And the AFL will continue to try to put pressure on Jackson. Just as they have done with every other person who has dared defy them.
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Get them on the stand and it will be mass memory loss. “I don’t recall” will be the catch cry and the judge will think them exemplary in their testimony.
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No changes then
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If I read it right… all he is asking is for a declaration that the AFL engaged in misleading and deceptive conduct and for the AFL to publish corrective advertisements of their misleading statements. Interesting.
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does it really mean that? irs a statement of claim, the afl hasnt even had a chance to refute its contents yet…
If you read the claim you will see many of the comments are direct from their own mouths, reported in the media, or sometimes from interviews in the media. Bit hard to refute when you are on the public record and what you have said has been widely reported
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yeah sure you cant refute the words were said, but just saying the words isnt enough to prove what jackson is alleging.
From what I read they have a public policy saying one thing, statements from them saying the same things, then actions that have the opposite effect.
Presumably they will deny the actions such as bullying Hird.
I can’t wait to see them in court.
Could be an interesting witness list.
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Although with a civil case not sure how the witnesses go, or even if they are likely to call any Except the main people.
Perhaps some other blitzers know?
Yes they have already tried that.
That is why in my post I said:
“Let me advise Blitzers even less learned in the law than me, that what
this means is that the AFL and its billions of dollars and its highly
paid, highly powered million dollar legal teams have not been able to
overcome in the lower level courts the well-reasoned legal arguments
that Jackson has launched.”
The AFL’s lawyers had imposed immense pressure in trying to stop the case from progressing even as far as this. That they could not do so is a credit to Jackson Taylor.
It is also one of the only victories - albeit a very small one - for the good guys in this Saga.
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In what way did they apply pressure for this not to go ahead?
Usual modus operandi - intimidation, harassment, media pressure and generally by discrediting people and making their life miserable. And if course, the old you’ll never work in football anywhere again trick.
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Justice does not come cheap. I doubt that Jackson Taylor could match AFL financial resources to pursue this case. It cost Hird a lot, even with the help of a white knight.
I have no idea of the strength of Taylor’s case, but I live in hope that it does get to court and that AFL people get subpoenaed.
As I understand it, many of the facts /assertions in the statement of claim are already in the public domain as a consequence of ASADA evidence in the Federal Court proceedings and in part from the AFL tribunal hearing The AFL has been able to ride them out with a mostly compliant media, It could be a different matter if Fitzpatrick and Gil were grilled in court and AFL workings were exposed. It is one thing to lie in public, another matter to perjure oneself in court.
It is a disgrace that a government agency got into bed with that mob and caused so many lives to be damaged.
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Thanks bigallan.
It would be great to get opinions from other BB legal eagles on this matter.
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ASADA responses to questions on notice are now up on the APH site. The only answers directly responding to the questions were confirmation that ASADA had conducted investigations of other clubs and that texts relating to other clubs were not given to CAS ( texts were confined to Essendon as per the texts supplied to the AFL Tribunal on the basis of relevance).
Standard non-answers to questions why ASADA conducted a joint investigation and why it issued an interim review .
No surprises there, ASADA continues on its path of obfuscation and contempt for elected representatives.
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Well, well, well…perhaps there’s a few guilty souls around who acknowledge the injustice done to us.
Australia’s Tokyo Olympics campaign will benefit from $100 million in projected new funding as the federal government reveals plans to establish a sports lottery two years before the 2020 opening ceremony to arrest our national decline in world sport.
Sports Minister Greg Hunt will today outline a national sports plan which includes the creation of a British-style lottery as a new funding source for Australian teams and a national integrity tribunal to determine doping, match-fixing and other serious charges against athletes.
The new sports court, to be funded by government, would remove the conflict of interest at the heart of the current anti-doping regime, which requires national sporting bodies to sit in judgment of their own athletes in drugs cases.
The weakness in the current framework was exposed by the Essendon doping case, where an AFL tribunal ruling in favour of 34 footballers aroused World Anti-Doping Agency suspicion of a hometown decision. prompting it to seek a re-hearing before the Swiss-based Court of Arbitration for Sport.
