Posts by WH
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no amount of yellow bracelets and fundraising will shake the idea that you weren’t the all-American hero.
Whatever Trevor. Even if it turns out that his finest performance was in Dodgeball, Lance Armstrong is a champion.
Cheating is endemic in sport, as it is in life. People should save their piety for deployment on actual scandals, such as preventable disease and global warming. I look forward to your column about how the three fastest people in the world just happen to come from Jamaica.
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Should readers be concerned that the Police have breached John Banks’ human rights? Or should they just be concerned about the direction of the trend?
I think it’s accepted that Police should emphasise the preliminary nature of their conclusions when commenting on investigations. On the other hand, making an arrest and laying charges – being a legal assertion that there are reasonable grounds to convict – also communicates the Police view that the accused is guilty of the crime they are charged with. As does the presentation of evidence in Court. It’s a bit unreal to say that the pre-trial press conference is a violation of the right to be presumed innocent but that the rest of the judicial process is not.
Assuming it was accepted here, I don’t see how you can extend the de Broglie reasoning to Banks, where the Police explicitly stated that there was insufficient evidence to proceed and declined to lay charges. There’s no presumption of innocence necessary in such a case – it’s basically an actual police finding. Having listened to the radio interview and read the letter, I’m not sure what you’d have the Police tell the public about their decision in these sorts of cases.
There is a real cosmic unfairness to being wrongly accused, but the effect is suffused throughout the ordeal, and can’t always be described as a breach of the right to be presumed innocent.
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I’m sorry if I’m shooting the messenger, it’s good to be reminded of these things in unsympathetic cases.
I wonder whether the known facts and narrow grounds of defence make it hard for the Police to discuss the case without casting Banks in a bad light. It’s an odd situation in that although Banks knew that he had received donations from Dotcom, and solicited them in “anonymous” form, he is pleading ignorance of the corresponding inaccuracies in his return, which he signed. It’s telling that everyone agrees the law should be amended to ensure that what Banks did is illegal going forward.
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Your takeaway from the decision not to prosecute is that the Police have infringed Banks’ right to be presumed innocent? I’m not sure that’s a plausible interpretation of what happened here, bearing in mind that the actus reus of the offence was essentially admitted. Which part of the letter to Mallard do you say had this effect?
The reactions to these different cases has been instructive. As with many things, it has tended to align with the commentator’s political position, or their view of the individual concerned.
That pose presents your argument as being above the fray, but it confuses the presumption of innocence with the attempt to draw civic meaning from what John Banks did and did not do. It might be different if Banks was a private citizen, acting in a private capacity. John Banks was advising a businessman on how to make anonymous donations to his fringe political party, deliberately circumventing our election laws in the process. The courts said John Edwards did nothing illegal, but that doesn’t make it the end of the conversation.
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Ana: my avatar has a crush on your avatar. Could you possibly paint it blue?
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Hard News: John Banks: The volunteer did…, in reply to Russell Brown,
To say this is unconvincing is something of an understatement.
I agree with Anna Simkiss’ comment. I understand Graeme’s supremely fair reluctance to second guess the Police, but without a disclosure of the underlying facts, the letter to Mallard doesn’t seem particularly compelling. This all reminds me that John Banks once served as New Zealand’s Minister of Police.
As with intent, the knowledge of an accused can only be proven by inference from known facts. As you’ve pointed out, John Banks’ claim to have been unaware of these donations is unconvincing. I just don’t see how he can call to say thanks for the split donation yet fail to be responsible for the way in which the payments were recorded on his own damn return. I can’t say whether the doctrines of constructive and imputed knowledge could be made to apply to the disclosure provisions of the LEA, but it would have been an interesting argument.
The other thing this reminds me of is that John Banks spent years demonising the unlucky, the unloved and the downright dishonest on talkback. So if there is anything we know for sure about the man, it is that he is a goose. The sauce for this particular goose tastes a lot like the fact that John Banks is a big fat hypocrite. So there you have it, John Banks: the man, the goose, the weasel, the talkback dragon, the paper tiger and bad egg is also a complete bullshitter.
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Hard News: John Banks: The volunteer did…, in reply to Andrew Geddis,
You're probably right, I suppose I'm reluctant to accept such an unappealing conclusion.
I just think there has to be some degree of knowledge imputed to Banks here. He asked Dotcom to structure his donation in a way that was plainly intended to facilitate the falsification of an electoral return. He can't be allowed to avoid responsibility by failing to exercise due care or by simply forgetting he did anything wrong in the first place.
And who forgets that a notorious German businessman gave you $50,000 in two conveniently anonymous payments? I guess it must have been sometime after Banks phoned him to say thank you.
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Graeme, is there any way that a Court could have prevented John Banks from so brazenly subverting our laws?
If I were a judge, I would surely have found that there was one large donation, not two anonymous ones; and that Banks' dishonesty (whether at the time of the conversation with Dotcom or subsequently) caused his return to contain false particulars. How have the Police avoided the irresistible inference that Banks intended to avoid making proper disclosure of the donation at the time he solicited it?
The very least that can be said is that Banks' is a scheming and dishonourable weasel: his own actions put him on enquiry yet he failed to take due care, he was reckless as to whether his electoral return was true or false, and he degraded others by including them in his efforts to avoid his obligations. It would be an unforgivable affront if he did not resign.
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I confess, I was a little surprised at the time Judge Harvey made his pun. But I do hope it won't deter him from taking an active, public role in debates about the internet and copyright law. Because, as distressing as this furore must have been for him, his involvement at NetHui last week was was an examplary demonstration of how much a judge, lawyer and teacher can contribute as a public intellectual
Journalism thinks it's guarding the legacy of Woodward and Bernstein, but it's actually hiding in Sienna Miller's bushes, trying to get a photo up her skirt.
We should maintain the distinction between expertise and what gets reported in the media, rather than encourage journalists to pose as honest broker intermediaries between the two institutions. I don't want to see George Will's remembrances of the weather in his childhood or to see journalists glibly talk down to a Nobel-prize winner and compare him to a unicorn.
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I have found the Pretty Woman scene I was referring to!!!! This reminds me of so many dates I have had.