Apprehensions of bias will create actual bias, at least in the case of two health bureaucrats who are threatening to take the Morris Royal Commission to court. Actually, one of the bureaucrats, Peter Leck appears to have stepped back, while keeping the threat alive, no doubt a face saving gesture. The other, Director of Medical Services at the Bundaberg Hospital, Darren Keating, is proceeding.
Until Keating lodges with the Supreme Court, we have no idea what his actual complaint is, but that doesn’t mean we can’t make some observations.
The first observation is that Committees of Inquiry are not courts. They operate on an inquisitorial basis, which means in essence that a commissioner is required to come to some conclusions before hearing all of the evidence. If that is what is being complained of, the court should take a broad view of Commissioner Morris’s ability to express an opinion about guilt or innocence. In the end a Commission of Inquiry is a bit like a superior kind of police inquiry. It tries to get to the truth, and will make recommendations, but any recommendations it makes are not binding on anyone and can be over-turned by the government, or the courts.
The second is that this action will convince the public, and many of Dr Keating’s future employers, that he is guilty because he is acting as though he has something to hide. In other words, complaining about bias will result in a situation of actual bias.
The worst result for Keating would actually be if he was successful. That would derail the inquiry, costing the state huge amounts of money, and forcing another to be held. The patients who suffered from Dr Patel would be angry. The government would be angry. Health bureaucrats would be angry. Would any of them have a clear and unbiased view of Dr Keating?
Second worst result would be for him to lose. He wouldn’t have inconvenienced anyone, but he would still look like a goose, and again, that would shape public opinion.
I have no idea who is advising Dr Keating, but if, as is likely, it is just his legal team, he should invest in someone with some strategic and public relations experience. They would tell him that he should wait until after the inquiry before launching any action, if at all. His best chances of an unbiased rest of his life lie in people forgetting who he is as quickly as possible.

Schapelle Corby is to have her case reopened. This would appear to be her last chance to work out what the Indonesian justice system is really about. It is not about abstract notions of justice, it is about power, influence and most significantly, money.
Probably the stupidest thing that has happened in the whole affair to date was the complaint by the Perth QC Mark Trowell, who was retained by the Australian government, that her Indonesian counsel had asked for $500,000 so as to bribe the judges.
Of course they did, but that is the way things are done there. By complaining Trowell would have made things more difficult, not easier, for Corby, with little or no impact on the whole system. Doubt that? Well read this story from the ABC Correspondents Report about Tommy Suharto, billionaire son of the former president. Tommy was convicted and sentenced to jail for 15 years for having a judge who was investigating him assassinated. He’s been in jail four years, had five years cut-off his sentence on appeal, received various other remissions, and is expected to be out of jail within a year.

TIM PALMER: What you’re suggesting is that in Indonesia today justice in the Indonesia of Suharto, money speaks more loudly than justice.
FRANZ JUANITA: Yes, I think… that’s what I think, you see, because it continues, and it’s even worse than during Suharto, because it is more widespread than during Suharto. It’s built into the system. So it’s weak.

Indonesia has such a weak central government that in a way everything has been outsourced. It might have a continental system of law, but it follows the eastern system of civil servants essentially being given the right to charge a fee for their services. In the Ottoman Empire it was common practice for civil service positions to be sold because of the baksheesh that they attracted. We might call this baksheesh bribery, or perhaps extortion, but to people in such societies, it is just the way that things are done.
The lead judge who convicted Corby boasted that he had convicted 500 or so drug dealers – a huge number, even if he has had a long career to date – yet a Gold Coast Bulletin reporter had no trouble walking out onto the streets and being offered drugs. How do the police select who they charge? I’d suggest the judges only see a very “poor” class of offender – those without the means to avoid going to court.
It poses an interesting moral dilemma. I think there is good reason to make it illegal for Australian businesses to bribe officials in foreign countries, and there are even better reasons to oppose payments of ransom, but I think the Corby case is qualitatively different from these situations. It is not about profit, and it will have little effect on the propensity of the Indonesian justice system to charge young Australians for drug offences. But $500,000 might save a life in a justice system that pays little heed to nice legal arguments.
The rehearing looks like Schappelle Corby’s opportunity to pay up, present some face-saving (for the judges) evidence, and come home. At the same time we need to find ways to persuade the Indonesians to change their ways, if only for the interests of Indonesian citizens themselves.

Another entry for my yet to be constructed database of predictions is climatologist Dr Roger Stone of the University of Southern Queensland and the Queensland Department of Primary Industries.
On the first of June ABC Rural carried these pars:

The prospects for normal winter rainfall and crops have deteriorated, with news today Australia is officially in a borderline El Nino.
The southern oscillation index is in the negative.
Dr Roger Stone, a climatologist with the Queensland Department of Primary Industries, says the outlook is bleak for winter crops.
He says three eastern states have almost no chance of a normal crop, with the outlook worst in New South Wales.
“For the state as a whole, less than 10 per cent chance of getting normal winter crop,” he said.
“This is normal yield, so it doesn’t miss out altogether on getting what we call median yields.
“For most of those shires to the west and south-west of Parkes and Dubbo, stretching down towards the Victorian border, in fact for most of New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia, the chances of getting a normal wheat crop are about 10 per cent to 20 per cent at most.”

Then, on the 30th June, a mere 29 days later, the Courier Mail carried this sentence about the sometimes torrential rain South-East Queensland has been receiving since mid-June:

Climatologist Roger Stone said the rain was likely to continue at least through winter due to a one-in-10-year climate phenomenon.

I was eavesdropping on a conversation between an ABC presenter and a security guard on Wednesday. The presenter was telling the guard that she had trouble believing in global warming forecasts 20 and 40 years into the future because “these people” had trouble working out what the weather was going to be in the next 24 hours.
Wonder what Dr Scott would say to that? Roger, over and out.

Neophyte Senator Barnaby Joyce is hogging the limelight this morning on a false premise. While the Howard Government theoretically takes control of the Senate today, it is not because of Joyce’s election, but that of Russell Trood, the third elected Liberal Senator from Queensland.
So I thought it was worth drawing a bit of attention to Russell. He’s a mild-mannered Associate Professor from Griffith University’s Department of International Business and Asian Studies. You can see his staff profile here. He has a law degree from Sydney Uni (one of our sponsors) and an economics degree from the University of Wales.
I suspect, from once having spent a couple of hours in conversation with him on an airline flight, that the Economics Department at the University of Wales is not given to what is generally termed “neo-liberal” economics. Trood’s economic view of the world is not mainstream “Howardism”.
His PhD is from Dalhouse University, which is in Nova Scotia in Canada, so he gets around! If you want to know more about what he thinks, you could check out his publications here (pdf 78kb) or an article that we published here
It might be worth studying the backgrounds of all the other Coalition Senators too. Barnaby Joyce is not the only one with clout – they all have it. If Labor is smart it will be trying to work out where the fault lines are and start pushing issues where other “balance of power” senators may want to line up with them and against Barnaby Joyce.
Which means that John Howard will have to pull Joyce into line pretty soon, or “control” of the Senate will bring more problems than lack of control did.