THE PSYCHOLOGIST : Drumgold still in trouble

Drumgold still in trouble

If ever a man has been destroyed by his own political correctness, it is Shane Drumgold, SC. He abused his position as prosecutor to launch a very weak rape case against Bruce Lehrmann, because "believe the woman" was all the rage. And to help a weak case to stand up he said a number of things that have come back to haunt him.

I feel sorry for him. He clawed his way up to a prestigious position depite humble origins in Mount Druitt. But the battle apparently left him insecure so he was unable to resist media pressure to prosecute. He lacked the self confidence that would have come from a private school background -- the usual background for a barrister

I too have a humble background and went to no school at all for my university entrance qualification but I have never aspired to public prominence. Economic and academic success has been plenty for me. Good interpersonal relationships are the only important form of success as far as I can see and my record there has been mixed. One wonders how Drumgold's second marriage is faring

Five Australian Federal Police officers have begun defamation action against the ACT government over allegations by former chief prosecutor Shane Drumgold that they engaged in “a very clear campaign to pressure” him not to prosecute the alleged rape of Brittany Higgins.

Lawyers for the five officers have sent a concerns notice to the government and to Mr Drumgold over his allegations against them, which included that they had engaged in “consistent and inappropriate interference” in the trial of Bruce Lehrmann.

The allegations were made in a letter Mr Drumgold sent to ACT police chief Neil Gaughan on November 1, 2022, expressing concern over “some quite clear investigator interference in the criminal justice process”.

The letter sparked the Sofronoff inquiry into police and prosecution conduct in the Lehrmann case, which largely exonerated police and found that Mr Drumgold’s assertions were baseless.

One of the AFP officers told The Australian the letter had “destroyed careers and destroyed people’s lives”. “When you’re in a profession where integrity is pivotal, if you lose your integrity, if it’s suggested that you are corrupt or you’ve trying to pervert the course of justice or influence something, it just goes against the grain,” the officer said.

“I don’t think people appreciate the impact that this whole debacle over the four years has had on individual police officers. We did nothing wrong, and we are paying the price.”

The concerns notice – a precursor to defamation proceedings – comes just days after the ACT government apologised to former Liberal minister Linda Reynolds and paid $90,000 in damages and legal costs over accusations by Mr Drumgold in the same letter that the senator had engaged in “disturbing conduct” that included political interference in the police investigation.

Mr Drumgold authorised the release of the unredacted letter after talking to a journalist from The Guardian, who then lodged a Freedom of Information request.

The letter, containing the DPP’s suspicions of impropriety against the named police officers and Senator Reynolds, was released without any of the consultations or redactions required by law. The FOI application was determined and executed within four hours of being considered for the first time.

The Sofronoff inquiry found that suspicions Mr Drumgold formed during his early interactions with the investigators “predisposed him to see non-existent malignancy in benign interactions between the police and the defence at the trial”.

Mr Drumgold complained police were speaking with the defence at the trial during adjournments. However, it was not surprising police felt deep antipathy towards the DPP since the feeling was mutual, the Sofronoff inquiry found. “Mr Drumgold did not seem to appreciate that mutual trust is a two-way street. It was he who, at the first opportunity, formed the baseless opinion that the investigators were improperly trying to thwart a prosecution.

“This inquiry has thoroughly examined the allegations in Mr Drumgold’s letter. Each allegation has been exposed to be baseless.”

Late in giving his evidence, Mr Drumgold “finally resiled from his scandalous allegations,” inquiry chair Walter Sofronoff noted. Mr Sofronoff said that “any official writing a letter of that kind would also know that copies of the letter would have to pass through many hands and that there was a real risk that it would be made public”.

“In fact, it was with the help of Mr Drumgold himself that the letter defaming others made its way into a newspaper.”

Mr Sofronoff found no police acted improperly: “The evidence before me showed that the investigators consistently acted in good faith and conducted a thorough investigation … Nobody suggested to me that the investigation was flawed in any way.”

The police had made mistakes, Mr Sofronoff said, including conducting a second interview with Ms Higgins that was not likely to produce anything useful and which caused her distress.

“None of these mistakes actually affected the substance of the investigation and none of them prejudiced the case … I do not find that any police officer breached a duty or acted improperly.”

One of the officers bringing the defamation action was critical of the ACT government’s attitude towards its police force. “The ACT, it’s a bubble here. It is a very closed shop and I think some of the people in these positions are batting way above their weight. Two police stations are closed because the government hasn’t invested. They have no care for the police at all. The number of police that are off due to stress, or leaving, it’s phenomenal.”

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/police-officers-sue-over-shane-drumgold-claims-that-destroyed-lives/news-story/8ce9e4ca7168b4846a2355e6ba1a3c3f

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Background

The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists.

The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Global warming

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter:

The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here

Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights

THE PSYCHOLOGIST

Drumgold still in trouble

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