Overview

Most of Project Mandamus has a purely legal focus.

Unfortunately the tight schedule to prepare for a Full Court appeal in the May sittings requires a disciplined approach to avoiding distractions from the respondents who are resorting to fairly desperate tactics.

For example we will now need leave to file a Supplementary Notice of Appeal because the Australian Government Solicitor disrupted the appointment to settle the Appeal Book index with the Registrar at 11:00a.m. Wednesday 5 March 2007 by requiring the Sheriff of the Supreme Court of Victoria to execute an arrest warrant they had obtained by malicious prosecution and fraudulent abuse of the processes of the court for the purposes of hindering and interfering with the freedom of the 2004 Australian general elections and some sort of racket involving the AEC diverting significant amounts of public revenue for the sole benefit of lawyers employed by the Australian Government Solicitor. (The AEC provides employment for the sort of police whose skill at recording names and addresses and organizing the counting of numbered slips of paper emptied from cardboard boxes gives them so great a comparative advantage in that branch of the force as to make them unsuitable for, and unable to obtain a transfer to, any other. The AGS provides a similar sheltered workshop facility for "special" lawyers that find  working for the government more interesting than making large sums of  money).

It only took 3 or 4 hours to secure my release this time, instead of the two days or so that it took to convene a full Court of the Federal Court to release me ten years ago. In addition, at an application for Habeas Corpus while still in the Federal Court building, the federal judge did provide for access to the electronic Court facilities in case the Supreme Court decided to hold me during the appeal proceedings, despite my less than courteous irritation at his refusal to finalize the application himself and his insistence on my remaining a prisoner so the Victorian Supreme Court could clean up its own mess.

Fortunately, but not as I thought at the time, humorously, I had requested access to the electronic Court in advance in response to the Full Court status report at the callover for the May sittings. The form asks for representatives of the parties to indicate what dates they might be unavailable due to other proceedings. My reply was that I was available throughout May but the respondents were unpredictable so I might be unable to avoid attending a Habeaus Corpus application on any date of their choosing and would suggest joining any such application to the appeal proceedings.

Last time I was nott actually released from prison until it had been conclusively demonstrated that the only result of imprisoning me was that I could do national television interviews from prison opposing both the ALP and the Liberals whereas only radio and print media had followed the story up to then. The "vote neither" campaign team outside prison organized a very successful campaign with minimal resources and no notice, swinging about 50,000 votes and reminding three judges of their judicial oaths.

We will now also have to extend the Chronology at least back to 1993, and probably back to 1987 or earlier to provide adequate background on malicious intentions were speculating about crossing the mind of Daryl Wight as he contemplated my Senate nomination, my arrest warrant which had not been executed in the 3 years since it was issued, and my proceedings against him and the AEC for refusing to enrol me and for attempting to intimidate me from nominating as he exercised the wide discretionary powers which Jessup J claims have been bestowed on on a very junior officer in a very insignificant branch of the public service by s.93A and s.98A of the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918.

Boxes of relevant archives were moved to the project office immediately after my release and assistance with sorting them and recording the information is now very welcome. However top priority must still be given to revising the Supplementary Notice of Appeal against Gordon J's judgment that my case for is "hopeless and bound to fail".

At the Supreme Court Smith J was much better prepared than the Federal judge and took less time than I would have expected to grasp the fact that he could not continue to hold me while the AGS rabbited on about how they did not know why the AEC acted as it did but were sure that by repeating it was all entirely normal and lawful all would become clear in the end. Smith J (as he claims to be) understood that he would be obliged to explain why he was holding me prisoner listening to their drivel to some other judge unless he cut the matter short and simply ordered my release unconditionally. (He quickly grasped that refusal of bail by the prisoner rather than refusal by the judge required immediate release almost as though he had known it all along).

A full account of what the AEC and Mr Wigt have been up to and why I am seeking exemplary damages from them will be developed here. But it will have to be done in the context of explaining it to a Full Court of the Federal Court at their hearing in the May sittings. We simply do not have time to deal with it in any other context at the moment and will not allow them to distract us.

Another web site has some useful background information:

 
Needless to say the opinions there are not my own. In particular I do not agree with the claims there that anybody is "required" to vote for the ALP or the Coalition or that the AEC's refusal to count votes against them is the result of some "law".

My own view is that the law requires free elections and people conducting purported elections that are not free are purely and simply criminals. I simply do not understand why others do not describe the actual legal situation that way, no matter how clearly I attempt to explain it. Hopefully the law students attending St Trinian's advanced litigation classes will be able to express it in ways that even a lawyer could understand.

