Your core argument has been on the law reform agenda of many criminal defence lawyers, if not their clients, for many years.

The financial/resource imbalances have dogged criminal justice every bit as much as witnesses rights and so forth.

I have known clients who have consented to a conviction on a 'lesser charge' simply to get the hell to end. That affords justice to no one. At best, revenge is served. More often the continuing consequences change the lives of the accused forever.

I have experienced the criminal justice system from many perspectives. I have been a defence lawyer, an accused, a witness, and a complainant. The process is stressful enough without the added financial burdens. To be dragged through and dumped at the end can shatter lives more effectively than a jail sentence.

The issue is not "How would we pay for this?" (the mechanical bean-counter approach), but "Why is it taking so long to accept that we can't afford not to?"

Much is made fo the costs of wrongful conviction, but wrongful accusation seems to be unimportant politically.

One question that occurs to me from your case is why the minor was not charged with making a false allegation? (and/or false statement ot police). Have police investigated the nature of the relationship with the neighbour?

Interesting article. I can't agree that blogging should be as important as writing books and publishing research papers for academics. There is a place for it though. A problem would be that unless the academic put an amount of time into the site it would be unlikely to generate much traffic and so when the really interesting idea was posted - there would be noone to read it. So there is perhaps a need to aggregate ideas into communal blogs? Which is sort of what OLO is?
I have a blog with a specifically environmental focus at www.jennifermarohasy.com/blog .

Blogging is very different to scholarship.

A blog is immediate, and invites quick responses. It can enable debate and discussion. But it is also hard to tell who is whom. Anyone can (and probably has) started a blog.

Bloging can, perhaps, enable immediate peer review - but again identity is a question that looms large.

Blogging also invites more casual, more personal commentary. This is not necessarily a bad thing. We are still working out the acceptable boundaries in online communications.

As an academic and a practitioner, I can see positives for blogs, but I can also see some real problems as well.

The immediacy of blogs is a double-edged sword. It *is* possible to produce well researched material for blogs, but it is also possible that the need to be regularly writing /something/ can quickly lead to writing /anything/ to have somehtign there.

Good writing is still good writing whether it is a blog or an academic paper. The value of the blog is this, it is immediate, it gets to the point, it serves the people.

Surely there is already enough unrefereed crap (and refereed stuff in low quality journals that have no impact whatsover -- one of which you are an editor of) produced by Australian academics that we don't need to encourage the situation.

I'd prefer to see Australian academics produce one good paper in a good international journal than 100 blog entries or 100 papers in journals of no particular value.

EVERY academic should blog?

That could be fine in subjects like law and economics where there is really no real subject and you can ramble on about whatever you like. The paradigm example is Becker-Posner Blog, http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/ where we have University of Chicago professors of economics, Gary Becker, and law, Richard Posner, jointly blogging. We also have, inevitably, the Anti-Becker-Posner blog, http://www.anti-becker-posner.blogspot.com/

But what in the hell would a professor of pure mathematics or chemical engineering or information and communcations technology or particle physics usefully blog about on a daily basis?

McConvill's article, sincerely meant as it surely is, is a sorry sign that Australia has literally lost the plot, as far as parlaying prosperity from the knowledge economy.

Modesty apparently precluded McConvill from posting a link to his own interesting blog at http://www.observationdeck.org/james/