Folks,
The above discussion on the FOI, or more to the point, the bureaucratic misuse of the law, is nothing new.
Indeed, there is nothing new about the behavior of the bureaucracy in completely subverting the intent of the Senate inquiry into PelAir, or any of the many other inquiries into CASA and its predecessors, which, big and small, number more than twenty over twenty five years or so.
This including the biggest parliamentary inquiry since Federation, the Morris inquiry, which sat for over 300 sitting days.
The Rule of Law Institute and Robin Speed also receive well deserved honourable mention from time to time in these pages.
But there is nothing new, and Lord Hewart of Bury, Lord Chief Justice of the United Kingdom in the 1920s, even wrote a book about it in 1929: "The New Despotism". In fact, everything Robin Speed says about the "rule by law", as opposed to the "rule of law" is said by Hewart in the above book.
Lord Chief Justice Hewart enunciated "Hewart's law" , which, slightly paraphrased, says: "the aim and intent of the bureaucracy is to subordinate Parliament, to evade the Courts, and to render the will, or the caprice, of the Executive unfettered and supreme".
As a review of the book, The New Despotism" says:
THE NEW DESPOTISM, a book of quite exceptional importance, is, in effect, the sequel to that speech. Every citizen of this country, from the least to the greatest, is directly and personally concerned with the encroachments of bureaucracy on public life. "Very few laymen are aware of the wide difference which exists between the rights of these parties (the Crown and the subjects of the Crown) as they survive to this day under the traditions of antiquated law and practice; and still less do they realise the gross injustice not infrequently inflicted upon individuals by the harsh and unconscionable exercise of certain rights which Executive Departments enforce, and which the Courts of law are powerless to disallow. . . . The existence of the fundamentally false and unconstitutional idea that the bureaucracy are a privileged class, not amenable in their official acts to the jurisdiction of the courts, is a danger to our traditional liberties which is obvious," said *The Times* in a leading article, and it is "these wide differences" and "this danger to our traditional liberties" which the Lord Chief Justice examines and condemns.
THE NEW DESPOTISM is fully documented and deals with these vital questions in a technical as well as a popular manner.
<https://archive.org/details/LordHewart-TheNewDespotism1929>
Does all of the above sound a bit familiar ??
Tootle pip!!
PS: Hewart is also responsible for one of the most common quotes on the law, frequently misquoted as "Not only must justice be done, but must be seen to be done". The original was far stronger, " ----- but must be seen to be well and truly done">