Thought police

Press freedom ... Front cover drama at Law Council organ ... Pauline Hanson and the KKK ... Big shots in San Francisco hauled into crisis session ... Secret recording ... Pig Iron Bob to the rescue ... From Theodora ... Justinian's Archive, September 1997 

Unsuitable for lawyers reading the LCA journal

What a strange cover it was for the August [1997] edition of Australian Lawyer, the soon to expire official organ of the Law Council of Australia. 

There was a picture of Pauline Hanson, with Bob Menzies in the background. The cover story was about the legal standing of political parties and the challenge to the registration of Pauline's One Notion Party under the Electoral Act. 

However, the real story was the behind-the-scenes merde fight that went on over the cover. 

The Law Council secretariat objected to editor Marty Schiel's original cover design, which was a montage containing not only the picture of Hanson, but a Nazi flag with swastika, and the burning crosses of the Klu Klux Klan (the KKK being mentioned in the article). 

The LCA secretariat called into action the infamous Australian Lawyer editorial committee to decide whether the design was "appropriate". 

A telephone hook-up was arranged and, as expected, the discussion was sheer pantomime. 

There was concern about the publication of "foreign political symbols". One sensitive member of the committee said that the cover was "unfair" to Pauline. Another said that if home grown political symbols were to be used they should not include the Eureka flag, because it represented "fascist non-taxpayers". 

The insanity went on for half-an-hour. Word of the cover spread to San Francisco and the ears of then LCA president Peter Short and immediate past president of the NSW Law Society, Stormin' Norman Lyle. 

Both were attending the American Bar Association junket, both were livid about the proposed cover, and both were on the blower back to Australia about it. 

In the end, the committee instructed Marty Schiel to remove the burning crosses and the Nazi flag from the cover. 

Mark Richardson head of the Law Society's nomenklatura, told Schiel that if there was any intention not to follow the committee's instruction to the letter, then he wanted to know now, so that he could get on the blower to San Francisco and inform Stormin' Norman. 

Stormin' has quite a history of editorial censorship with the NSW journal. 

Subsequently, it emerged that without informing members of the committee or seeking their permission, and in defiance of the Telecommunications (Interception) Act, the deputy secretary general of the Law Council, Christine Harvey, had arranged for the telephone hook-up to be secretly recorded. 

Ian Dunn from the Law Institute of Victoria fired off a magnificent letter of complaint, but Harvey explained that the recording was simply being made as a backup to her secretary's notes of the meeting and, in any event, it was not a tape recording, merely a recording by a dictaphone.

That's all right then.