We're back for day 2 in the NSW Supreme Court. Watch here:
Commentary thread to follow.
First up is questioning to Kathryn Boyd, who is the Deputy Secretary, General Counsel in the NSW Dept of Premier and Cabinet.
Peter King making me feel like I should have had a bigger coffee this morning..
Worth noting there's no requirement to actually be good at arguing in court to be a lawyer. You can see why it's the ones who are good who make the ridiculous money.
You know like the ones the NSW govt is paying for with a blank cheque courtesy of the bottomless public dollar.
On the flipside the fact the govt is paying for one of the best barristers in the country means they're clearly not interested in taking any chances with a case against them.
Now appreciating why some judges come across as grumpy and blunt if you had to deal with this every single day.
Govt lawyers "this entire cross examination has been pointless". It's honestly really hard to disagree with this.
Onto the next witness, Darius Everett, Acting Assistant Secretary for Fed Dept of Health. Joanna Davidson is the counsel for the Fed govt.
King/Kassam's case is the only one that overlaps state & fed legal challenges in one case so we're up for another round of King questioning..
So this is still going and it really feels like just waiting for Peter King to stop talking.. 🙃
We're done for day 2. King managed to get some decent points across but it was a bit of a mess in terms of any kind of structure. We'll be back on Tuesday at 9am where it will be the opportunity for Clarke, Harkness & Plain to finally speak & the govt side to respond.
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Group of protesters wandering around the city, @therealrukshan is now live. Unsure of location? Media contingent following them around & apparently cops trying to follow. Nice to see one of the attendees checking on Dowsley's head in the live haha
They're at the Tan, same location the impromptu Melbourne footy celebrations last week. Far less people there than at that event. Cops are starting to gather in large numbers now.
They're continually moving, where is unclear but from history that's probably the only way to avoid rubber bullets.
Getting irritated by the level of bs. 1. Cases today were reported yesterday, which means they were tested Tuesday. So they'd need symptoms or exposure notification in 48-72hrs or less. Not how their public data claims for infectiousness or delta work. Smells like bs.
2. They have been told for months, publicly, by multiple experts, that compliance was clearly declining & unless they addressed that by more moderate measures, it would get worse. There isn't an excuse for just being this ignorant. They 100% made the decision to ignore this.
3. By deliberately making the previous choice, they rightfully should have prepared for the consequences. Not like they've had over a year & spent billions only to now scream & cry that we aren't prepared & for some reason the public *must* continue to bear the brunt of this.
Struggling to follow some of King's lines of questioning, it's not very clear what he's going for here..
Have to say it.
King is giving off big Foley vibes.
Interested what he chooses to pull out of the Public Health England report. UK have generally great open data reporting. Very frustrating that Australia seems to love ignoring that this exists.
For the NSW SC livestream:
Peter King = Kassam/AFL Solicitors.
Marcus Clarke/Jason Harkness/Vanessa Plain = Henry/G&B Solicitors.
J K Kirk SC = NSW govt lawyers.
We've been watching them run through the evidence presented for the cases and assess/debate if it should be included or not, particularly in respect to how/where in their case it's relevant.
We're now at the first witness that's been presented, Prof Kristine Macartney.
Oh look the NSW govt side is trying to argue it's more damaging to public interest to release cabinet docs & break normal legal protocol & that that's more important to protect than the interests of the litigant seeking private rights.
The battle of this will essentially come down to if the judge rules this is 'exceptional circumstances' or not.