Everybody Knows, Part 8: When is a Government Not a Government

13 of the 19 members of the NSW Medical Council. Photo: nswmc.org.au

by Mary W Maxwell, LLB

I said earlier that I had read only half of Russell Pridgeon’s book Everybody Knows. I have now read all of it — twice. Thank you to those who bought a Kindle or a paperback from Amazon, helping it to become a best seller (OK, third best, but who’s counting).

I was flabbergasted to read about the New South Wales medical council, so-called. Possibly it’s the hottest takeaway from this book. Not to downplay the vaporizing of a magistrate which was covered in Part 7 of this series, but we already knew that a judge can be a baddy. Just ask Shane Dowling.  And don’t forget my Gumshoe series entitled  “Getting a Judge.”

First let me set up the structure here. There are two plots running through this book.  One is that a certain person — namely, Dr Russell Pridgeon, but it could be anyone — discovers sex trafficking in Australia. Dee McLachlan discovered it a while back and made a movie about it (The Jammed). I have written  two books about it — Deliverance, and Reunion. Pastor Paul says it is a billion-dollar business in this country alone.

But now for the second plot in this book. Russell is a smart fellow who guards with his life the reputation of his family.  It seems his grandfather, Wilfred Seymour, in 1911, wrote the main textbook about native law in South Africa. In his youth, Russell counted 14 lawyers in his extended family.

So, try as it might, the Australian legal system was not going to get away with trouncing on this particular immigrant. (Russell came to Australia from Zimbabwe, in 2004, but with a few years, en route, in New Zealand.) The new book Everybody Knows contains some real eye-openers as to how courts get away with what they do. A major way is by throwing dust in your eye. They lead you to believe something is there in the law to justify their vicious treatment of you — but there isn’t.

This second plot is a far more valuable gift to us readers, and I hope every law student will take it to heart. I am guessing that disgust and anger motivated Russell Pridgeon to chase down all the details of who was arresting him and, very technically, on what grounds.  His rattling the cage about false charges has already caused the prosecutor to drop 5 of the 7 charges against him.

Note: when I say “him” I could as well say “them.” Russell Pridgeon and Patrick O’Dea are being treated as a pair.  Along with others they are said to form a “network” of traffickers. See how ridiculously Operation Noetic has advised the people of Australia?  Oh, one of the charges was that they were “dealing in the proceeds of crime.” Hey, look in the mirror, y’all AFP.

Patrick was charged with “using a carriage to menace.” So, are picturing him running down the street with a pram bumping into people deliberately? Nope. The “carriage” is the electronic thing that carries messages.  Ergo, the cellphone or the email.  Mr O’Dea menaced people with emails.

Complaining to the HCC

Doctors live in no small fear that a patient will file a complaint against him/her. Anyone in Australia can go to the Health Care Complaint (HCC) office and say “My doctor tied the tourniquet too tight” or “she put the wrong dosage on my medication” or whatever. This leads to the HCC having to investigate.

Of course there are rules to protect a doctor against untrue accusations. But these might not come into play if the HCC, or a Higher Power, wants that doctor to be struck off the register.  Indeed you can speculate that the patient who said “Doc tied the tourniquet too tight” may have been paid to file that complaint.

Russell Pridgeon suffered three complaints. A man, whom I codenamed Brackleston, filed two of the three. Do you recall Part 5 of this series of Gumshoe articles about Pridgeon’s book? It more or less reprinted Russell’s short chapter on the tomfoolery of this second complaint. It alleged that Pridgeon had given a woman 3 blank prescription pages and allowed her — 14 years ago — to fill them in and sign Russell’s name.  Oh please. Please.

Today I regret having invented the name Brackleston. Dee and I — not to mention the man of the hour, Russell — are nervous about being hit with a charge of Revealing the identity of Somebody Who for Some Mysterious Reason Has a Right to Anonymity. The person who filed two complaints to the HCC has a real name that I won’t reveal.  But I now understand that the name Ruselll gave him — Mr Malacoda — was itself a pseudonym.  If I make any further references to him, I will say Malacoda. I hereby cancel, abjure, and disavow the pseudonym Brackleston, OK? Same guy.

