When I was on the bench I made some ‘brave’ decisions. And shock jocks, tabloid rags, the police association, and politicians would pile on with their critical views.
But their reactions, however hysterical and misplaced, were largely substantive and were namby-pamby compared to the current situation in the United States.
If a judge finds against any Trump demand then they are eviscerated as ‘lunatics’, ‘communists’ or ‘corrupt criminals’.
And that’s just from the attorney general and president, let alone Fox News. Then they are threatened with impeachment, and such proceedings actually commence in the Congress.
Courts bullied
Or they are arrested in handcuffs, as has happened to one district judge who made orders forbidding Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) from forcibly detaining a person in the face of the court.
As for binding orders that the court declares, even those made by the Trump-led Supreme Court, well they are simply ignored.
‘They don’t apply to us because it’s a foreign policy issue,’ the leadership claims. Or, ‘the planes were already in the air so we just let them go on’. Unimaginable in Australia or any western democracy in my lifetime.
The courts are being bullied, just like the legal profession and the universities.
Several law firms who acted for Trump’s adversaries were the subject of Trump decrees that would have meant they folded into bankruptcy as they could not enter federal buildings.
Some grovelled and the orders were removed – but only when they laid down, feet in the air, and agreed to undertake up to $40 million of free work for Trump pet ultra-conservative causes.
Others are fighting and winning. Universities have been threatened with crippling funding cuts unless they end diversity programs, weed out so-called antisemitism (read anything but pro-Netanyahu) and give right-wing Fox News hosts curriculum control.
Universities threatened
Columbia shamefully folded. Harvard bravely has not.
When the courts are treated in this way, when the legal profession must kowtow to the king, when universities must toe the line or else be decimated then that is fascism.
The election result in Australia represents a rejection of a drift to Trumpism. However much Dutton tried to distance himself, we all suspected that in his quieter, furtive moments he would open the hidden compartment at the back of his wardrobe and fondle his MAGA cap, genuflect at the Trump portrait and shine the old police boots.
You could hear it in his forays into savaging ‘woke’ universities and school curricula. You could feel it in his cosying up to extremist Zionists who think that anyone who even slightly raises a concern about the genocide in Gaza should be labelled as a Hamas supporter.
And you could smell it a mile off in the fawning, then desperate, love-fest on Sky News and in The Australian and from all the shock-jocks who were bolstering, then propping up, and lastly hectoring the voters to join them.
It did not work. We, the voters, rejected nuclear as a front for an anti-renewables push, vetoed crawling to war criminals in the Middle East, and opposed a drift toward making Australia great again (thanks Jacinta) by demonising immigrants.
The Zionist-led jihad of the teals did not lead to a single defeat, much to my delighted surprise. They flexed their muscles and drooped. Murdoch and son failed dismally in their efforts to influence the election because we now know what the end game looks like. Trumpism has made us realise that democracy is fragile and the drift can easily become a flood. We said ‘no’ to hate.
In the end, the Greens and Mandy did not stand a chance with that swing in three-way battles where the ALP had to come third.
For the courts it means business as usual and decisions can be made seeking to do right by all manner of people without fear or favour, affection or ill will.
Universities, like my own, can remain relatively distant from political intervention, and academic freedom will continue to be valued.
Law firms can do their job without retribution no matter who they are paid to represent, and those pesky freedoms so protective of democracy remain intact. We truly have dodged a bullet.
My hope is that the ALP uses this majority to be brave on climate change, native forest logging, drug law reform, a voice in some form, on Israel and in education.
The odourless centre
Mind you, my hope is tempered by fear, because there are dozens of examples where the ALP just seeks to consolidate even a landslide with a drift to the odourless centre.
Western Australia saw an unprecedented victory for the ALP, and yet one could hardly describe that ongoing regime as progressive.
This just leaves the commentators on Sky and in The Australian frustratedly nashing their teeth at activist judges, woke universities and liberal lawyers. Forgive me if just for a second I regress and say: ‘sucked in ya losers’.
♦ Professor David Heilpern is SCU Dean of Law and Chair of Discipline, Faculty of Business, Law and Arts. He is a former magistrate.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
