Over the past six
years I have asked the Commonwealth Ombudsman (countless times!) a simple
question:
“Please ask Screen
Australia to provide evidence of allegations senior members of staff, the Chief
Executive and the Screen Australia board have made regarding myself?”
For six years the
Commonwealth Ombudsman has refused to do so. The questions remain unanswered.
Mr Colin Neave
Commonwealth Ombudsman
GPO Box 442
Canberra
ACT 2601
28th Nov 2018
Dear Mr Neave
Following on from my letter of 2nd Sept 2016,
receipt of which has not been acknowledged by your office.
Please find attached two letters I have written to Screen
Australia this month (9th and 17th Nov) relating to Chief
Executive Graeme Mason’s refusal to allow me to make FOI requests. I have received
acknowledgment from neither the SA board or from the FOI officer of receipt of
these letters.
Is this a matter of concern to your Office as we approach
the 6th anniversary of my original complaint to the Ombudsman about
Screen Australia’s failure to adhere to FOI legislation?
How much longer does the office of the Ombudsman need to
ask the most basic of questions: “Evidence please?”
My letter of 13th Dec 2010 to Elisa Harris is
worth quoting at length as a reminder that 6 years ago (next month) a member of
your office completed an investigation without bothering to ask any questions
at all of those Screen Australia staff that were the subject of my complaint? It
is noteworthy also that Screen Australia was already doing all that it could to
thwart my attempts to make FOI applications.
Dear
Elisa
I note
that you have copied your 8th Dec letter to Nick Coyle, FOI officer
at Screen Australia. I am not sure why you have done so but it may be of
interest to you that I am still waiting
to obtain from Nick, through FOI, answers to questions I asked of Julia Overton
months ago and which she quite simply refused to answer. How can the Ombudsman’s office complete its
investigation into my complaint when the answers to my FOI questions, pertinent
to my complaint, have not yet been provided to me? One of my FOI requests
relates to the notes Julia Overton took during our 25th our August
meeting – the only contemporaneous written record of who said what in this
meeting. The more important question arising from your letter of 8th
Dec is: How can the Ombudsman’s office
complete its investigation without asking the most important question of all
and the one around which my complaint turns?
Did
the conversation between myself, Ross Mathews and Julia Overton on 25th
August occur as I have described it many times now. Or did it not? You observe, quite
correctly, that “what was said at this meeting appears now to form the main
issue of complaint.” Later in your letter you write, “Clearly Ms Cameron has
reviewed what occurred at that meeting and is satisfied that no further action
is required by the agency regarding this." If it is ‘clear’ that Fiona has
‘reviewed’ what occurred in the meeting, what did she discover? That I was
telling the truth? That I have been lying? That Ross and Julia refuse to answer
the question? Did Fiona look at Julia’s notes? If she did, and if Julia’s
written account is different from my own, why has Fiona not availed herself of
the opportunity to point this out to me? Did the Ombudsman’s office even put
the question to Fiona: “What is your understanding of what was said in the meeting
of 25th August.”
In
the absence of a clear answer to this question (am I telling the truth or not)
it would be a waste of my time in the writing and yours in the reading if I
were to respond more fully to your 8th
Dec. letter. Please, Elisa, obtain from Ross, Julia and Fiona an answer to this
question and lets proceed from there. And you could ask Liz Crosby also. She
was present at the end of the meeting of 25th August and will, I
think, be familiar with the meeting’s outcome.
On 17th. Nov. I
wrote the following to Zachary in your office: “Dear Zachary
I am
in need of some advice...I do want to proceed with my complaint but I want to
do so in the right way or, to put it another way, in a way that makes it simple
for your office to deal with. In essence this is a very simple matter and I
would like to keep it that way....Any advice you can give me would be greatly
appreciated - by either email or on the phone.
cheers,
James 0400959229
The ‘simple matter’ I was
referring to was getting an answer to my one question – proving to be as
difficult as getting blood from a stone!
I did
not hear back from Zachary. This did not concern me since it has been made
clear to me on a few occasions that the Ombudsman’s office has quite a backlog
of complaints to investigate and that it could take months before my complaint
was looked at. I certainly expected your office to get back to me in response
to my 17th Nov email email when my complaint was being considered.
This has not occurred. The investigation
has been completed before all the evidence is in and, it seems, without the key
question being asked.
Six years later the most important question of all
still remains unasked by your office:
“Please
provide evidence that Mr Ricketson intimidated, harassed and placed at risk
members of Screen Australia’s staff prior to May 2012!”
Please excuse me if I repeat the question I asked
in Dec 2010:
How can the Ombudsman’s office
complete its investigation without asking the most important question of all and
the one around which my complaint turns?
A few weeks later I wrote another letter to Elisa.
6th
Jan 2011
Dear
Elisa Harris
Following
on from my letter of 5th Jan. and our telephone conversation
yesterday.
Clearly you have no intention of
asking of Ross Mathews, Julia Overton or Liz Crosby the most relevant question
in this dispute – without an answer to which it is impossible to make a
determination as to where the truth lies. I must
say that I find this an extraordinary state of affairs!