The relevant legislation is the Health Care Complaints Act of 1993 in New South Wales. It says that complaints may, or sometimes must, be handed over to the Medical Council. After that, depending on the dealings between the doctor and the council, it many end up at NCAT.  What an awful name. The CAT is Civil Administrative Tribunal, I think the N means New South Wales.

Control of Medical Professionals

For my money, the super-duper discovery of the entire book, Everybody Knows, is Pridgeon’s realization that the Medical Council is not the government. Of course there ae many self-governing institutions in society. Some of them contain “authority.”  So you would naturally think that the behavior of those institutions is related to law and that they are answerable to someone higher up in government.

In 2012, I was researching the control of doctors in the US, for my book Consider the Lilies: A Review of 18 Cures for Cancer and Their Legal Status. I learned that each physician must obey his state’s AMA rules as to “best practice.”‘ For cancer patients she must order only the Big Three treatments — surgery, chemo, and radiation. Maybe she has located a cure for cancer that does not fit the Big Three.  Well, stiff biccies.  If she insists on curing her patient, she will be deregistered.

How’s that for ridiculous?

If you look into the history of this, you will see that each state legislature has given in to pressure from the American Medical Association. Roughly, the state has imbued that private organization, the AMA with authority. When the cancer curer does her thing, she knows it will be possible for the AMA to take away her license. If you look further back to 1920 or so, you will see that the Rockefeller family overhauled Medicine. This involved taking over of medical journals and medical schools.  Aren’t they the busy little bees, those Rockefellers?  I don’t know how they tackled, in each state, the licensing factor but they certainly did tackle it.  Typically, they legislate to create a board who gets an authoritative right to dump undesirable (or should I say, desirable) doctors.

The New South Wales Medical Council Is a Private Corporation

As I said, Pridgeon was dumbfounded to find that the Medical Council is not “government.”  Yet it “governs.”

I won’t beat around the bush here. I’ll tell you what they did to him, and then we can discuss the nature and source of their authority.

They deregistered him in the blink of an eye, when the swoop down of Operation Noetic occurred, in October 2018. Mr Kingpin (Russell) was arrested on the 17th, spent three nights in the Watchhouse, got bail, –and went back to work on the 22nd.

The crime he was arrested for had nothing to do with his professional behavior as a doctor. It was for child stealing (that means helping the mother hide her kids form a perpetrator). Some of Russell’s patients would no doubt decline to show up for appointments with a child stealer.  In fact, the media blaze gave everyone the idea that he not only ran a trafficking for money but was himself a pedo.

As stated above, anyone can make a health care complaint.  In this case, besides Malacoda doing that, the Australian Federal Police, the AFP, did it. I feel this was correct.  If they thought a doctor was running a child sex trafficking business, they had better get the word, fast, to the medical bosses.

Still, I know for sure that the AFP did NOT think Russell was doing a trafficking. (He had volunteered to them, 5 months earlier, what he was doing, and asked for help for the kids in question.) We can set the AFP aside for a minute.  The key question is: Did NSWMC — New South Wales Medical Council fall for it?  No, no, no.

They, instead, were participants in the entire shocking destruction — i.e.., attempted but unsuccessful destruction — of a good doctor. Russell thinks, and I agree, that the persecution is not so much about him but rather to let everyone out there know what will happen to them if they get, um, pushy. “Never be pushy. Just bow and obey.” “And don’t go around starting Anti-Paedophile Political Parties, hear?”

The Accountability of the Council (the Medical Council, the MC, of NSW

The HCC and the MC are tied together as “co-regulators.”  I admittedly don’t know the particulars of that.  But I know that the Medical Council is composed of 19 persons, according to their website nswmc.org.au, retrieved May 1, 2023. Of their 19 members, 6 are appointed by the Minister for Health, including one l legal practitioner, 2 by the Australian Medical Association, 9 by groups (colleges) of specialists, 1 by Multicultural NSW, and 1 by the universities of Sydney and Newcastle, jointly.  How a college, such as the College of Obstetrics, picks its member might be an interesting sidelight.

