Members
of the Screen Australia Board
Screen
Australia
Level 7, 45 Jones St
Ultimo 2007
5th May 2017
Dear Screen Australia Board members
In response to Graeme Mason’s email of 4th
May; this being his response to my letter to himself and the Board of 1st
May.
In response to the 4
scenarios I proposed, Graeme writes:
1) Is not currently possible
2) You as Director and/or Writer with another person
in role of Producer would be acceptable, provided that the Producer is the
applicant and that there is no direct contact with you
3) You as writer, again would be acceptable as we
have many projects where we deal with the Producer and Director in the main
with little if any direct contact with the writer. Again this would need to
involve no contact with you
4) Is not currently possible
Lest there be any confusion
about where I stand with Screen Australia Graeme writes:
“I have decided that Screen Australia would accept and assess an
application for Ships in the Night
provided that you are not the producer of the production, are not the contact
and do not lodge the application or have direct contact or communication with
staff.
I think it would be fair to
summarize the key point thus:
The Screen Australia Board considers that James Ricketson poses
a risk to SA staff. Owing to its duty of
care, the Board cannot allow staff to meet with or communicate with him.
I received a 2nd
email from Screen Australia on 4th May regarding my 4th
April FOI request for documents relating to evidence in support of SA’s
decision to ban me. It can be can summarized thus:
Screen Australia has no intention of providing James Ricketson
with evidence of the risk he allegedly poses to SA staff; of his ‘highly
offensive conduct’.
I am left with no choice now
but to seek this evidence through the courts. Or, to be more precise, to take
legal action to prove that there is no evidence; that I should never have been
banned in May 2012 and that the two subsequent bans placed on me by Screen
Australia (May 2014 and My 2016) were unwarranted, unnecessary and enormously damaging to both
my reputation and my ability to earn a living as an Australian filmmaker.
Dealing with the most pertinent
parts of Graeme’s email. He writes:
“I am not, for the purposes of answering your practical or
operational requests, going to once more go over the issues which led to you
being deemed ineligible.”
As you know, the issues that
led to my being ineligible have never been addressed this past 5 years – namely
evidence in support of the proposition that I intimidated and placed at tisk
members of SA staff. For Graeme to use
the expression “to once more go over the issues” is disingenuous, to say the
least! No evidence has ever been presented to me that I intimidated or placed
at risk members of Screen Australia staff; that I have, as Jane Supit puts it,
engaged in “highly offensive conduct”.
The Screen Australia
Board has, for five years, refused to
provide evidence of any kind. You have hoped, through the repetition of
fallacious allegations made by senior SA bureaucrats, that these would become
accepted as fact by the film community of which I have been a part for more
than 40 years. I, on the other hand, have consistently and continually requested
that I be provided with evidence of my intimidating and ‘at risk’
correspondence. On many occasions I have stated that if such evidence exists,
if it were to be presented to myself and the film community, I would accept the
ban placed on me as being appropriate. No filmmaker should intimidate or place
at risk members of staff within any funding body.
The Board’s assertion,
through Graeme Mason, that I pose a threat to SA staff is not just hurtful and
defamatory; it is a lie. And you all know it to be a lie. And you hope, in the
perpetuation of this lie, that my fellow filmmakers will believe it and judge
the ban on me as being justified. This is what has, in fact, occurred in the
case of the Australian Director’s Guild – a body of which I was a founding
member. The ADG will not accept me as a member if I am to be critical in any
way of Screen Australia, will not publish any opinion pieces I write in the ADG
Screen Director magazine and refuses to even publish, in its newsletter, the
fact that I have been banned! This is not just evidence of the extent to which
Screen Australia has damaged my reputation but evidence also of Screen
Australia’s intimidating into silence all within our industry who are reliant,
one way or another on Screen Australia, as is the case with the ADG through the
funds it receives from SA.
The fate of James Ricketson
stands as a stark reminder to any filmmaker who has the temerity to criticize
Screen Australia in public; any filmmaker who exercises his or her right of
free speech.
Given Screen Australia’s refusal
to provide me with evidence of my intimidating and ‘at risk’ correspondence I have sought this through FOI legislation,
many times now. My FOI requests have been knocked back on the grounds that it
is not in the ‘public interest’ that I be appraised of evidence of my “highly
offensive conduct”. That Screen Australia should breach both the letter and the
spirit of FOI legislation to deny me evidence of my ‘crimes’ speaks volumes of
the hope of the Screen Australia board that I will simply give up in my quest
for evidence. In this the Board is mistaken.
Graeme writes:
“At this point in time Screen Australia would require a way
to manage a project in which you were involved so that there is no contact,
either face to face or in writing, between you and our staff.”
Why can there be no contact
between SA staff and myself either face to face or in writing? I have been
asking this for five years but will ask again:
Have I ever, in a
face-to-face meeting with a member of Screen Australia staff, acted in such a
way as to make them feel at risk? Have I ever behaved offensively? Have I ever
sworn at members of staff? Threatened them?
The answer, as you know, is
‘no’. If you truly believe the answer to be ‘yes’, cite one instance in which I
have behaved in such a manner. You will not because you cannot. It suits the
Board’s purposes (the vilification of James Ricketson) to make such allegations
but to refuse, point blank, to back them up with facts; with evidence.
The same applies in the case
of written communication. Please provide me with just one instance in which
what I have written to a member of SA staff has paced them at risk or amounted
to intimidation? Or has been “highly offensive”? You cannot and will not
because there are no such instances. Yes, I have been a vocal critic of Screen
Australia since its inception. And yes, when lies about me have been placed on
file I have advocated on my own behalf to have these lies struck from the
record; removed from the files.
