The kerfuffle over the Sunday Canberra Times putting Chief Minister Jon Stanhope’s head on a doctor’s body was an insignificant sideshow about a small picture.
The main show, with still no clear view of the big picture, is the 2003 bushfires.
As soon the coroner got close to getting a clearer picture, they want to shut her down. This week, nine ACT officials joined by the ACT Government successfully moved in the ACT Supreme Court to stop the inquest into the fires until the court determines whether the coroner Maria Doogan should be excluded on the grounds of perceived bias.
Doogan was moving beyond the hand-wringing and woe over a natural disaster. She was moving beyond the applause for the brave firefighters risking their lives. She was moving beyond the self-congratulatory praise over the response AFTER the event.
She was getting close to the real questions. Yes, it was a natural disaster and not much anyone could do about halting the firestorm that hit on January 18, 2003. But who was in a position to warn the residents on the perimeter of the city that a fire might hit? When were they in that position? And why didn’t they issue the warning before it was too late?
The residents might have had to abandon their homes anyway, but at least they would have had a chance to rescue their sentimental valuables. At least they would have been given a choice to prepare their homes for fire so there was less chance of them being consumed by flames. And maybe they would have had the chance to stay and fight.
Was it perhaps that, collectively, the ACT authorities were scared stiff of being accused later of setting off a false alarm, of crying wolf, or even of creating unnecessary panic? Could it be perhaps that they were so scared of the political consequences of that (Gosh, all those people wasted a weekend moving their sentimental valuables and cleaning gutters) that they completely misjudged the urgency of the situation?
Where was the Acting Minister for Emergency Services (Stanhope) and what was he doing at the relevant times?
The public is entitled to have those questions tested. As the coroner started to put these things to the test with the possibility that she might find some sort of shortcomings here, she has been silenced – temporarily or perhaps permanently.
Maybe there are perfectly good answers to these questions. But we are entitled to hear them before the beginning of the next bushfire season.
The public interest in finding out what happened and how to prevent recurrence is greater than the individual interest in “procedural fairness” or “perceived” bias – note, it is not actual bias.
The public interest is greater in this instance because no individual rights are affected by a coroner’s hearing. Coroners cannot jail or fine anyone. Coroners cannot award damages. They cannot dismiss anyone from office.
The function of a coroner is simply to find out what happened.
The public has a right to know what happened through the vigorous inquisitorial powers of a coroner.
If individuals are subsequently sued for damages or prosecuted for criminal offences then, certainly, give them utmost legal protection against “perceived” bias or admitting hearsay or prejudicial evidence or any other irregularity. But those things should not get in the way of finding out what happened – and certainly not cause a delay beyond the next fire season.
This legal carry-on puts coroners in an impossible position.
Once a coroner starts testing witnesses by demanding answers to pertinent questions, they scream bias.
But if a coroner does not test, but sits back like a judge in civil or criminal proceedings and lets the parties fight it out, they scream “procedural unfairness” because the coroner has made a finding without fair warning and a chance to be heard on that point.
Coroners are doomed either way and the public misses out.
The ACT Government is joining the action of nine of its officials to close this inquiry. It is justifying its actions on the grounds of “protecting” its officials and giving them “fairness”.
That justification does not hold water with me. I think the Government should be exposing its officials to scrutiny of their actions by the coroner, not joining them in what I think looks like an attempt to avoid scrutiny.
If this level of legal protection for witnesses in coroner’s inquests is warranted, the corollary should be that all the evidence in the coroner’s inquiry should be available to any subsequent civil or criminal proceedings. But it is not. The fact it is not shows how unnecessay this action over perceived bias is.
The balance is wrong here and the public is missing out. Let’s not be beguiled by Stanhope posing as the protector of individual rights. What about the public right?
All the lawyers involved are no doubt competently doing their professional duty to serve their clients individually and to protect their clients’ interests individually. But from the perspective of the ordinary Canberra citizen who wants answers to what happened on January 18, this looks like the collection of those ACT political and bureaucratic authorities who are responsible for warning the public about fires are doing their damnest to stymie or at least delay a coroner’s search for answers to what happened.
If successful, can the public be confident any new coroner is going to be as expansive, thorough and wide-ranging as this one?
This is an appalling diversion from the pursuit of answers to questions the public has a right to see tested.
We now have majority government. It can gag scrutiny in the legislature. It has now shown a propensity to resist scrutiny at a coronial inquest and to resist scrutiny in the courts over Gungahlin Drive. So it is even more important for the media to do the scrutiny.
This brings us back to the small picture: the picture of Doctor Jon that was published last Sunday. It seems to me a shame that that distracted attention from Danielle Cronin’s excellent analysis of the ACT health system. But Stanhope is right. Most ordinary readers looking at that picture would say: what on earth is Stanhope doing dressing up as a doctor when he has consistently said he does not do stunts? The words “digitally created” in small type under the picture did not go far enough to remove that initial impression.
It will be interesting to see what the Australian Press Council says, if it goes that far.
But the biggest sin is to have unnecessarily given the Chief Minister a stick to beat the media over the head with.
A smokescreen over the little picture should not be allowed to intimidate the media from seeking answers about the big pictures on fires, health, responses to coronial inquests, indeed, the whole range of government activity.