Kiwi Tall Poppies Can Relax

I’ve just lost a hero – and had my faith in journalism restored. Well, the Oz variety anyway.

Prominent Australian jurist Marcus Einfeld, 70, has been sentenced to three years jail for perjury and perverting the course of justice.

The one-time darling of the left, former Federal Court judge and head of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, proclaimed ‘national treasure’, has become the first superior court judge to be jailed in Australia.

For many journalists he was the ideal newsmaker, an activist who would take on the establishment with issues like asylum seekers yet retain standing in society. His seemingly unassailable credentials let him use words like ‘genocide’ when describing the removal of Aboriginal kids from their parents last century.

He’d won international awards for his work and was a prominent commentator on Jewish and Israeli causes. Even his background was set in granite; his Dad had been a revered Labor politician.

Now we know Einfeld as a dissembler and liar who invented an elaborate story just to try and dodge a $AUD 77 speeding fine. When he was ticketed in 2006 he claimed a female American academic was driving his car at the time.

But two smart journalists with The Daily Telegraph, Michael Beach and Viva Goldner, made a few phone calls and found the woman had died in 2003. Einfeld countered that it was another woman with the same name, but she couldn’t be found.

Einfeld then constructed a sitcom of fictional characters and events to explain away the original lie, but the journalists kept digging. They soon found nuggets; his entry in Who’s Who included academic qualifications bought from US degree mills and never spotted by Einfeld’s colleagues.

There’s no point in repeating the whole sad story here – all the grubby little details of Humpty Dumpty’s fall can be found on the Web. It’s a yarn as old as humankind – a little deceit compounding interest, male ego and incompetent authorities.

More relevant is the role of the journalists and the question: “Could an Einfeld be unmasked here? With the huge contraction of newsrooms in this country and the loss of jobs, do we have enough quality journalists left to uphold the public’s right to know what’s happening?”

The two Telegraph writers won a Walkley Award for their work. Walkleys are Australia’s Pulitzers. The judges said ‘they went back to the fundamental rules of journalism’ by doing basic checking and remaining curious.

The magistrate who heard Einfeld’s original not-guilty plea to the speeding ticket accepted his excuse in a two-minute hearing. Who’d dare question a former judge’s affidavit? The journalists did.

The NZ media seems to be in a particularly bad way at the moment, relying on copy from the cops, courts and councils. There’s the occasional investigative journalistic scoop (as opposed to a story passed on by a citizen who has stumbled across a wrongdoing), usually broken by The NZ Herald and then mauled by the pack.

The other gaps between the diminishing ads that aren’t taken up by infotrash are filled by armchair commentaries that are seldom insightful (excluding Chris Trotter, Michael Laws and Rod Oram), frequently banal and often tired.

So where are the hacks who are driven to disclose and discomfort? These women and men need the courage to confront stonewalling heavyweight PR flacks who may well have been their former superiors, stand up to editors constrained by miserly accountants and spend time and money pursuing leads that may not lead anywhere.

Above all they need faith in their basic news instincts and bosses who will back them for the sake of one golden principle: A democratic society thrives best with a fearless and vigorous press.

This is not a plea for a return to the booze-fuelled roughneck journalism of the past, just an expression of concern about what’s happening to our media. Some of the kids at, for example, Whitireia (www.newswire.co.nz ) seem more articulate and creative than many of their predecessors – but will they ever get paid work in the mainstream media?

The Opposition seems to have been on extended leave since it lost the election, and with journalism a sunset occupation who is going to expose the fools and evildoers, the liars and fraudsters?

Any Marcus Einfelds in this country must feel cheer at the news of more media sackings. They are not alone. Also in the chorus are the company directors whose management skills get no scrutiny, the bureaucrats who are not held to account and the politicians whose actions and reactions (or no actions) don’t get questioned because there are just not enough reporters around to do the job.

Justice Seinfeld, as he was known among journos, was not exposed by his own powerful profession, or the government with its limitless resources, or the police or any regulatory authority armed with awesome investigative muscle and the money to match.

His misdeeds were revealed by a couple of sniffing hacks.

© Scoop Media