URGENT AND STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL

Wednesday 21 November 2007

To: Jayne Haydon (03) 9282 8462, Associate to Deputy President Forgie, AAT.

Fax: (03) 9282 8480

Cc:

Mr Daryl Wight

Australian Electoral Officer

Level 8, Casselden Place

2 Lonsdale Street

MELBOURNE VIC 3000

Fax:     (03) 9285 7167

Attn: Kaye Bartlett (03) 9285 7137

Via Address for Service:

Australian Government Solicitor

(Attn: Paul Barker paul.barker@ags.gov.au 03 9242 1257)

Level 21, 200 Queen Street, Melbourne VIC 3001

AGS Ref: 07325790

Fax: (03) 9242 1317

From:

Arthur Dent

Address for Service:

Ground Floor, 302-308 King Street,

Melbourne VIC 3003

c/- Nowicki Carbone & Co

DX 38204

FLAGSTAFF

Fax: (03) 9642 4636

RE:     ARTHUR DENT –V- AEC

            AAT Ref: 2007/5485

1. Thank you for the copy I have now received of my Trust Account Ledger from J N Zigouras & Co tendered by John Zigouras in the course of his evidence and cross-examination.
2. Please thank D.P. Forgie for the prompt hearing.This enabled those witnesses who happened to be present to give their evidence and have it adequately tested by cross-examination without additional inconvenience.
3. I should also acknowledge the reasonable attitude displayed in parts of the letter dated 19 November and received just as I arrived for the hearing from Paul Barker on behalf of the respondents and the adoption of those proposals by Dr Donahue on behalf of the respondents before and during the hearing, which made it possible to proceed with the final hearing in relation to the respondents refusal to perform their statutory duty to enroll me pursuant to s.96 of the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918 (“the Act”).
4. In particular I acknowledge that paragraph 7 of that letter successfully refuted the allegation in my request for telephone directions prior to that hearing that such directions would be necessary so that the hearing could proceed expeditiously and not be rendered futile due to the AEC’s desire to protract matters past polling day a few days later on the following Saturday 24 November. I stand refuted – convincingly and in the only way possible.
5. In the light of that I would now be willing to provide the number of the mobile phone I am currently carrying to Paul Barker for his personal use in assisting to resolve any issues quickly, provided that he first gives a written undertaking faxed to the Tribunal as well as myself, not to allow that number to become known to his employers, clients or anyone else but will only use it to contact me when convenient to me. I note that Dr Donahue expressed, somewhat vehemently, that he had no interest in seeing that phone number immediately prior to the hearing.
6. Concerning paragraph 6, I assume that the proposal that the Tribunal write to me pursuant to s 42A(4)(b) inviting me to show that the respondents refusal to enroll me as a silent elector pursuant to s.104 of the Act is reviewable by the AAT is some sort of legal fiction connected with a perfectly reasonable desire that the AGS would at least get the usual 28 days to come up with some plausible excuses for their clients actions if they had not gone about their refusal in precisely the spectacularly silly manner that they did.
7. Provided that I am actually on the roll before polling day this Saturday 24 November and the proper annotations and obliterations are in place so that I am enrolled as an itinerant and as a silent elector and a general postal voter and these are firmly stuck there by means of either a final order or a stay order, there is I agree, no need to shorten the time for delivery of further s.37 documents. The respondents should be given a reasonable opportunity to come up with a case to remove my silent elector and general postal voter status.
8. There is a place for legal fictions so I am quite content to go along with the idea that we can just sort of take it that the situation is as though the Tribunal had written to me asking silly questions and as though I had written back drawing attention to the relevant parts of the documentation and enactments under which Daryl Wight fictionally reviewed and either affirmed or reversed either his own decision, fictionally notified to me when he fictionally acted as a DRO under some provision of the Act that swims into effect after public announcements of fictional elections and disappears again as soon as the announcement is confirmed to be true, such as, for example, hypothetically speaking, s.102(2D), or some other DRO, such as Graham Dobson, the DRO for Batman referred to in T.7 pursuant to s.102(2B) or perhaps Jo-Anne Johnson, DRO for Melbourne who fictionally decided she had not received an enrolment form at all and gave me 28 days to provide one at which point she would think about my silent enrolment.
9. At the end of the day, unless a stay order is issued and attached to my notional address requiring it to remain obliterated until further notice, some fictional DRO or other may at some point unobliterate it as a result of a delusion shared with Paul Barker that it is no longer possible the original decision not to obliterate it could be set aside under s.120(3) or by the AAT or by a Court, as specified in s.104(9), with the meticulous attention to detail in sub-paragraphs (a) and (b) that has made the Act so important an example of the classical canon of Vogon poetry.
10. In the light of Paul Barker’s confusion as to how the decision was made and by whom, I now add to the list of witnesses required for cross-examination the names of contact officer Kaye Bartlett and DROs Jo-Anne Johnson and Grahame Dobson to item 2(b) of the draft Hearing certificate listing Daryl Wight as required for cross examination.
11. I have now been given formal legal advice by Harry Nowicki of Nowicki & Carbone that there is already no possibility of a Court doing anything to restrain the holding of fictional elections for the Senate this Saturday regardless of what orders the Tribunal makes, so there is no need to rush the orders earlier than Friday and the Tribunal can therefore take its time to consider the “ramifications” as submitted by Dr Donahue.
12. The orders enrolling me are still essential before Saturday, in view of the anomaly referred to in paragraph 6 of Brennan C.J.’s judgment in Muldowney v Australian Electoral Commission, [1993] HCA 32.

