David Flint
David Edward Flint is an Australian legal academic, known for his leadership of Australians for Constitutional Monarchy and for his tenure as head of the Australian Broadcasting Authority.
Early life and education
David Flint was born in 1938 and grew up in the Sydney suburb of Waverley. His mother was born in the Dutch East Indies and has been described as Dutch or Indonesian. She enjoyed music and dancing, and Flint took her out dancing every week until she died aged 90. Flint's father was a public servant, a champion amateur boxer, and member of a puritanical religious organisation.Flint attended Sydney Boys High School, before studying law, economics and international relations at the Universities of London, Paris, and Sydney, leading to a career in the law and academia. He states that he was "a socialist in his student days".
Career
Admitted as a lawyer in New South Wales and England and Wales, he practised for a number of years, lecturing in several university business and law schools. That included a wide range of subjects including business, tax, antitrust, comparative, constitutional and international law.He has written widely in various journals, and in the press in English and very occasionally in French, on topics such as the media, international economic law, European Union law, Australia's constitution, Australia's 1999 constitutional referendum and on direct democracy. His views are often sought by the Australian and international media.
In 1975, he joined the Australian Labor Party in indignation over the dismissal of then Prime Minister Gough Whitlam. He was asked to act as head of the University of Technology Sydney Faculty of Business for one year in 1977.
At UTS in the 1980s, he was elected and re-elected president of the union staff association and was a delegate to the NSW Labor Council.
Flint was appointed the UTS Dean of Law in 1987 and reappointed twice, holding office until 1997. He was elected four times by law deans as Convener of the Committee of Australian Law Deans, holding office from 1990 to 1993. In 1990, he was appointed by the federal government as a member of the International Legal Services Council, a position he held for six years. In 1989, after an assessment by a committee including a former chief justice and a professor of international law in three Australian universities, he was awarded a chair in law at UTS. He has held professorial positions in other universities, and is now an emeritus professor of law.
During his term as dean, Flint introduced a full-time law degree and a series of joint programmes with other disciplines including computing and science. He also proposed significant changes to Australian university and to Australian legal education, including:
- for the first time in an Australian public university, twelve months teaching through Summer and Winter programmes;
- the introduction of a range of graduate programmes for non-lawyers;
- the first Australian professional doctorate, the SJD;
- the first Australian university programmes in Alternative Dispute Resolution;
- the inclusion of periods of study at foreign universities as part of law and other programmes;
- the incorporation of practical legal training into the LLB – “one-stop” legal education;
- a detailed proposal for the introduction of a US-style Doctor Juris;
- strong support for the introduction of AUSTLII, based at UTS in a venture with UNSW, which gives open internet access to Australian statute and case law.
Regulator
Flint was appointed head of the Australian Press Council in 1987 in succession to Hal Wootten. All previous chairmen had been former senior judges. As deputy chairman and chairman of the Council's Freedom of the Press Committee, Flint was seen as bringing the Council back from the brink after it divided over how to react to the takeover of Herald and Weekly Times by News Limited, precipitating the resignation of Wootten.Flint remained in the chairmanship until 1997. His contributions included streamlining the complaints process and enhancing the Council's role in defending freedom of the press, including filing, and appearing in, an amicus curiae brief to the High Court of Australia. He also succeeded in promoting the Council in the media and to the public, all within a tight budget. He requested that the usual honorarium be used for media research and other Council related purposes. From 1992 to 1996, he was Chairman of the Executive Council of the World Association of Press Councils.
During 1998, he was invited by the Coalition Government to chair the Australian Broadcasting Authority, although the only political party he had previously belonged to was the Labor Party, where he had been a branch president. By 2004, having long since abandoned the ALP, he had become a member of the Liberal Party.
In 2004, Flint resigned from the ABA, after a controversy over a letter which he had sent to broadcaster Alan Jones soon after his appointment and well before the lead-up to his heading the ABA's cash for comment inquiry into commercial broadcasting. The letter mentioned an international affairs seminar where Paul Kelly, a leading journalist with The Australian, had stressed the influence of Alan Jones' radio programme. When a controversy later arose about the direct sponsorship of commercial radio presenters, Flint announced that he would ask the ABA board to set up a public inquiry, which board members unanimously agreed to. As chairman of the ABA, Flint was chairman of the inquiry.
In an appearance years later on the ABC television program Enough Rope, prominent Sydney broadcaster John Laws accused Alan Jones of placing pressure on John Howard to keep Flint as head of the ABA. Laws said he had heard Jones say that he had "instructed" Howard to reappoint Flint in 2001.
Flint insisted that his resignation was "not an admission of guilt", and asserted that he had forgotten the letter, one of a large number which he had written. Furthermore, Flint alleged that, despite a thorough Freedom of Information investigation, hostile sections of the media had inflated the one letter into a "series of fan letters". The television program Media Watch, whose pursuit of the story was recognised by a Walkley Award for investigative journalism, claimed that it had provided an opportunity for Flint to unambiguously deny the existence of more than one letter. According to Media Watch, Flint's reply "did not deny the existence of the correspondence". Flint asserted that Laws was mistaken in his belief that anti-Laws sentiments on his part had led to recent ABA action against Laws. On the contrary, Flint stated in his book Malice in Media Land that he had defended Laws at the ABA, and had opposed the authority's decision to proceed against Laws, believing that the decision was both unjustified and unlawful.