This section will, as time permits, provide some wider context for the current proceedings.

For example, here's some background on how I became Arthur Dent. 

My current name has been established by repute and common usage for  about  3  years  now.  Since  being refused enrolment on 17 October 2007 and rejected as a candidate nominated to represent the people of Victoria in the Senate on 1 November 2008 I have been involved in legal proceedings against the AEC before Ryan J and Jessup J of the Federal Court, Deputy  President Forgie of the AAT, Black CJ, Gordon J and Tracey J of the Federal Court and Smith J of the Victorian Supreme Court. Six of these 7 had no difficulty grasping that my current name is Arthur Dent. Only one, Gordon J, preferred to address me as "Sir". The Full Court case in May is an appeal against a judgment of Gordon J.

About 15 years ago I wrote a leaflet during the 1993 Federal Election encouraging voters to avoid writing numbers in any boxes on the ballot paper as the lizards would then be able to pretend you prefer some of them to others. It contained this excerpt from "So long and thanks for all the fish" by Douglas Adams:

Don't vote for  the  lizards!

 ‘On (the robot’s) world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people.’”

‘Odd,’ said Arthur, ‘I thought you said it was a democracy.’

‘I did,’ said Ford, ‘It is.'

‘So,’ said Arthur, hoping he wasn’t sounding ridiculously obtuse, ‘why don’t the people get rid of the lizards?’

‘It honestly doesn’t occur to them,’ said Ford. ‘They’ve all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they’ve voted in more or less approximates to the government they want.’

‘You mean they actually vote for the lizards?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Ford with a shrug, ‘of course.’
‘
But,’ said Arthur, going for the big one again, ‘why?’

‘Because if they didn’t vote for a lizard,’ said Ford, ‘the wrong lizard might get in’”

I was staying in room 42 at the Red Cedars motel in Canberra with access to the internet via the ANU and the University of Canberra. My email address then was room42@gnu.mit.edu.

I was particularly irritated with the Keating government at the time for letting Telstra seriously delay deployment of the internet in Australia. The aim of the leaflet was to remove it from office. More or less simultaneous legal proceedings were also initiated in the Federal Court against the Keating  government  for letting  Telstra grab over $10  million intended for accelerating internet  development in Australia and bury it in fraudulent "Cooperative Research Centres".

The AEC wrote to me threatending prosecution under s.329A of the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918. s.329A prohibits encouraging voters to vote otherwise than in accordance with s.242. s.242 directs voters to number the candidates in the order of their preference. I'm not sure whether the AEC have ever fully understood the significance of my email address or ever will. Nor has it yet become clear what Telstra had to do with it all.

I took the AEC's threats to the nearest available Federal judge seeking an injunction restraining officers of the Commonwealth from interfering with freedom of election. Instead of granting an interlocutory injunction, Deane J referred a  Question Reserved to a Full Bench of the High Court to determine whether s.329A was a valid law of the Commonwealth. Keating "won" the election by the narrowest possible margin, as a direct result of unlawful intimidation. (The AEC proudly boasted that it had successfully intimidated at least 2 "anarchist" candidates for the Senate into abandoning their campaign by threatening to prosecute them for not supporting either the ALP or the Coalition).

The High Court didn't get around to hearing the Question Reserved until shortly before the 1996 Federal Elections, by which time people were so desperate to get rid of Keating they were even prepared to vote for Howard.

At the High Court hearing I pointed out that as a result of their delay, one of the Justices held a commission whose validity depended on the validity of the elections at which the Ministers who recommended his appointment claimed to have been elected. Consequently he could not sit in judgment of his own cause. The other members of the Court met in the absence of the one whose commission had been challenged and held that it was valid. Brennan CJ ruled that I was not permitted to present my arguments concerning s.240 since only s.329A was before them. Subsequently the  members  of the  Court wrote lengthy obiter dicta giving their various different opinions about s.240  which they had refused to hear argument, about and their  various different opinions about why s.329A was or was  not valid.

Before the High Court announced any decision on the matter the AEC got an injunction against me from the Honourable Justice Barry Beach (as he then was) of the Supreme Court of Australia to restrain me from  publishing this:

.

The wanker (as he now is) committed that crime and and then ordered my unlawful imprisonment for denouncing it.

The politicians of Australia in Parliament House assembled had no option but to unanimously purport to repeal the s.329A they had unanimously purported to enact.