The big question is: To whom is the MC accountable? I assume they are funded by the state as they make an annual financial report to parliament, per the Statutory Bodies Act of 1964 and the Public Finance and Audit Act of 1963. I deduce that the entity to whom they are, in all practicality, accountable is: the elite, the mafia, the cabal, Mr Global or however you name it. People who do not have legitimate authority, people whose methods appear governmental but are private and therefore outside of democracy.

What does The HCC Act Call for?

Dr Pridgeon has shown us who attacked him, name by name, in correspondence. (Silly old coots, they should have been more circumspect.) Before stating the MC sins involved, please be aware that Russell was arrested and was up for trial at this time (and still is). What we are looking at is not his crime but his loss of medical license, owing to the MC’s decision to strike him off. That, recall, was thanks to three complaints made via the co-regulator, the HCC.

Hoping you care, I shall now give the last 3 digits of the file numbers for each “folder”. First complaint by Malacoda ends with 356. Malacoda’s second complaint folder ends with 252, the AFP folder ends with 756.

Are there any regulations that instruct the MC on how to handle complaints? Yes. for example under sec 145B (1) of the Heath Care Complaints Act,

“(a) the Council may make any inquiries about the complaint the Council thinks appropriate; (b) the Council may refer the complaint to the Commission for investigation; (c) the Council may refer the complaint to the Tribunal; (d) the Council may refer the complaint to a Committee.”

Also ” (j) the Council may determine that no further action should be taken in respect of the complaint.”

Some Sins of the MC

We can dispose of Malacoda’s second complaint, about the wandering prescription pad, by showing that the allegations were for something that happened 15 years ago.  It had nothing to do with sex-trafficking anyway. Still, it did serve to harass Russell. He could never get an answer form the MC as to what it was doing with this case.

Pridgeon reports: “Eventually, in November 2022, after more than four years, I was advised that this complaint was closed.”

(I think he can sue them for harassment, lost time, etc.)

Next, for the AFP complaint. As stated, Russell awaits normal prosecutor action; the matter of his being a criminal is long since out of the hands of police. And the MC has no role in that prosecution. We are only talking about the doctor’s right to perform as a doctor, which was indeed in the hands of the MC.

Now for Folder One, Malacoda’s #356. (Hey, maybe it means something in Numerology.) In regard to this, the MC made its most incriminating booboo. They added an allegation, creatively, on their own initiative.  Holy wow.  Here it is — I’m quoting the book Everybody Knows:

In the complaint, Malacoda’s admixture of untruth, partial truth, and misinformation contained almost nothing to do with my professional conduct. It was, to the best of my knowledge, completely un-evidenced.

I wrote a letter to Ms Rebecca Moynihan of the NSW Medical Council advising the above, on 30 May 2021, and did not receive a reply.   When I made my second appeal to the Medical Council, their submissions referred to Malacoda’s complaint, saying that the complaint alleged that I had been accused of child sexual abuse:

They said: “[In the Chronology prepared by the Medical Council of NSW for the s150A in relation to Dr William Russell Massingham Pridgeon MPO343064 MED0001190753” we see on Page 3 of the submissions for the section 150 proceedings: “Dr Pridgeon is also accused of abusing the male child [Redacted name].”

There was no allegation that I abused any child made in Malacoda’s complaint, not even obliquely. The New South Wales Medical Council fabricated this allegation all by themselves.

In fact, the legislation orders the HCCC to act with speed and efficiency: Section 29A of the Act directs the HCCC to act “ex- peditiously”, there is a similar clause in the Health Practitioners Regulation National Law. Remember, the abbreviation HCC is for Health Complaints Commission.

There is a large body of case law that sets down that “Delay totally invalidates an Administrative decision.”, including the case of “Nais and others v Minister for immigration and Multicultural and indigenous affairs and another”.

The Medical Council’s conduct bespeaks a sympathy with child abusers, and their actions in repeatedly seeking suppression or- ders of the names of the men whom the children had identified as their abusers confirms this. The MCNSW has misused its power to prosecute me for conduct — rescuing children — that no ordinary decent Australian would consider wrong.