'To tell a deliberate lie or series of lies ... regardless of the obligation imposed by an oath to tell the truth, and to participate constructively in the administration of justice and the ascertainment of the truth, is at best arrogant and at worst a complete rejection of law and order and the consensus of the community which alone enables our society to live in freedom and democracy.''
So speaking was one of Australia's best known judges, while acting as an ACT Supreme Court judge, in sentencing a man for contempt of court. The accused man, who had been trying to give a friend, on trial for bank robbery, a palpably false alibi, had been manoeuvred by the prosecution to the point where he had refused to answer a question, even after a direction by the trial judge to do so. In sentencing him, the judge, Marcus Einfeld, was as much exercised by his obvious perjury as by his refusal to answer.
The judge sentenced the man to jail for a year, allowing him to be released after nine months if he signed a two-year good behaviour bond, which included drug rehabilitation. The judge made clear that he regarded the sentence as light for an offence ''of the most serious kind'' deserving ''significant punishment'', but was being lenient because of the offender's youth. Justice Marcus Einfeld is 69, and could not claim that in his favour.
The judge's fury, seven years ago, about all of the lying he had heard in the trial (in which he had sat as judge and jury, and by the way in which he occasionally closely cross-examined some witnesses, perhaps counsel) was also manifest in his sentencing of the bank robber. So much so that the Federal Court, sitting as a court of appeal, upheld an appeal against sentence and sent the convicted man back for re-sentencing, concerned that the judge might have given the appearance that he was as much sentencing the man for perjury, or, by pleading not guilty, causing a trial, rather than for his bank robbery.
Luckily perhaps, the man in question, one of Canberra's best-known and most inept criminals, is in one of his increasingly brief periods of not serving a jail sentence, and will not, at least for a while, be able to quote back to him in the prison yard some of the judge's words to him as he sentenced him to nine years' jail.
Yesterday, Einfeld, no longer a judge, pleaded guilty to a perjury before the NSW courts. And to an attempt to pervert the course of justice. As those who have followed his travails know, he submitted a false statutory declaration in relation to a traffic camera offence, saying that he had not been driving his (court-supplied) car at the time, and nominating another person, who turned out to be dead, as the driver. Just what particulars will finally go before the court in what appears to have elements of a plea bargain are not yet clear, but those who have followed the case will know of allegations that this was part of a pattern with the judge a pattern said in the NSW Court of Criminal Appeal to go back at least until 1999 which is to say, before he was lecturing criminals about the wickedness of perjury. A trick, in short, for not having to pay one's traffic fines, relying on the inertia of the system in failing to follow up cases where the nominated owner of the car alleged another driver (particularly one outside the jurisdiction) was driving at the time.
It is a sad end for a man who studied law alongside John Howard and any number of others who were to become famous, including an array of High Court judges; was to become foundation chairman of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission; and to have been involved in any number of national and international causes involving refugee causes, human rights, Jewish affairs and United Nations and Commonwealth causes, and many other worthy matters, over the past 40 years.
His father was Syd Einfeld, a very popular NSW Labor minister of consumer affairs in the 1960s. From him, perhaps, Marcus developed some of his flair for publicity, his love of it and, perhaps some of his talent for overstatement a talent long manifest even before people began questioning the accuracy of the many hundreds of claims he has made about his career, memberships, honours, and achievements in his voluminous CV, or looking upwards to check whenever he mentioned the splendour of the weather.
One can say in defence of him that much of his energy was devoted to great causes, sometimes unpopular ones, and often at some personal cost. I can think of other lawyers (especially those long given to despising him) who have never lifted a finger in the cause of human rights or human dignity, and whose skills have been mostly devoted to making the rich and powerful even more smug and comfortable.
Yet even many with some instinctive sympathy and sadness at his humiliation will acknowledge that there was often something insufferable in his hogging of the limelight, as it were sometimes seeming to shove aside the victims he was representing in his anxiety to be in the centre of the picture. His great art for moral superiority and grandstanding and rush to pontificate in finger-pointing phrases on so many matters of public policy stand in counterpoint to the arrogance, conscious wickedness and utter utter hypocrisy of the crimes to which he has pleaded guilty.
I myself came to the conclusion that he was a bit of a fraud years ago when he, as human rights commissioner, visited Toomelah, an Aboriginal settlement in northern NSW, accompanied by an array of journalists and photographers. The old ham wept and sobbed as he expressed his shock and horror at the living conditions, and got any amount of publicity. Yet anyone who knew anything about Aboriginal settlements knew that Toomelah, if far from utopian, would not have made the top 10 for poor conditions, even in the immediate vicinity, and that the effect of his intervention was rather more likely to do good for Einfeld's reputation than for the improvement of local conditions. So it proved. That's why I have harboured, for so long, my memory of Einfeld's grandstanding about the seriousness of perjury waiting for a moment when it could not prejudice his fair trial. That trial had been due to start on Monday; the guilty plea has now rendered it unnecessary.
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