Our identitification of Anarchist website ‘Slackbastard’

We have grouped together a number of articles that have appeared on our website in recent months concerning the identity of the Melbourne-based anarchist who calls himself
‘Slackbastard’ (aka Andy Fleming and Andy) and who publishes a website and Facebook page with this title: http://slackbastard.anarchobase.com/

These articles stated that Slackbastard was one James Hutchings.

We now say that Slackbastard is not James Hutchings.

We now say that Slackbastard is the brother of James Hutchings. On the state of information at this time, a first name is yet to be confirmed. For all purposes here, we will call him ‘Andy’.

We have put these articles here into two categories such that no one will be uncertain as to which items we are talking about.

We will delete some of these articles soon and transfer the general data to our private holdings on the anarchist movement where it may remain relevant. Other articles which contained crucial information of public service to the nationalist movement have been slightly edited to reflect ‘Andy’ Hutchings rather than James Hutchings.

The evidence suggests that James Hutchings had played a role in establishing the Slackbastard site. Of course, James Hutchings is an anarchist and has played a role in anarchist activism and organization. However, we cannot ascribe to him the particular wrong-doing engaged in by ‘Andy’.

Lawyers acting for James Hutchins threatened to sue for defamation, Dr. James Saleam of Australia First Party, as the author of all these articles and made various demands against the party and against him personally.

Interestingly, journalists and media outlets co-operated in allowing Slackbastard to deny he was James Hutchings, but never resorted to any exposure of this man, nor to any serious investigation of the anarchist network and whether it had endorsed violence. Articles were run by media criticising the nationalist movement as if an anonymous anarchist was some sort of neutral ‘anti fascist’ or ‘anti racist’ activist whose word could be taken. A concerted policy was in place to conceal the identity of Slackbastard. This secrecy has bedevilled the matter of Slackbastard for a long time.

Our legal counsel suggested that the possible defamation action against James Saleam was put together with the truth about the identity of Slackbastard being deliberately concealed and the matter of costs being a high priority for Mr. Hutchings’ counsel. It has been our advice that if the action proceeded, there would come a moment when the identity of Slackbastard would have been revealed. It was our advice that would have meant an “ambush” had been carried out which may have undermined any overall defence to the
defamation action. The “costs” may have been a few tens of thousands of dollars to that point and it could have been that Dr. Saleam would have been liable.

Did the threat of a defamation action have many authors? We will examine that question in due course.

Australia First Party stands for truth. We have now told it.