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Canberra Today 14°/17° | Friday, March 29, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Griffiths / Off the grid isn’t good enough

Royal Commissioner Dyson Haydon, centre, surrounded by technology.
Royal Commissioner Dyson Heydon, centre, surrounded by technology.
“It is notorious among the legal profession that I am incapable of sending or receiving emails.” –Dyson Heydon

IN some ways I shouldn’t have been, but I was surprised to read that Royal Commissioner Dyson Heydon doesn’t own a computer or know how to use email.

In a small way I was a fan of the man when he was in the High Court. While not always agreeing with him, it was hard to argue with the power of his intellect.

John Griffiths.
John Griffiths.
And there will always be his almighty bollocking of the ACT Supreme Court in 2009: “The torpid languor of one hand washes the drowsy procrastination of the other. Are these phenomena indications of something chronic in the modern state of litigation? Or are they merely acute and atypical breakdowns in an otherwise functional system? Are they signs of a trend, or do they reveal only an anomaly? One hopes for one set of answers. One fears that, in reality, there must be another.”

That’s a lyricism sadly lacking in much of Australian life, in my opinion.

But a great intellect and a glorious writing style are sadly not enough in 2015.

At its best, the internet  allows us all to be smarter and better informed than any individual, no matter how brilliant, can be. Just as a carriage of slobs sitting on a train can leave Usain Bolt gasping for air on the side of the tracks.

Another right-wing culture warrior with a brilliant mind and a snappy writing style, Gerard Henderson, recently demonstrated the danger of not checking his own certainties.

Writing on August 7, Gerard excoriated the ABC for daring to suggest that the Soviet invasion of Manchuria might have had something to do with the end of the World War II.

It was all achieved by good old Uncle Joe in the Kremlin who had no battalions in the field. No other view was heard. Historical sludge. ABC style,” he wrote.

Now a very, very quick Googling will inform any idiot that the crescendo of the war involved not battalions, but three whole Red Army “Fronts” (a “front” comprising multiple groups of multiple armies). In all, 1.7 million Soviet troops fighting 1.2 million Japanese of the elite Kwantung Army.

The Soviet contribution to the war is generally not well appreciated in the West and certainly wasn’t talked up when Gerard was a boy.

Living in an era of constant advances in all areas of learning, we can’t afford to rely on the prejudices we acquired in our youth. Doing that just makes us look silly.

It’s one thing for an elderly judge to decide to check out from modernity and stay off the grid. Good luck to him, I say, and I hope one day to emulate him.

But if he’s going to accept a high-powered salary to run a Royal Commission into the nuts and bolts of Australian society I’d really appreciate it if he could make the effort to keep up.

It’s not good enough to rely on others to research for him and draw things to his attention. That’s exactly what got him into trouble in the first place.

He’s ended up like the prisoners chained to the wall in Plato’s cave, trying to to understand the world on the basis of shadows flickering on the wall.

We are unbelievably lucky to live in a time when all the knowledge in the world is instantly available to us. It’s near criminal not to make use of it.

 

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Ian Meikle, editor

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