Firepower

A surprisingly emotional outburst from Paul Sheehan in the SMH about the Firepower debacle:

It is difficult to exaggerate the scale of the lies, the extent of the damage, the trail of destructive bastardry left behind by Timothy Francis Johnston, who lied to everyone, cheated everyone, and, as you read this, lives in luxury overseas because the Australian authorities are too stupid to charge him with fraud and thus be able to seek his extradition.

...

Since Johnston graduated from St Laurence's College, a Christian Brothers school in Brisbane, he has become an increasingly deluded, reckless, pathological and criminal predator. His exaggerations accumulated until they became a pyramid of lies which became a pyramid of frauds, built on pyramid selling. Almost nobody checked the detail, and there were so many details which would have exposed the lies.

He could never have wreaked the damage he did without the active support of the Australian government, and the passivity of regulators and police.

Johnston had no patents. No intellectual property rights. No scientific evidence. No factories. No prospectus. No audited accounts.

No large export orders. In fact, he had almost no sales. He spoke of a global company but in reality it was a handful of people in an industrial estate in Perth. The unprecedented scale of this horror story has never been fully understood, and never been available to the public, until today.

Because today is the publication date of a book, Firepower, which lays out the magnitude of this fraud and the depth of its implications. It has to be mandatory reading for the Trade Minister, Simon Crean, and his senior departmental officials. Crean will enjoy the discomfort it brings to his Liberal predecessors in government, but not for long, because Johnston is now his problem.

...

It is the missing due diligence, the prosecutorial zeal, the big picture. It presents the events that should have animated every agency that came into contact with Johnston and his idiotic narcissism. Instead, the job has been done by Gerard Ryle, a journalist.

Firepower groans with a mass of damning detail, the work of someone who has won 15 awards for investigative journalism, including four Walkley Awards. Ryle has been a Walkley finalist 11 times. He is the news editor of this newspaper.

Given that I haven't read it, of course it may be true that Ryle has written the greatest book of all time - somehow displacing Infinite Jest from the top of the list - but the above is fairly heavy praise!! And it even manages to include flattering details about Ryle's career. And amazingly the greatest investigative journalist of all time is the news editor of the SMH, the paper which published Sheehan's story. Admittedly, this fact is fully disclosed about half-way through the article - but for my money this is not enough. If the SMH wants to run an article so strongly praising a book and the man who wrote it - and that man is a senior editor of the SMH - then the disclosure should be upfront in big bold letters.

Having said all that, I do want to read the book.