Whilst it comes as no
surprise to me that members of Screen Australia’s senior management should use
spin and obfuscation to avoid answering a simple question, it does surprise me that the Ombudsman’s office should likewise
resort to spin to avoid obtaining an answer to this question – as you did on
the phone yesterday in declaring that it is up to the Ombudsman’s office to
determine the manner in which it conducts its investigations and hence is under
no obligation to ask this all important question. The logic of this, coming
from a lawyer, escapes me. I would have thought that first and foremost the Ombudsman’s office’s job was to get to the truth
or as close to the truth as it is possible to get – an objective that can only
be achieved by asking the right questions and hoping to get honest answers.
But I am repeating myself, to no end. You will not ask the question! C’est la
vie!
The various gestures on the part
on the office of the Ombudsman to go through the motions of ‘investigating’
this matter over the past 6 years have been characterised by a refusal to ask pertinent
questions. Had these been asked in 2010, 18 months or so before the official
ban was placed on me, this matter could have been resolved before the end of
2010.
It is difficult to escape the
conclusion that your office decided, in late 2010, that my complaint had no
merit at all and that the best way of dealing with it was to simply not ask any
questions at all that might lead your office to believe that my complaint did
have merit.
Now, in Nov 2016, your office is
so heavily invested in the proposition that Screen Australia’s ban was
justified it cannot ask these questions (“Why the ban on FOI requests?” for
instance) without tacitly admitting that your office has evinced a high level
of incompetence in its handing of this matter.
I have written at some length
about the impact of Screen Australia’s ban on my career as a filmmaker. Let me
add a few words regarding the reputational damage I have suffered:
The Australian Director’s Guild
(ADG), of which I was a founding member, represents the interests of film and
TV directors. One of its many functions is to protect directors from the kind
of bureaucratic bullying that I have been subjected to by Screen Australia
since SA’s inception. Since May 2012, the month of my ban, I have been persona
non grata with the ADG – which has not only refused to ask for evidence of the
alleged offenses that led to my ban but has refused to even mention the ban in
its newsletters.
Why is this?
There are two reasons:
(1) Your office has, since 2010, given its seal of
approval to the ban placed on me – firstly the unofficial ban and then the
official one. In relation to the official May 2102 ban Screen Australia has
held up the Ombudsman’s support for the
ban as evidence that I am guilty as charged. (The Ombudsman’s declaration that
the ban on me is justified is, incidentally, one of the reasons provided by
Screen Australia for refusing FOI requests from me.)
And so it is that the Australian Director's Guild,
believing that the Ombudsman has investigated this matter, arrived at the
conclusion, quite understandably, that I did in fact intimidate, harass and
place at risk members of SA staff. Why on earth would (or should) the ADG advocate
on behalf of a director who intimidates and places at risk members of Screen
Australia’s staff?
You may ask, “Why didn’t the ADG at least request of
Screen Australia that it provide evidence, from my correspondence, that I
intimidated, harassed and placed at risk members of SA staff?” This brings me
to:
(2) The Australian Director’s Guild receives funding
from Screen Australia. It cannot afford to bite one of the few hands that feeds
it.
The ADG is thus caught between a
rock and a hard place. If it were to ask for evidence and find that there is
none (and there isn’t) it would find itself in the awkward position of having
to advocate on my behalf and go into battle with one of its major funders –
Screen Australia. This the ADG cannot afford to do.
In its wisdom the ADG board has
decided not to ask any questions of Screen Australia and not to respond in any
way to my emails and letters. Having to choose between support for a fellow
director and continued Screen Australia funding the ADG has chosen the latter.
It is a question of survival for the ADG and I do not take this personally.
This is the way the world works. Those who control the purse strings (in this
case Screen Australia) control (or at least heavily influence) policy decisions
– in this case the ADG’s decision to turn a blind eye to the plight of a fellow
filmmaker.
On a personal level, however, my becoming persona non
grata with the ADG is very painful. These are my peers, my fellow filmmakers.
Some I have known for 40 years. I am now well into my sixties and what will
probably be the last decade of my life as an Australian filmmaker is being
clouded by the false accusations that have led to my being banned for 54 months
now by Screen Australia. Your office, in refusing to conduct a proper
investigation in 2010 and in refusing to ask the most basic of questions this
past six years, has lent credibility to Screen Australia’s ban and thus been
complicit in the reputational damage I have suffered.
Six years down the track, as Kent
Purvis goes through the motions of
conducting yet another ‘investigation’ into yet another two year ban, imposed
in May 2016, I fear that he is again refusing to ask for evidence of the
offences that have led to my being banned for 54 weeks now. If this be the case
any report that is written about this latest ban (6 months ago) will be
worthless and I will need to expend a lot of money acquiring answers to my
questions (evidence of my guilt) in the Supreme Court.
I would appreciate it, Mr Neave,
if you did, just this once, at least acknowledge receipt of a letter from me.
best wishes
James Ricketson
cc Senator Mitch Fifield, Minister for the Arts
Members of the Screen
Australia board
Australian Director’s Guild
Louise Vardanega
Graeme Mason
Fiona Cameron
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