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THE TIMING OF THE SHREW by Whispering Jack "No shame but mine. I must, forsooth, be forced To give my hand, opposed against my heart Unto a mad-brain rudesby, full of spleen Who wooed in haste and means to wed at leisure" William Shakespeare The Taming of the Shrew Imagine if the Age newspaper published an opinion piece tomorrow on Adrian Bayley, accused killer of Jill Meagher, in which the author pronounced him guilty beyond any doubt of murder even though the trial is months away? What if it was suggested that the appropriate punishment for such a heinous crime was nothing less than life in prison to be served in solitary confinement for the next ten years? There are those who care little for the rights of the accused in such circumstances but in reality, it is the respect for those rights that is the very cornerstone of our democratic society. Without the rule of law, our society sinks into the realm of the uncivilised. Three years ago, the Council of the International Bar Association passed a resolution endorsing this definition of the rule of law: "An independent, impartial judiciary; the presumption of innocence; the right to a fair and public trial without undue delay; a rational and proportionate approach to punishment; a strong and independent legal profession; strict protection of confidential communications between lawyer and client; equality of all before the law; these are all fundamental principles of the Rule of Law." What this means is that in the context of the AFL's current investigation into the Melbourne Football Club's activities in the same year as the passing of the above resolution, there is no place for sensationalist opinion pieces such as that written by Caroline Wilson and published yesterday in the Age. Wilson may well know more than she's letting on but playing judge, jury and executioner based on the evidence presented by her this week is not helpful to her reputation as a journalist or to her readers' understanding of the matter. What she has done is to treat her readers to rumour, innuendo, supposition, double meaning, lack of context, smoke and mirrors and general palaver that may or may not stand scrutiny in a court of law. Most of it fails to address the basic fact that for a decade before 1999, the AFL and its leadership set a certain standard as to what defines "tanking", the loose word that's supposed to describe the offence being investigated. During that period, there was an almost annual outcry about one team or another deliberately trying to lose games to achieve a better outcome in the draft and the AFL condoned the practice as long as it didn't involve a direct order to the players to lose matches. After the infamous Kreuzer Cup in round 22, 2007 an employee of the "losing" team, Carlton spoke about his concern about how that game was played. The AFL's investigation lasted about 15 minutes after which the world was told there was nothing to see here; move along. The message was loud and clear. Once your season is over in terms of your capacity to make the finals, you can send players off for surgery, play them out of position, interchange them when they're firing and, if you're permitted to do that, then surely you're also allowed to meet and discuss such things among yourselves, joke about them and even brag to your sponsors that things are going to get better next year because you managed to pick up a priority pick? I was never comfortable with this but, as Patrick Smith pointed out in the Australian yesterday, the AFL's position has always been based on Andrew Demetriou's narrow definition of tanking. "Demetriou's understanding allows for only direct action taken on the field of play - instructing a player to deliberately kick a point when a goal would have won the match - as tanking. According to Demetriou, putting inferior players on the field, resting elite ones, playing others in unsuitable positions, taking influential players off the ground are all examples of list management and experimentation. They do not define tanking." So what is Wilson telling us when she describes Melbourne's conduct in 2009 as shocking and awful? That it was worse than those other clubs including West Coast, Carlton, Collingwood, Richmond, Hawthorn, the Western Bulldogs, St. Kilda and Fremantle that have lost sufficient games to qualify for priority picks but have (to date at least) not been investigated by the AFL? That the investigators have already found the club guilty even though it has yet been charged, has not seen the evidence against it or had the opportunity to put forward the case in its defence? I look at that definition of the rule of law above and I can only conclude that the Age and Wilson have trampled all over Melbourne's rights in the past week. If the AFL has been involved at all in supplying her with information/conclusions then they've created a fine mess for themselves and are about to help a lot of lawyers to educate their children at expensive private schools. Not only that, but Wilson has been disingenuous in the way in which she's gone about her business and in the timing of her articles. Her stories this week remind me of this famous scene from the Pink Panther - Inspector Clouseau was led by the concierge to believe that the dog on the floor in front on him didn't bite but he omitted an important fact - that it wasn't the concierge's dog. Who knows what manner of tanking Wilson's been writing about this week but is it the sort that would enable the AFL to apply sanctions against Melbourne without opening a Pandora's can of worms involving half the other clubs in the competition? Finally, what is it about Wilson and Demon CEO Cameron Schwab? Apart from a reference to him appearing "grim-faced" after Melbourne's third win of the season when the club was still two wins away from losing a priority pick (perhaps the chicken vindaloo at the president's lunch was off that day?), I don't quite see what he's done to deserve the gallows. Strangely enough, I've yet to find a Wilson article involving Schwab in which she has anything nice to say about him. It's almost as if there's a deep-seated rift between the Wilsons and the Schwabs going back centuries all the way to Shakespearean times, one that evokes visions of a shrewish Liz Taylor, mouth frothing and begging to be tamed. Taylor, of course, was acting.