by BETTINA ARNDT – EARLIER this month there was an important presentation by prominent Sydney silk Margaret Cunneen SC. She was speaking at The Presumption of Guilt Conference run by the Rule of Law Education Centre.
As many know, Ms Cunneen is a woman with impeccable credentials to comment on the criminal justice system. She has spent well over 30 years at the coalface, decades as a crown prosecutor convicting some of our most prominent rapists and other villains and then, as a commissioner in charge of a large child abuse investigation.
- Feminists have been lobbying for years for a 'yes means yes' affirmative consent model.
- Under new laws an accused must prove to have taken active steps to ascertain consent.
- What wasn’t rape last year may be rape next year under these reforms.
Now she’s back at the bar, successfully defending an endless queue of accused men, including many alleged rapists.
Her online presentation focussed on the impact of the new sexual consent laws that Attorney General Mark Speakman aims to ram through NSW parliament.
Mr Speakman appointed the NSW Law Reform Commission to examine proposed changes to these laws but then ignored their warnings about the injustice that could result and proudly announced he is giving the feminists what they want.
A PERFECT SYSTEM
Feminist academics have been lobbying for years for a yes means yes affirmative consent model where enthusiastic consent must be given at every stage throughout the sexual encounter.
Under the new laws an accused must now prove to have taken active steps to ascertain consent throughout the sexual proceedings. And as Cunneen pointed out, this renders most of the sex most of us have as potentially illegal.
But the main game here is to provide more cannon fodder – a new supply of accused men to face a justice system already weaponised against them.
That was the real bombshell in the Cunneen presentation – her expose of the extent to which the feminists have already succeeded in stacking the system by removing the filtering system which once ensured that only rape cases with sufficient evidence went through to trial.
Now almost all cases are pushed through into court, where many get thrown out by juries.
That means conviction rates go down, inspiring more rage from the feminists, more politicians frothing at the mouth demanding more be done to ensure the safety of women and ever more legal measures to ensure rapists get their comeuppance.
It’s just perfect, a carefully calibrated system to ensure the feminist project just keeps gaining more momentum – very like the ever-expanding definition of domestic violence, soon to include “coercive control”, which ensures an unending supply of victims and an expanding cash cow as governments pour in funds to address the problem.
I’ve made a small video [see below] highlighting some of Cunneen’s key points – aimed at attracting more attention to the important issues this key player is making about our criminal justice system.
THE ZEAL TO CONVICT
What’s very telling is Cunneen talks about how much things have changed since she worked as a crown prosecutor.
“Even before things used to hit the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions, police had a filtering process. They are no longer permitted to do that.”
No longer permitted to determine on the basis of evidence whether the case had legs. No longer permitted to do proper investigations to see where the truth lies.
Police are now required to refer in their “facts sheets” to complainants as “victims” and treat them accordingly, says Cunneen, adding police have very little discretion or often, none at all, about proceeding to charge.
As Cunneen explains, “with ownership of the case the police then want the case to succeed”. After the complainant has been declared a “victim”, the system then takes hold.
“There’s not much more investigation that goes on, there’s just a zeal to get to the end and to convict the charged person.”
How frightening is that? I’ve seen how this works in cases that I regularly encounter supporting accused students on campus.
The police are hiding evidence that might weaken the case against the accused, they coach complainants to try to trick the accused into confessing in taped phone calls, they refuse to interview witnesses or examine social media evidence that could help the accused. The zeal works just one way.
Margaret Cunneen spells out the fact that we are now seeing lower rates of conviction because so many weak cases are no longer being filtered out by the police and Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions.
The result is more cases failing, complainants feeling let down by the system.
But wonderful data providing fodder for the feminists to feed to our captured media to make the case for more to be done about our failed justice system.
THE INTERNATIONAL CABAL
Perhaps this seems a little far-fetched, suggesting that there is a deliberate effort to drive down conviction rates to promote more measures to convict men of rape?
Well, have a look at what’s happening overseas as feminist lawyers play the same blame game. Look at the news from the UK last week where the Justice Secretary Robert Buckland came under pressure to resign if he can’t reverse the plunging rape conviction rates.
Within days he was on the BBC apologising to victims and promising to “do a lot better”.
Similarly, over the ditch activists in New Zealand are in the news complaining the rate of successful rape convictions in 2020 was the lowest for more than 10 years.
Diana Davison is co-founder of The Lighthouse Project, a Canadian non-profit that helps the falsely accused.
She reported this week that Canada now has “an automatic charge policy on sexual assault complaints. The police have no discretion and must lay charges if the complainant describes a sexual assault. Investigation is discouraged. Of course, this results in fewer convictions”.
In Canada too there are media headlines despairing that despite more rape victims coming forward these are resulting in fewer convictions. There’s a big push on for affirmative consent laws as well as specialised courts for sexual assault accusations.
How’s that for a great idea to do away with pesky juries that mighty let rapists off the hook? The feminist inventiveness holds no bounds.
A criminal law is not a social work convention.
It’s highly significant when the first law officer for the State of NSW announces that his new sexual consent laws “send the message that survivor’s calls for reform have been heard”.
Ms Cunneen did a great job explaining that a criminal trial “is not a social work forum or a psychology convention. It’s not there to provide the complainant with some kind of solace or affirmation or tremendous triumph. It’s not about the complainant.”
Ms Cunneen explained that as a defence council, she tells juries that “it is a very nice and a lovely kind thing to believe your child or your neighbour or your friend if he or she says that they’ve been sexually assaulted. …But a jury has to act judicially.”
That means understanding that the criminal case is not about the victim: “It’s the accused whose liberty is at stake in a criminal trial. It is he – generally it’s a ‘he’ – who’s been arrested and thrown into custody until bail can be sought, who has had his home raided and searched by police, who’s had to pledge his life savings or have his parents mortgage their house to get put for legal fees and whose life is on hold for two or three years.”
The stakes are high, warns Ms Cunneen. “We are really blurring lines here and men, all men and mothers and sisters and friends of men ought to be very concerned because what wasn’t rape last year may be rape next year if the purpose of these reforms is simply to increase the numbers of people who are convicted of rape.”
And that is the point. This has nothing to do with promoting justice. It is all to do with punishing men.PC
Love Bettina! Great to see her here!
Delighted to see Bettina Arndt writing for Politicom. She is a woman who has spoken a lot of sense over a long time.
Bettina is my favourite Arndt : -)
SO WHAT’S NEXT?
Just as marital partners can be coldly cautious and seriously clear-headed about obtaining a PRE-NUP to protect their own assets, so it’s logical that men must protect themselves, their reputations, their jobs and of course their right to retain their liberty, by always asking their sexual-partner-to-be to sign a PRE-FORNI AGREEMENT giving full legal consent to what used to flow so naturally!
AND I’M NOT JOKING!
Now sign here, and initial here, and here, and here, and here, and here and date, and time of performance please.
Now let’s do it.
Do what?
International Cabal has hit the nail on the head (the invisible enemy).
The rich and famous played on Epstein Island and would walk away Scott free. But those days are now over, and convictions could be coming sooner than we think.
A level madness has taken grip of Australia. My post-teen daughter believes my wife should hate me – and she repeatedly and openly encourages her to do so.
All because I’m considered a privileged white male and that, in her mind, all women are “victims”.
My daughter refuses to understand that her mum and I struggled together, side by side, to eke out a comfortable life.
It was never mum versus dad. It was both of us united against the world – until now.
Explain that God was a women until she changed her mind.