http://www.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/sinodisp/au/cases/cth/HCA/1993/32.html

13. The real “ramifications” of the Tribunal acting according to the law are that my enrolment would be treated exactly as promised in the Frequently Asked Questions about Proof Of Identity at the AEC website:

http://www.aec.gov.au/FAQs/POI.htm#id_different

What do I do if my driver's licence has a different address or name (ie. my maiden name) on it, than the one I want to enrol under?

In most cases that won't matter. Fill in the enrolment form for the address that you have been living at for at least a month or the name you are legally or commonly known as. If there is any problem the AEC will contact you.

14. There was no problem. My database records matched up exactly as they should, as shown by T7. For the purpose of a decision enrolling me by this Friday it should be sufficient to note that T2 contains no findings on questions of fact that are in any sense material, refers to no evidence or other material on which any findings could have been based if the decision maker had been inclined to make a finding about anything and gives no reasons for any decisions but merely recites matters that a putative decision maker might note, consider and form views about if it had been equipped with sentience rather than word processing extensions to its pseudopods. The formal Minute recommending approval of my enrolment by DRO Grahame Dobson at T7 should have been acted on as there were no “problems” in marching up the database records from the information I provided.
15. Item T12 showing that I had been nominated for election as a Senator may well be a material fact that explains why Daryl Wight refused to enroll me as claimed by the Australian Government Solicitor in its s.37 documents. But that is a matter which should be considered by the DPP and then by a Court with Criminal jurisdiction rather than by this purely administrative tribunal. Likewise it may be relevant to the amounts of damages, including exemplary damages, in FCA proceedings VID 982 of 2007. The “ramifications” which Dr Donahue hinted at are that if I had been enrolled I would also have been on the ballot paper so the election would have been free whereas if I simply did not exist at all then an awkward Court of Disputed Returns judgment could be avoided procedurally instead of on its merits. It is sufficient to state this warning, along with the demands that I and my family produce our wallets to him and account in detail for our comings and goings that should assist the Tribunal to reach a speedy decision. I commend this poem by Rudyard Kipling on “The Old Issue” to the Tribunal:

http://whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/words/authors/K/KiplingRudyard/verse/p1/oldissue.html

