farmdoc's blog post number 697

Here are some footnotes to yesterday’s post:

In 1995 Sweetheart Vivienne and I walked Hinchinbrook Island’s Thorsborne Trail, and we were shown over the proposed Port Hinchinbrook site by (now 87 year old) Margaret Thorsborne who was then President of the FoH. So my observations on both counts are personal.

Ultimately Williams prevailed over the FoH, and Port Hinchinbrook was built. I don’t know how much Williams’s White Shoe Brigade membership and SLAPP writs contributed to this result. But I doubt they were unhelpful.

Keith Williams sold Port Hinchinbrook in 2006. He had a stroke in 2008. Now 80 years old, he’s disabled and lives on the Gold Coast in South Queensland.

I don’t know if Port Hinchinbrook’s been successful and what its environmental impact is. The new owner’s planning expansion.

FoH is defunct. The ongoing battle against the environmental excesses of Port Hinchinbrook (aka Club Mud) is being fought by the Alliance to Save Hinchinbrook [ASH].

The Grand Prix Corp’s threats of SLAPP writs were empty; the writs never eventuated.

In January 2010 Gunns withdrew the last of its 1995 Gunns20 SLAPP litigation – without even one minute of substantive (i.e. non-procedural) courtroom action.

I wrote here of vandalism at the house of Gunns Chairman John Gay (pictured) Last Monday a man pleaded guilty to it. During the hearing, Gay said he was frightened and sick of harassment at his house. How dare he – the instigator of 20 SLAPP writs aiming to frighten and harass lawful opponents – have the temerity to portray himself as an underdog. (Given the continuing southerly progress of Gunns share price, the last laugh won’t be Gay’s.)

I last wore white shoes in 1985 – when I last played tennis.

farmdoc's blog post number 696

Today’s is the first of two linked posts:

The White Shoe Brigade was a group of boisterous, arrogant and Government-advantaged Queensland property developers in the 1990s. The rationale of this contemptuous name’s explained here. One of the Brigade’s higher profile members was Keith Williams (pictured). After successfully developing Sea World and then Hamilton Island, Williams proposed a large ‘integrated resort’ development called Port Hinchinbrook, near Cardwell in North Queensland – adjacent to the wondrous tropical wilderness of Hinchinbrook Island, and whose construction would annihilate acres of mangroves. So predictably Williams’s proposal met with staunch opposition from a large group of concerned citizens (including Sweetheart Vivienne and me) – the Friends of Hinchinbrook [FoH]. Williams responded to his opponents not with true concern and respectful dialogue; but rather (in 1994) with writs against FoH’s leaders.

Thus was my introduction to SLAPP (i.e. Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation).

SLAPP is a form of bullying and intimidation which aims to stifle free speech and pubic protest by initiating a lengthy and expensive legal process in which there’s a massive disparity of financial (and other) resources between the two sides.

A year or two later, the Australian Grand Prix Corporation threatened Save Albert Park’s leaders with SLAPP writs.

Then in 2005 Gunns Limited issued SLAPP writs against 20 opponents – the Gunns20 – of its State-sanctioned environmental plundering.

(Continued tomorrow.)