WHERE the Attorney-General is concerned, I have no problem. Any man who can appear from behind a bush and say 'Stuart, now what about my underpants', gets my vote. The incident took place a year ago in the garden of the Dutch Consul-General. The Dutch are unusually tolerant of these sorts of things.
Attorney-General Jeremy Mathews had been doused with black ink by a man protesting over one of the several issues involving him. I had revealed that Mathews' clothing, including his underwear of the day, would have to be submitted in evidence to the magistrate's court which was trying the protester. It was on the occasion of the celebration of Queen Beatrix's birthday that he finally cornered me in the undergrowth.
It is a neat analogy of Mathews' career that he should be the one to be stripped naked in public over the practice of briefing-out. When his marriage collapsed, he was persuaded to bare it all on the front page of the newspaper. So it has been with the case of the barrister who left the Legal Department for private practice and still coined in more than $17 million in brief fees from the department working on a complex commercial crime.
It is typical of Mathews' luck that he should be the Attorney-General caught with ink on his underpants over a matter like this. Briefing-out is a way of life in the Legal Department which is as remote to me as life in the Davidian sect. Stacked as they are with qualified lawyers, there seems a need to trawl the streets for more, at immense cost to the taxpayers. Ask a newspaper editor if he or she will seek out freelancers and pay a fee for something that can be written by a staff member and the laughter will ring to the rafters.
Unfortunately for Mathews, he is the Attorney-General snatched by the searchlight handing out the money. The fact that it was an unfortunate import, Director of Public Prosecutions John Wood, who did the dealing matters not a wig box since he is back in England in comfortable retirement, being gratuitously rude about the barrister here appointed to look into the case.
While we are at it, should the public think the $17 million case is an isolated one, we can pluck from the annals of the Legal Aid Department the case of the Sek Kong murders which, at one point, had up to 14 private barristers being paid $10,000-a-day 'refreshers' to defend the accused Vietnamese.