There is no need to revisit
this aspect of my now 6 year dispute with Screen Australia. It is all
well-documented and it is all available for anyone who is interested on my
blog. This was the reason why I placed my correspondence on my blog, so that my
fellow filmmakers could make up their own minds as to whether or not I deserve
to be banned by Screen Australia. These same documents will now be available to
the court to view in making a determination on this matter.
That I should now have to
resort to the courts to acquire such evidence is absurd – a waste of the the
time, energy and money of both myself and Screen Australia. However, I have no
choice but to pursue this course of action in order to prove to my fellow
filmmakers that there is no evidence.
Graeme writes:
“The requirement that you not have contact with staff will stay
in place until such time as I am certain that there is clearly shown good will,
courtesy and respect towards staff and no risk to staff. It is only in those
circumstances that the ban may be lifted and normal relations resumed. “
At the risk of belabouring
the point, please explain to me, members of the SA Board, what you mean by
‘risk’? What kind of risk? Of physical violence? Of verbal abuse? At risk of
what? Provide me with at least one example of my having placed a member of SA
staff at risk!
This is a question that the
court will, as I am sure you must be aware, wish to acquire an answer to. The
Board could save a lot of people a lot of time, energy and money by answering
it now and not having the answer extracted from Graeme Mason during expensive
legal proceedings.
Graeme writes:
“In order for Screen Australia to be able to change its current
position on your eligibility, Screen Australia must be satisfied that you will
not persistently and unreasonably denigrate or make unreasonable demands on our
staff and Board members.”
I trust that it has not
escaped the attention of Board members just how often the words used to
describe my ‘crime’ have changed! There is no longer talk of ‘intimidation’ or
“highly offensive conduct”. Now I am guilty of “unreasonably denigrating”
members of staff and Board members. This begs a number of questions:
What have I written about
members of staff or the Board that is “denigrating”?
Given that Graeme qualifies
this accusation with the word “unreasonable” am I to take it that some
‘denigration’ is ‘reasonable’?
Perhaps the dictionary can
help us here:
DENIGRATE: “to criticize unfairly”, “to
disparage.”
Have my criticisms of Screen
Australia been unfair? Or do Screen Australia’s thin-skinned senior bureaucrats
and Board members see any and all criticism of SA as ‘unfair’?
“to disparage” means, in this context
“to criticize someone or something in a way that shows you
do not respect or value him.”
It is true that I have little
professional respect for bureaucrats who place untrue statements on record
(Fiona Cameron) or who lie – Ruth Harley – but is disparagement a reason to ban
a filmmaker? The expression, “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the
kitchen” comes to mind.
Graeme writes:
“In relation to your current eligibility status Screen Australia
is on firm ground.”
I do not believe that Screen
Australia is on firm ground at all and am prepared to test this assertion in
court.
Graeme’s reference to my
having “tested numerous avenues” is clearly a reference to the Commonwealth
Ombudsman. The correspondence between myself and the Ombudsman is all on record
(and on my blog) and I need not review it. I will make the point, however, that
in the six years I have dealt with the Commonwealth Ombudsman he and his
representatives have never once asked Screen Australia to provide evidence in
support of the proposition that I have intimidated or placed at risk members of
SA staff; that I have engaged in “highly offensive conduct”. Instead, the
Ombudsman has provided the imprimatur of its approval to the ban on me on the
grounds that, and I quote:
You have
referred to the actions of SA ‘childish, stupid and counter-productive.
You have
referred to the actions of SA as Mc Carthyism, directly tying the refusal of
communication to your criticism of that agency.
You have
made reference to SA representatives as having lied, or being liars.
This would be laughable if
it did not reveal that the office of the Commonwealth Ombudsman is not up to
the task of investigating complaints in a thorough, competent and independent
manner.
The other ‘avenue’ Graeme
refers to is the Australian Government Solicitor; in possession of the
‘evidence’ provided by Ruth Harley in May 2012 to justify the alteration of
Screen Australia’s Terms of Trade - for the sole purpose of banning me. Ms
Louise Vardanega (copied on this letter) has made it clear that she cannot
provide me with a copy of this ‘evidence’ without Screen Australia’s approval.
Screen Australia refuses to provide such approval. The reason is abundantly
clear. The Board knows that whatever ‘evidence’ Ruth Harley provided to the
Australian Government Solicitor is nonsense and that I would very easily be
able to demonstrate this fact if I were privy to it.
Graeme writes:
“…to be clear the reason I am telling you this is that Screen
Australia does not want to go back to square one with you in the event that a
project that you are attached to is not successful in getting our funding.”
Graeme repeats here the lie
placed on record by Fiona Cameron that kick started this dispute 7 years ago.
Again, Graeme is being disingenuous. I have never, in my life, complained about
not receiving funding. Never. If, as Board members, you have any respect at all
for facts, evidence, truth, present me with evidence that I made the complaint
Fiona Cameron referred to; that Graeme is now referring to. Provide me with evidence that I have behaved
in a way that warrants my being banned or instruct Graeme to stop placing such demonstrably
untrue nonsense on file.
Graeme’s offer to accept an
application for a James Ricketson project under the conditions he outlines is a
cynical exercise in bureaucratic bullying. For me to accept such conditions
would involve acknowledging the truth of what Graeme states quite clearly –
namely that I pose a threat to SA staff. For as long as such lies are placed on
file – damaging to me both professionally and personally - and disseminated
within the film industry, there is no possibility of any form of détente
between myself and Screen Australia.
Five years is long enough to
wait for justice to prevail in this matter. I will now instruct my legal
counsel to do whatever is legally necessary to secure the evidence the Screen
Australia Board refuses to provide me with.
best wishes
James Ricketson
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