Australia First Party candidates and officers have received various harassments in recent days in the form of ranting phone calls replete with smear and e-mails containing misleading matter and libel.
Dirty Tricks efforts have been constant against the party since the election period began. These latest pinpricks might otherwise have no meaning if it were not for the source.
Source of the Smear?
Our investigations reveal that the current Fairfax harassments come from a certain Mr. Robert Leys who lives in country New South Wales.
Mr. Leys was recently released from the Banksia Unit at the Tamworth Hospital after being “scheduled” by police under the Mental Health Act. His permanent diagnosis is paranoid schizophrenia. Sometimes the treatments fail.
Mr. Leys has a long term ‘connection’ with the Sydney Morning Herald. In 1999, he appeared as a Ku Klux Klan activist who had supposedly infiltrated the Pauline Hanson party. His claims were – of course – false. But the Herald ran with the story anyway. That story was composed by a certain Greg Roberts who was later censured by the Press Council for factual distortions in another matter in 2008.
Last year, the Sydney Morning Herald used Mr. Leys again. This time he was among a number of anonymous “sources” quoted to produce smear against the NSW Chairman of the party, Dr. Jim Saleam.
Dr. Saleam had received in 2009 particular text messages later shown to be from Mr. Leys.
Extracts include (with errors):
October 14 8.03 am “… A journo has contacted me. As well as all other uni students that might know u…. “
October 16 10.47 pm “Maybe go the jorno that rekicked my dislike 2 saleam…..
It seems that, triggered by the newspaper, this unfortunate man now harasses Australia First members.
In 1999, Mr. Leys was “scheduled” by police after making an assortment of threats to people in his local community and another one to murder Dr. Saleam’s family. His recent sojourn in the Banksia Unit was likely related to similar threats, up to and including a threat to murder – and a possible attempt to steal explosives from a place in Lightning Ridge.
It may be inevitable that Mr. Leys will be produced by the press again in some capacity to say things against Australia First. In 2009, shortly after the Sydney Morning Herald reported that Australia First Party had the numbers to register as a Federal party, Mr. Leys’s close associate in the 1999 KKK scam against One Nation – David Palmer – surfaced to say that their group was infiltrating Australia First. Mr. Palmer and Mr.Leys also claim to be leaders of Australia’s “Nazi party” and Mr. Leys has been reported to health care professionals by local people and family members to have had a life-long obsession with German Nazi paraphernalia.
Such publicising of defamatory smear demonstrates the dark depths Fairfax Media will go to, recruiting such loony mudslingers to serve party political agendas. It is Hostile Media Framing. So get your copy of Fairfax’s Sydney Morning Herald regularly. Their pocket Nazis should be back in print shortly. It seems modern journalism swims in a sea of mud.