Mick Keelty announced that he is resigning as Australia's top cop, effective September 2009.
Let's hope he now fades into obscurity. Heaven forbid that government would offer him a consultancy or two. He was dangerous enough to the national health when he was supposedly fully accountable.
In case any Aussie company was thinking of offering this man a responsible job - a little reminder of Keelty and his inability to cope with either the job or the general public.
"Eleven members of ABC's The Chaser have been charged and granted bail following their arrest in Sydney today.
Julian Morrow and Chas Licciardello, two of the stars of the satirical show, were among those detained by police today, after staging a fake motorcade through Sydney as part of an APEC week stunt.
They were charged under new APEC laws with entering a restricted area without justification.
The crew members were in a convoy of three cars and two motorbikes, which was reportedly ushered through two checkpoints in Sydney's APEC security zone."
* Police bungle sees Chaser charges binned
ABC News 30 January 2008:
"Australian Federal Police Commissioner Mick Keelty has called for limitations on the criticism of Federal Police and government security agencies.
He had also criticised some sections of the media over its coverage of terrorism cases.
Commissioner Keelty told the Sydney Institute last night that there should be no public comment made about terrorism investigations until each matter has been finalised in court.
Commissioner Keelty says the criminal justice system should be left to operate free from ongoing public discussion.
"I understand it can be difficult to wait for the chance to freely express ourselves but I do believe to best serve the public interest and to attain the full enjoyment of all our rights we must sometimes delay that expression," he said.
He also says criticism of the AFP and other government agencies should be limited.
"We've just got to call a halt to criticising public institutions when it's the same public institutions that we rely upon to keep good governance," he said.
Journalist Hedley Thomas from The Australian won the Gold Walkley for his coverage of the Mohamed Haneef affair.
He says Commissioner Keelty's argument is contradictory.
"On the one hand he was saying that defendants and suspects deserve a much better go in the court of public opinion and that the media should treat them more kindly," he said.
"But the facts are that in the Mohamed Haneef case and others, it's been the police and security agencies and the politicians using police information that have smeared the character of the suspects before they've even been charged."
Crikey 25 March 2009:
"Keelty is remarkable in his capacity to blame others for the AFP's mistakes. After the Haneef affair, Keelty blamed everyone else — the media (whom he proposed to prevent reporting such cases), Haneef's lawyers, Haneef himself, Scotland Yard, the DPP — for the debacle when his own officers were the ones responsible for leaking material against Haneef, fabricating evidence and demanding he be charged without any basis. The AFP also later tried to avoid cooperating with the commission established to investigate what happened.
Not that Haneef was the only beneficiary of the AFP's particularly inept form of persecution. The false imprisonment and illegal interrogation of Izhar ul-Haque by ASIO agents — another breach of an individual's most basic rights that has escaped appropriate redress — occurred with the concurrence and participation of the AFP.
Now there's the weekend's events at Sydney Airport.
Thankfully they were only bikies intent on attacking one of their own. Terrorists could have killed hundreds and been heading off in a Silver Service cab before Keelty's Keystone cops arrived, the only threat being those sinister chauffeurs who try to foist rental cars on you when you walk through Departures. The CCTV system wasn't even working properly."
