Screen Australia admits that there is no evidence that I intimidated harassed or placed at risk SA staff back in 2012

 

Ms Kirsten Delaney

FOI

Screen Australia

GPO Box 3984

Sydney 2001                                                                                        10^th October 2025

 

Dear Kirsten

 

“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.” 

 

In your letter of  3^rd. October you have defined ‘intimidation’ not as an act committed by a perpetrator, but as a subjective feeling experienced by someone who believes themselves to a victim of intimidation.  Your words:

 

Screen Australia notes that the requirement that the documents “containing evidence that [you] intimidated, harassed and placed SA staff at risk” is a subjective assessment. In the interests of openness and transparency, Screen Australia has decided to provide you with all of the documents presented to the Board in 2012 which relate to you. Screen Australia does not and should not be read as making any comment on whether the documents released in response to your request are evidence of the subjective assessment outlined above

 

This word-salad, clearly intended to create the illusion of transparency and accountability, generates cognitive dissonance instead: 

 

Here is the evidence you asked for, James, but Screen Australia does not necessarily consider it to be evidence. 

 

Have you been instructed by Dierdre Brennan or the Board to engage in obfuscation of such Kafkaesque proportions? Or is your choice of weasel words here, this exercise in casuistry, standard operating procedure when responding to Freedom of Information requests?

 

Either way, they are an insult to my intelligence and an embarrassment to your professional obligation, as FOI officer, to be clear and concise and not to engage in such crude spin doctoring. 

 

What your words reveal is that in ‘Screen-Australia-World’ in 2025 any member of staff who feels that they have been intimidated can declare that they have been intimidated. No evidence of intimidation is required, only a staff member’s subjective experience. Screen Australia will make no comment on the validity or otherwise of this subjective experience but can and will ban a filmmaker based on it – a filmmaker who makes criticisms of SA policy or  who asks questions SA staff do not want to answer. This subjective experience is sufficient, even in 2025, for the current Board, made up in part of film and TV professionals, to threaten with banning a fellow filmmaker such as myself who has been asking, for thirteen years, for evidence of intimidation that you have admitted in a very roundabout way, in your letter of 3^rd October, does not exist. 

 

We are in Alice in Wonderland territory here and you all – SA staff and Board members alike – know this to the case. And yet, despite not being able to point to one paragraph, one sentence or even one intimidatory word, continue to cast me in the role as a villain so dangerous to the emotional well-being of SA staff and Board members that the threat of a fourth ban on me is a fair way of dealing with my request for evidence.

 

This is not my last comment on this latest FOI request but thank you for acknowledging, in a very convoluted roundabout way, that there is no evidence that I intimidated or placed at risk any member of SA staff. ‘Subjective assessment’ will not stand up in a law court, and nor should it. 

 

I suggest that those to whom this letter is copied familiarise themselves with my letter to Fiona Cameron dated 25^th November 2010 – presented to me, by yourself, as evidence in support of the allegations of intimidation etc. made against me fifteen years ago. I invite Screen Australia staff and Board members to find evidence of intimidation in it and please either share this with me or declare that you can find no evidence.

 

As should be obvious to SA staff and board by now, I am not going to give up in my to have my name cleared of the false allegations that led to my being banned in 2012.

 

I offer, yet again, to meet with Screen Australia staff and/or Board members to discuss this dispute and bring it to an equitable end.

 

cheers

 

James Ricketson

 

cc  CEO Dierdra Brennan

Screen Australia Board Members