“Everybody is of the view that we don’t want to have to repeat what happened with Essendon,’’ Mr Hunt told The Australian.
“If there is an independent arbiter in Australia, we would be happy with that.’’
The national sports plan — still being developed in consultation with the sports — will provide an overarching policy framework covering participation, high-performance sport, preventive health and integrity measures.
It represents the first serious attempt to fill a void identified nearly 10 years ago by the Independent Sport Panel chaired by David Crawford, which lamented the absence of a national sports policy to inform and evaluate government funding decisions.
The plan is being formulated against Australia’s slide down the Olympic standings, a shrinking sports budget and a bitter dispute between Australian Sports Commission chairman John Wylie and Olympic supremo John Coates. Australia’s Olympic medal haul in Rio was the smallest since Barcelona 25 years ago.
In the six years between 2010-11 and 2016-17, government allocations to the ASC dropped from $268m to $251m; a reduction in real and nominal terms. Team Great Britain, which is funded by a lottery, now gets twice as much in high-performance grants as Australia’s Olympic team.
One of the few issues Mr Wylie and Mr Coates agree on is the need for Australia to adopt a British-style lottery. Under the model being developed by Mr Hunt and Mr Wylie, the states would be reimbursed for any losses to their existing lotteries, with money left over to be set aside for sports programs managed by the ASC, Australian Institute of Sport and state-based sports institutes.
Existing state licence holders will manage state-based ticket sales, with the federal government to tender for a group to manage national, online sales.
Modelling by leading lottery operator the Tatts Group estimates that a national sports and heritage lottery would generate $50m a year in extra sport funding.
Mr Hunt’s proposed start-up date for the lottery is July 1 next year. This means Australian teams and athletes preparing for the Tokyo Games will benefit from two full years of proceeds. The bottom line for total sports funding leading up to Tokyo will be made clear in next year’s federal budget.
Mr Hunt said state governments were supportive of the lottery idea and there had been no opposition to the creation of national integrity tribunal.
The plan will also set goals for participation in community sport, and associated health outcomes, but be skewed towards Australia realising its ambitions on the global sporting stage.
Ben McDevitt, a former chief of the Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority, has been a prominent advocate of an independent body to hear doping cases. Speaking to The Australian at the height of the Russian doping scandal, Mr McDevitt said there was an “inherent conflict of interest’’ in sports policing their own athletes.
He believes that in the Essendon case an AFL tribunal made up of two retired judges and a barrister failed to apply the correct standard of proof to the evidence gathered by his investigators.
Suspicion of another hometown decision poisoned the atmosphere on the Rio Olympics pool deck, where Chinese world champion Sun Yang was pilloried as a cheat after serving a three-month ban imposed by his national swimming federation for returning a positive test for a banned heart medication.
Mr Hunt said a retired judge would be appointed as a permanent head of the proposed new tribunal.
“Some of the professional sports are quite interested in getting away from where the AFL found itself adjudicating on itself and having a national integrity tribunal,’’ Mr Hunt said.
The national sports plan is open for public submissions until 31 July.
Mr Hunt said the government would work closely with the states, the ASC, the AOC, the Australian Paralympic Committee and Commonwealth Games Australia in developing the plan.
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Bit of a long bow to think these people may have a guilty conscience, as they would need to have a conscience in the first place.
It says they wouldn’t want a repeat of what happened WITH Essendon, not what happened TO Essendon, I.e. they wouldn’t want another ‘home town’ decision (what they say about the original tribunal decision). No guilty souls there.
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Hello saga my old friend
We’ve come to talk with you again
We’ll never forgive these things
Born from seeds of a deep DickIngs
Which have haunted us with visions of a witch
A total biitch
Who twisted the sounds of saga.
In tragic times we walked alone
Victims of lies we can’t condone
Spread by Fitzy, Gil and bigfatVlad
Between them own not one gonad
It was the courage of our captain and our coach
Who fought the hoax
Truthful throughout the sounds of saga.
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