In August 2002 the AEC removed me from the electoral roll where I was still enrolled at my ex's address for ignoring their routine letters in which they periodically ask every Australian elector "are you ignoring me or have you moved somewhere else" and threaten "if you continue to ignore me I will remove you from the electoral roll".

I endeavoured to politely reassure them that I was not rudely ignoring them but that they really are that insignificant by not responding.

Two years after having formally determined that I did not live with my family, and eight years after their 1996 fiasco, the AEC began a campaign of serious harassment of my ex and adult children, allegedly looking for me - apparantly seeking recovery of costs they had paid to a Dr Jessup of senior counsel (as he then was) for maliciously  prosecuting me and persuading the wanker to make an idiot of himself.

On the last day  of the 2004 elections, during the media blackout, the AEC sent in the sheriff and/or Victoria police to start a serious of raids forcing their way into the homes of my ex and other family members, allegedly looking for me.

A family outing with Richard Stallman to visit a Lorrikeet called scratchie the next day was spoiled as a result.

The circumstances surrounding that occasion led me to reflect on the bizarre characteristics of the universe I find myself in and the people I associate with and their inability to comprehend that my own attitudes are just what any reasonable sensible person would think if there were any in this part of the galaxy.

Its a long story (to be told more fully while working on the Chronology) but there seems to be something quite inevitable about me ending up named Arthur Dent and I am beginning to suspect that may have been my "real name" all along.

Yesterday the sheriff's officer who had very politely taken me prisoner very politely asked for my date of birth and I very politely replied that I did not know as I was very young at the time. Apparantly that was the first time anyone had ever answered that question truthfully to her. She appeared to find such transparent honesty refreshing.

The FOI application I launched back in 1993 in connection with Telstra's ripoff of internet funding took 9 years of telephone directions hearings before Deputy President Forgie gave a detailed judgment documenting their story that they did not keep backups of email or maintain a record management system as required by law, that all the senior executives involved in the scam had left, the entire branch of Telstra devoted to fast packet networks had disappeared with all its records, an Experimental Broadband Network they had obtained funding for to divert funding from internet research was largely a figment of their imagination and that they had lost all institutional memory of what the case was about. Deputy President Forgie concluded in effect that they had been punished enough and and brought the proceedings to an end as an unreasonable diversion of resources after 9 years. I did not appeal.

The reappearance of D.P. Forgie in my life setting aside the refusal of the AEC to enrol me and substituting a decision to enrol me gives me hope that I should be able to tidy up quite a few loose ends before retiring ("life is what happens while you are making other plans").

I made an oral ex parte application at 4p.m. on 1 November 2008 to the duty judge at the Federal Court in Melbourne to require the AEC to accept my nomination for the Senate which they had rejected at noon that day.

I was not unduly surprised when the Honourable Justice Jessup (as he now is) introduced himself to me as the person paid by the AEC to maliciously prosecute me 10 years ago. Previously I had thought the AEC's representative was a Mr Hyde (or that's what I have since convinced myself I must have thought at the time).

His reasons essentially were that I had delayed in coming to the court and that the Parliament had seen fit to grant the Australian Electoral Officer the widest possible discretionary powers to exclude candidates nominated for election. So far he has chosen not to publish those reasons.

This sort of thing happens to me regularly. So I did not find it especially remarkable that the Sheriff was waiting to arrest me when I arrived for an appointment with the Registrar and the AEC, nor that the judge to whom I immeditely applied for Habeas Corpus turned out to be called Dick Tracey and had attended my old high school.

The fact that I have been wandering homeless around this part of the galaxy for several years, often in my dressing gown and seeking a cup of tea, convinced me that Arthur Dent was a more suitable name. (I have never liked the name Albert and the Murray J having misled himself concerning a case of demanding money with menaces following an oppressive judgment by Vincent J may also have to feature in a full  Chronology).

The thing that remains puzzling to me, rather than just difficult to explain to others, is the events surrounding the trip to visit the Lorrikeet called scratchie (now deceased) and its effect on various members of my family.

Richard Stallman is "just this guy", with an entirely unremarkable name, just like my own. But there seems to be something in the Whole General Mish Mash that got out of kilter when he emailed that he was in near planetary orbit and would like to visit.

That story will have to wait for another day and another forum.

I am not particularly interested in elections or electoral law. Have not thought about them much over the past decade or two though I do have some interest in the connection between collective choice theory, category theory and the philsophical aspects of fundamental physics concerning uncertainty.

My main interests are in philosophy and revolutionary politics and I will be seeking full compensation from people who resent being ignored using unlawful means to force me to pay attention to them.

To be continued (and linked and rewritten).