Lawyers and law students have always had access to judgments of the nation’s courts and statutes of its parliaments. They have been available in the law reports in the university, practitioners’ and court libraries throughout Australia and have included details of Family Court jugdments, with names and details of custody and property settlements.
I recall one Family Court case that went to the High Court, for example, involving a constitutional wrangle based upon some salacious details. The woman was asserting that the child whose custody was disputed was in fact fathered by someone other than the husband case. She said it was not a child of a marriage and therefore the Commonwealth’s Family Court had no constitutional power to hear the case. The Constitution restricts the Commonwealth’s power over custody of children to those in relation to marriage and divorce. The woman said the case should go to the state supreme court (which unlike the Family Court at the time) had power to order a blood test which might prove the issue. The man (who did not want paternity challenged biologically) wanted the custody case to be heard by the Family Court.
In those days, the press were not allowed in the Family Court, but they were allowed into the High Court. Fearing embarrassment for the child later, Justice Deane (now Governor-General) had the wit and humanity to suggest a suppression order on the names, and the case is now listed as something like F v F, but in many routine Family Court jugdments in other cases the identity can be deduced by lawyers and law students from reading the jugdments.
The general public, however, have not easily been privy to the same information. Some public libraries have carried court jugdments and some court and university libraries have let the public in. Even so, it has been difficult for people untrained in the law to find exactly what they want. Indeed, first year law students spend a lot of time learning how to use a law library.
Then came electronic publishing and sophisticated electronic searching.
In the past several years Family Court and other court jugdments and statutes of the federal and state parliaments have been put on CD-ROM by commercial companies. Cost has still excluded the general public, but in the past year or so the Australasian Legal Information Institute has put the jugdments and statutes on the Internet.
There was consternation yesterday that an ordinary member of the public could search the Family Court database and extract all sorts of personal details about named litigants. The Attorney-General, Daryl Williams, said he had taken the database off the Internet.
It was a silly over reaction, similar to the reaction of the Church and civil authorities in the Middle Ages when confronted with the invention of the printing press. The first instinct of authorities is to suppress. But there was no suppressing the printing press and there will be no suppressing the Internet. Indeed, the two developments are very similar.
The Internet is like the printing press, the telephone, the car and the fax machine … a useless invention never likely to catch on. Any idiot at the time knew that the quill, the post, a horse or a telegram were far more reliable and never likely to be replaced.
In fact, of course, the Internet, is about where the car was in 1913, full of crank handles and spark retarders and slower than a horse.
We have to deal with the Internet by recognising its power and potential, and not by crass denial techniques.
It is far more likely that Mr Williams has disrupted far more students of family law in legitimate study than he has stopped prurient browsers of salacious family court details. And even with his crass action , he has not fully succeeded. I found details of several cases at 3.30pm yesterday, involving (and I’ll use their initials) AGL and DLG (a ding dong over whether a wife who walked out could get her hands on the husband’s compo pay-out and MFH v KGL and a Canberra case involving W.
So what.
The importance of the Internet is not what information is on it. It contains much the same information as the paper version. It’s the method of access that counts.
There are several elements to that. The first is geographic convenience. You can search and send and receive messages across the nation or the world without leaving home. That obviates the cost of travel and no-one third party need know what you are searching for or why or to whom you are communicating about what. At the other end, the information provider does nothing beyond putting the information on an electronic database. That reduces costs. The receipt of the information is almost instantaneous. For all the unreliability of modems and software, they are now quicker, cheaper and easier than going to a library and photocopying. Of greater importance is the method of electronic searching. You can search for individual words or combinations of words in the text.
The Family Court database is one example. Another is to compare, say, the paper archives of The Canberra Times with an electronic database of the same thing. With the former it would take too long to be practicable to find out if Billy Bloggs ever appears in the drink-drive list (or even the Family Court list if the surname were unusual) over the past 10 years, for example. Text searching can be deadly.
In yesterday’s instance, Mr Williams had control of the database and could deny access. But that will not usually be the case. The latter-day clerics and the holders of state power will not be able to control the thousands of Internet sites in the world. Besides the data can be sent to an overseas site and access to it cannot be denied without closing off so much else of great economic benefit to the nation.
The Internet presents not just a quantum leap in information, but, as with printing, a different world. People are just going to have to get a little less precious about the bandying about of information and opinions about them. It will be like the pre-industrial village when everyone in the (tiny) world knew what everyone else was doing because people gossiped.
Now they gossip across the nation and the world. Indeed, an American mathematician, mechanic or stamp collector will have more common interests with an Australian counterpart than with an Australian sociologist, programmer or electrician. Moreover, they can find each other more easily than on the Internet than in their own street. The detriment, of course, is that there is more to human contact than electronic messages. The Internet has to be used to improve human contract not reduce it, and university experience over the past two decades suggests this is the likely result because human nature remains the same we are gregarious, but we also like to pry and gossip. Despite Mr Williams’s crass attempt (and no doubt others will try the same thing), the Internet will not be stopped, nor human nature easily changed.
In some respected the interim supremacy of the printed word has deluded us. Because it was treated with such importance, much of the prying and gossip of village life was sanitised from it on pain of heavy payment of defamation damages or because people were reluctant to commit to print. So a lot of public and semi-public people got a rose-coloured view of how the world viewed them. For good or bad, we will have to deal with more village gossip and prying on a world scale.