Anna Burke, a former Speaker of the House of Representatives, and nowadays full-blooded member of the Administrative Review Tribunal, has come to grief at the hands of Google.
Justice Timothy McEvoy in the Federal Court had no trouble finding that Ms Burke’s extramural online research had infected her reasons and was a denial of procedural fairness.
It’s not just jurors derailing trials with their Googling – it seems the vice has spread further.
Matthew Hilbert claimed he had injured his back while woking for Lindsay Fox’s trucking business. Linfox decline to compensate him, having accepted the medical advice of Dr Peter Steadman who believed the fracture was not the consequence of a workplace “incident” in March 2022.
There was other medical evidence to the contrary, but the Fox people liked Steadman’s opinion.
Hilbert’s application for a review of the company’s decision came before Member Burke, who ordered that compensation should be paid and remitting it back to Linfox for reconsideration.
“The Tribunal was not persuaded by Professor Steadman’s opinion that as the Alfred Hospital did not detect the fracture, it had not occurred.”
In the process she boldly bolstered her reasons with a helpful research article discovered on Google – but not helpful for Linfox.
At para 105 she said:
“Also, tragically a simple google search will demonstrate that emergency departments in Australia have a 10% adverse find rate. Harm Prevention in the Emergency Department (ED), Victorian Managed Insurance Authority 2021 (VMIA) Author: Dr Ashish Jaison, FACEM Emergency Physician, Alfred Health Clinical Fellow.”
Member Burke cited the executive summary:
” … Procedural, medication and diagnostic errors are all important areas of potential improvement for patient harm prevention. Researchers have found that diagnostic errors account for the largest fraction of medical indemnity claims, the most severe patient harm, and the highest total payouts. Diagnostic error occurs more frequently in EDs than the recorded 10–15% of adverse medical events for hospital inpatient care.”
Linfox asked McEvoy to throw out Burke’s finding because the company has not had been notified about the tribunal’s independent research and had therefore been unable to make submissions.
McEvoy agreed and sent it back to start again before a different member.
Google breaks the Beak
It brings back haunting memories of Perth magistrate Barbara Lane, who resigned in 2014 after revealing she had used Google to independently make checks during a criminal hearing.
Two brothers had been accused of housing workers in sheds without council approval. The accused claimed that it was all the fault of labour hire companies, which they said had misused the sheds.
The Madge revealed during cross-examination of one of the accused that she had Googled the labour hire companies, but could not find any details.
“I thought that would be useful,” she added.
It was left to Justice Eric Heenan to sideline the beak from hearing anything further in the case.
Reports about Heenan’s reasons in The Worst Australian said the Googled results made it difficult to avoid the appearance of an independent, unstructured and unsupervised investigation that could not be fully canvassed or examined.
Madge Lane resigned before Heenan’s judgment came down.
Apparently, she had a bit of a record – being accused in 2010 of bullying lawyers and delivering substandard decisions. In 2011 the Supreme Court said she had pressured an accused to plead guilty.
Anna on the Slippery seat
Memories of Anna Burke may be blurry. She had been a trade union official attached to VicRoads and later moved up the greasy pole to become the Labour MP for Chisholm.
She had been elected Deputy Speaker of the House and when Speaker Jenkins resigned in November 2011 Labor was in minority government.
To shore up the numbers it lured Slippery Pete Slipper from the LNP into the Speaker’s chair.
Shortly after things started to unravel. In April 2012 Slippery took leave in order to to deal with allegations relating to the misuse of Cabcharge dockets and accusations of sexually harassing James Ashby, now Pauline Hanson’s Svengali.
Later the fraud conviction was overturned on appeal and Ashby’s sexual harassment claim was dismissed by Justice Rares as an abuse of process.
After Slipper’s resignation. Burke was elected unopposed as Speaker of the House in October 2012. She didn’t recontest her parliamentary seat which was taken in 2016 by the Unhappy Liberal, Julia Banks.
The following year, the Turnbull government appointed her as a full-time member of the AAT and Mark Dreyfus gave her a leg-up to senior member in 2024.
In 2017 Slipper was consecrated as a Bishop in Australia by the Brazilian Catholic Apostolic Church.
Devotion to the Monk
By now the career path of Justice McEvoy, the other star performer in this saga, is well known to readers.
See: Family strife
In March 2019, Attorney General the Very Rev Christian Porter sent McEvoy from Vic’s Bar ‘n’ Grill to the Family Court – despite his limited experience in the field.
The records show that the Raw Onion Muncher and former PM, the Mad Monk, had reason to be a fan of McEvoy, who acted pro bono for the Monk in a defamation claim brought by John Setka of the CMFEU.
In fact, he acted in six matters for the far-right door-knocker – without drawing a shilling.