16. The reason that electors are required to enroll, and candidates to nominate, under the names by which they are usually known by to their fellow citizens is that it is the people who are to be represented and to directly choose their representatives. No Vehicle Registration authority, Income Taxation authority, Health Insurer, Social Services agency, Bank or local council has a vote or a capability to be elected. Consequently the sets of attributes that non-human institutions uniquely identify us by in their databases as names or numbers are not necessarily the same as the names under which we engage in political decision making together with our fellow citizens. The respondents know that and part of their duties are to match up the two, in particular by refusing to enroll people who use names supported by official documentation issued by various institutions that are not the names by which they are usually known to the actual people who actually know them.
17. The respondents seek to do the exact opposite of what the Act intends. They insist that electors are to adopt the names assigned to them by official records instead of changing official records to reflect the names of electors. They propose to write letters to itinerants seeking “evidence under subsection 102(1A) of the Act” knowing very well that this subsection does not require any response and does not even permit an inquiry in the case of itinerants, for the very good reason that there is little point writing letters to people with no fixed address. S.96 is explicitly excluded from the operation of s.102(1A).
18. The respondents want people to use their names on their drivers licences for voting even when those are not the names they are usually known by to their fellow citizens by repute and common usage. Otherwise there could be “problems”
19. Since counsel for the respondents had no findings to support with evidence, he wisely chose to not produce evidence supporting such findings.
20. The only interesting legal question is whether the Tribunal ever had jurisdiction to hold an inquiry into my personal affairs at all or whether s.93A and s.98A are invalid so that the review should only have been of the refusal itself. Submissions on that should be available shortly and the Tribunal’s reasoning for immediate orders enrolling me pursuant to s.96 could conveniently deal with the question of its jurisdiction to consider applications pursuant to s.93A and s.98A at all by simply ignoring their alleged existence, to be examined more closely at subsequent hearings. My acquiescence in the ruthless cross-examination my family and friends were subjected to provided abundant illustration of the consequences of allowing such inquiries to ever begin, before making submissions that should bring them to an abrupt end. Such cross-examination might be relevant to some point the respondents wish to make about silent enrolment, so I await patiently for them to actually explain what point it is they wish to make.
21. The request I made for a blanket confidentiality order at the start of the hearings still stands. None of this should ever have happened, and it should never, ever happen again.
22. The directions I now seek for hearings after Monday are that they not be listed for 14 December (Gordon J) and that the usual requirements not be dispensed with. There is no longer any need to shorten the periods allowed. The AEC should now deliver to both the Tribunal and to my address for service:

1.     All documents relevant to whether I should be enrolled as an itinerant silent elector and general postal voter, including all documents containing the names “Albert Langer” or “Arthur Dent” or any of the addresses at which anyone with those names might have been associated at any time, and all correspondence with anyone in relation to s.93A or s.98A or any refusal of a request for silent enrolment under s.104 in the possession of the AEC (including computer records, emails etc) pursuant to ss33(2A) paragraph (a).

2.     A statement pursuant to paragraph (b).

3.     A statement pursuant to paragraph (c).

23. For the avoidance of doubt this does include documents that concern the AEC’s dealings with other persons named Arthur Dent and with other persons it has refused to enroll or to enroll silently so that the Tribunal can compare the AEC’s general practices with both its stance towards me and the law. Applications for such documents to be treated confidentially and only made available to the Tribunal for comparison purposes will of course not be resisted. Claims that the respondents do not maintain backups of email systems or have a record management system compliant with Australian Archives requirement will be met with derision and references to AAT Proceedings V1993/1112 and the duration thereof, attrition list and the notable stamina of the Tribunal and applicant.
24. Enclosed is a 1 page statement from Harry Nowicki which I did not hand in yesterday along with the others. I have removed the attached filenote as it contains confidential information about my personal affairs and those of other persons which should not be provided to the Tribunal until after a confidentiality order has been formally made.

Arthur Dent

Enc.

Here is naught unproven—here is naught to learn.
It is written what shall fall if the King return.

He shall mark our goings, question whence we came,
Set his guards about us, as in Freedom’s name.

He shall take a tribute, toll of all our ware;
He shall change our gold for arms—arms we may not bear.

He shall break his judges if they cross his word;
He shall rule above the Law calling on the Lord.

He shall peep and mutter; and the night shall bring
Watchers ’neath our window, lest we mock the King—

Hate and all division; hosts of hurrying spies;
Money poured in secret, carrion breeding flies.

Strangers of his counsel, hirelings of his pay,
These shall deal our Justice: sell—deny—delay.

We shall drink dishonour, we shall eat abuse
For the Land we look to—for the Tongue we use.

We shall take our station, dirt beneath his feet,
While his hired captains jeer us in the street.

Cruel in the shadow, crafty in the sun,
Far beyond his borders shall his teachings run.

Sloven, sullen, savage, secret, uncontrolled,
Laying on a new land evil of the old—

Long-forgotten bondage, dwarfing heart and brain—
All our fathers died to loose he shall bind again.

Here is naught at venture, random nor untrue—
Swings the wheel full-circle, brims the cup anew.

Here is naught unproven, here is nothing hid:
Step for step and word for word—so the old Kings did!

Step by step, and word by word: who is ruled may read.
Suffer not the old Kings: for we know the breed—

All the right they promise—all the wrong they bring.
Stewards of the Judgment, suffer not this King!