Neeson.