What is the price of justice? In Australia, it’s $240,000 (US$162,175). At least that’s what one woman was ordered to pay after winning her wrongful-arrest lawsuit.
Monica Smit — founder of the pro-liberty activist organization Reignite Democracy Australia (RDA) and, therefore, a thorn in the side of tyrants Down Under — was arrested three times during a Covid-19 lockdown protest in Victoria, Australia. In her role as an independent journalist, Smit was covering the October 31, 2020, demonstration in Melbourne, Victoria’s capital, which local newspaper the Age dubbed “the most-locked-down city in the world.”
Abandoned Settlement
Smit sued the police for wrongful arrest. The government offered her a settlement of $15,000 (US$10,136) to drop her lawsuit. Smit refused. “I said no because I wanted my ‘day in court,’” she wrote in an opinion piece for LifeSiteNews.
“If you take the money, you have permission to keep asserting that you think you were wronged, but you will never get closure,” she explained. “It will always be your word against theirs.” (Emphasis in original.)
The government, of course, wanted her to settle at taxpayer expense to “avoid public embarrassment or taking accountability,” Smit observed.
You get to skip away into the sunset with your ‘hush money’/bribe, and nothing changes for anyone else. The government continues to feel emboldened by their limitless power and gets further confirmation that they are invincible. The ‘little people’ like you and me stay in our box and accept that we are powerless against authority, even when we’re victims.
But Smit, who admits to having been “born a little crazy,” just couldn’t bring herself to abandon her principles:
I don’t view success in monetary terms. For me, it was always about using my voice to speak for those without a voice. Thousands of Victorians were abused during the COVID lockdowns, and they … don’t have the resources to pursue justice for themselves. The offer of $15,000 did not have justice attached to it in any form whatsoever. It was the proposed exploitation of taxpayers’ money to make me shut up and go away.
I would never do that, and I don’t care what the consequences are. The ‘safe option’ is never the right option for me.
Can’t Win for Losing
Thus, Smit pursued her lawsuit. Against four government lawyers who were being paid to appear in court every day, Smit acted as her own, unpaid attorney and was even forced to pony up $1,500 (US$1,014) per day in court costs.
After a 13-day trial spanning more than seven weeks, Smit was vindicated — or so she thought. According to news.com.au:
The County Court of Victoria on Thursday ruled two of the three arrests were unlawful, as the government had failed in those instances to prove the elements required under section 458 of the Crimes Act for summary arrest.
“I have found that Smit was falsely imprisoned on two of the three occasions that she was arrested,” County Court Judge My Anh Tran said in her published decision, which noted there was “special and enduring protection afforded by the common law to the human right to liberty.”
The judge awarded Smit $4,000 (US$2,703) in damages. However, because this was less than the amount of the settlement she had been offered, in the eyes of the law, she actually lost her case. As a result, she was ordered to pay the government’s legal fees, which came to $240,000.
“How can someone win their case but pay over $240,000 for the pleasure of winning?” Smit wondered.
“How can justice be available to everyone if it cost that much?” she asked. “The answer is simple. Justice is not available to everyone. In fact, it’s available to almost no-one at all.”
Smitten by the Just-us System
“How naïve I was,” Smit wrote, “that I thought I could seek justice and walk away unscathed.”
Indeed, by the time her punishment for defeating the government was handed down, Smit should have been under no illusions about the state’s treatment of liberty lovers, as she herself pointed out:
A year after this first incident, I was punished again by being arrested and charged with incitement. I was given bail conditions that could have been written in Communist China. They wanted me to shut down my business which had 6-7 staff members and hundreds of thousands of members. My website got over 5 million views that year, and they wanted me to shut it down.
I refused to sign those draconian bail conditions and was sent to maximum security prison, even put in solitary confinement, to await the appeal of the conditions. I won the appeal and was let free. I pleaded “not guilty,” and soon after they dropped the charges. I will be suing them for my imprisonment despite the difficulties I faced in this recent trial.
All of this, she observed, was intended to discourage both her and other victims of the state from seeking justice.
Smit, however, isn’t going away quietly. Although her trial was, she claimed, “the most stressful thing I’ve ever done in my entire life,” she intends to pursue her false-imprisonment lawsuit. That, along with her fine for winning her other case, will, she hopes, “highlight the injustice within the justice system.”
“I have complete peace that I did my best and had pure intentions,” she declared. “I put the rest in God’s hands.”
