The Dead Roo

One of these days, Greg Smith will probably be the Attorney General of New South Wales.

Elected in the most recent NSW state election, Greg Smith was one of the campaigns star recruits. He’d been a senior public prosecutor, with a record for being tough on crime. He also had a background in community work, little wonder he was instantly promoted to justice spokesperson, and made Shadow Attorney General, Shadow Minister for Justice, and Shadow Minister for Juvenile Justice immediately upon his election to the safe seat of Epping.

The man is also a dangerous “right to life” fundamentalist, accused of branch stacking, gross conflicts of interest, prone to outlandish statements and grave errors of judgment.

This is a brief profile of Greg Smith.

Greg Smith has made a sometimes controversial career of the law. The earliest available media references place him as a senior legal advisor to the National Crime Authority, when he left to join the Department of Public Prosecutions a former staffer described him as “Irreplaceable, he really was the backbone of this place”.

Though take that anonymous statement with a grain of salt, the Sydney Morning Herald journo was trying to make the case that the NCA was suffering a critical brain drain.

Whilst serving in the DPP, Greg Smith took on another role as head of Right to Life’s NSW division. The campaign against abortion led him to activism, in 1991 he and three hundred supporters formed a “human chain” along Parramatta and City Roads in protest.

A cynic might suggest that human chains are a way of making a piss-ant protest seem more significant.

It was through his involvement in Right to Life NSW that he made a number of statements to the media revealing his extremely conservative social views, which I shall detail bellow.

In 1993 he attacked the Uniting Church for running a hospital that, among many other things, would perform abortions. It was apparently “inevitable” that Christians would leave the church in response, because Christians “believe in the teachings of God as contained in the Bible - that these are constant teachings that just aren’t altered to fit the whim of the day”.

In 1994 he issued a statement calling for police to investigate people involved in RU486 trials for preforming illegal abortions. The claim that abortions are “illegal throughout Australia” was repeated by Smith most recently in his submission to the Senate Committee on Community Affair’s investigation in the re-legalization of RU486.

Smith has a long association with the Catholic church through his various campaigns against the legalization of euthanasia. In response to a 1999 advert by Kate Harrigan, a terminally ill patient calling for a right to die, Smith “questioned the lady’s psychiatric state and asked whether or not she was receiving adequate palliative care”. Those who financed the advert were performing “a stunt. They’re cashing in on the fact that there is an election on.”

In 2000 Smith praised John Howard’s attempts to stop single women and lesbians having babies using IVF as courageous.

Smith’s 2001 stated position on stem cell research and therapeutic cloning is particuarly revealing:

“producing human embryos by a cloning process or any other method of non-sexual reproduction is a grave offence to human dignity.
…
The supposed distinction between ‘therapeutic’ and ‘reproductive’ cloning must be exposed for the furphy it is: to produce an embryo is always ‘reproductive’; to destroy an embryo is never ‘therapeutic’.
…
Cloning humans would also occasion a whole range of new ethical and social dilemmas, because the process radically dissociates procreation from the loving union of a man and a woman”

An endnote defined sexual reproduction as including IVF.

Despite his one time membership of the ALP, Smith would become a star candidate of the Liberal’s 2007 election campaign, with Debnam touting him as an attorney general early on. Smith’s time as a prosecutor, and the methods by which he obtained pre-selection, became a political embarrassment for the Liberals during the campaign.

The controversy arose out of the fact that Smith did not immediately resign his position as the Deputy Director of Public Prosecutions, and once he became a candidate his position was subject to Liberal Party interferance.

In September 2006 it came to light that Debnam and Senator Bill Heffernan had phoned Smith and asked him to reverse a decision not to proceed with pedophilia charges against a Newcastle man.

Other than that they believed his decision on this matter was a political liability, I can see no reason why Debnam and Heffernan would commit such an astounding breach of the separation of powers in what was possibly an illegal action.

That aside, the fact of the matter is that after this phone call took place, Smith decided to prosecute the Newcastle man.

Later advice from the Crown solicitor concerning Smith’s actions, read into Hansard, stated “Greg Smith… failed to comply with the Code [of conduct for DPP employees] if he failed to terminate the telephone conversations with Mr Debnam or Senator Heffernan as soon as the subject matter became apparent”.

After this, Labor began digging into more of Smith’s history as a prosecutor. After a prolonged investigation into pedophilia and child pornography in Operation Auxin, one of New South Wales most notorious pedophiles was apprehended. Robert “Dolly” Dunn was granted indemnity from prosecution by Mr Smith in exchange for his testimony.

This was early in 1992, in 2006 it became the matter of a heated discussion on the floor of the NSW parliament.

More recent claims of misjudgment by Smith arose out of the Power Porn saga. Patrick Power was a prosecutor with the DPP, he brought his computer in to get fixed, and techies found child pornography on it. It would have been grossly inappropriate for Smith to warn Power of this investigation, but the accusation was leveled that he did.

Smith claims he got the OK to talk to Power about what was found on his hard drive after talking to Director of Public Prosecutions, Cowdery. Cowdery says his recollection was that Smith did not ring him until after he had spoken to Power.

Smith’s position as Liberal Candidate and Deputy Public Prosecutor became politically untenable, and eventually he resigned to concentrate on being a candidate.

As a Liberal Candidate and Opposition Justice spokesperson, Smith again gives us some insight into his deranged thinking.

He issued statements that condemned the access NSW prisoners had until recently to protein based diet supplement, “muscle builders”. Allowing prisoners access to the tools to beef up “is reckless and endangers the lives and safety of wardens and prisoners alike”. We are yet to hear the now shadow AG calling for the banning of weight sets and exercise yards in Prisons.

Protein drinks were not the only think Smith found worrying about the state of NSW prisons. There is always Islam. A press release reads:

“It is deeply concerning that a growing number of prisoners in Goulburn gaol’s Super Max facility are adopting fundamentalist ‘Jihad’ appearance and practices

I have no idea what ‘Jihad’ appearance is.

In the Sydney Morning Herald:

Opposition justice spokesman Greg Smith accused the government of failing to act after first becoming aware of the religious conversions more than a year ago. “To think that terrorist groups may well be formed in the prison system is something that our authorities should have done something about,” he said.

It wasn’t just smith’s dubious political statements that earnt him press coverage in the campaign, there was also the matter of his pre-selection.

By all accounts Smith, aligned with the right faction, was picked for the seat of Epping by Debnam and right wing power broker David Clarke. He went up for the seat against high profile candidate, and later successful candidate for Goulbourn, Pru Goward.

Smith won the pre-selection battle 61-32, a surprisingly large number of votes considering that the branch had a fraction of those members prior to the vote.

A great deal was made by the Labor party of the role of the right faction in signing up members of the local Lebanese Maronite community en masse.

Retiring MP Andrew Tink didn’t say much about the pre-selection battle, but his long time campaign manager and liberal party from the 70’s onwards, Rolly Crook, volunteered his services and money to an independent candidate after Goward lost the battle.

Short of an unlikely resurgence of the wet faction, Smith will be the Attorney General in the next Liberal government. His checkered past, poor judgment and extremist social conservative views will inform New South Wales law making during such a government.

Dare I say I’m glad I don’t live in New South Wales?

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