Refusing to understand the purpose of a court: Ryan Tandy’s fine

A classic tactic of columnists looking to stir up shit where none was previously visible – the journalistic equivalent of forcing a banger round the u-bend – is to take two things that are not really equivalents and make a direct comparison between them. Here’s Glenn “LA Law” Jackson in the Sydney Morning Herald giving a textbook demonstration:

“So a price has been placed on defrauding a code. It is $4,000. To place it into context, if someone had run onto Dairy Farmers Stadium on August 21, 2010 – the night Ryan Tandy’s Canterbury played North Queensland – he or she might have been fined the same amount.

“The maximum penalty for streaking at Dairy Farmers Stadium is $4,000. That fine can be doubled if you interfere with the on-field play. But for interfering with the integrity of rugby league by attempting to manipulate the first scoring play of that Saturday night fixture, Tandy has been hit with a $4,000 fine. Or a $571 successful outlay on that option.”

Let’s swiftly deal with the rather odd last sentence, which seems to imply that Tandy could have covered his fine in advance by placing a bet as part of his own gambling scam. A course of action which, one would have to assume, he did in fact choose to take: Tandy is clearly not the first name on the list for Rhodes Scholarships but it’s difficult to imagine that even he would try to pull of a betting scam without placing a bet.

I’m not sure if LA Law has figured out that fines tend to be higher if the guilty party actually benefits from their fraud – perhaps he thinks Bernie Madoff, for instance, would have effectively got away with it if he’d just stolen enough money to cover the fine. In this case, the requirement of Tandy’s fine to repay his ill-gotten gains is presumably negated to quite a large extent by the fact that the whole ludicrous scheme didn’t pay off in the first place.

Anyway, back to the main point: the idea that the $4,000 fine is “the price [placed] on defrauding a code”. Which, of course, is utter nonsense: the fine (and a 12 month good behaviour bond!) is the price that has been placed on being convicted of providing false information to the NSW Crime Commission and attempting to dishonestly obtain financial advantage by deception. So far as I’m aware, neither New South Wales nor the Australian Commonwealth has a law against defrauding a sporting code. If they do it seems rather odd that Tandy wasn’t charged with breaking it – he’d have been bang to rights.

Legally, what were the actual charges against Tandy equivalent to? Getting caught trying to pull of an insurance scam and lying about it, perhaps? It’s startlingly obvious to anyone who actually spends two seconds thinking about it that it’s the job of the court to enforce the law and of the NRL to uphold the integrity of the game. Ergo one minor league fraud equals a $4,000 fine (and a 12 month good behaviour bond!) and one spot fixing scam equals a life ban from the NRL. Seems to me that everyone’s done their job here.

Fortunately for LA Law, there’s one man who’s always prepared not to spend two seconds thinking about things: Mark “Slower” Geyer. Here’s Slower’s view: “Every spectator went there thinking they’re going to get a fair game, and they didn’t. You can do a lot in the game but you can’t rob the fans. What’s the price for that? It’s all about making people aware of what they’ve done. Does a $4,000 fine do that?”

Personally I’d argue that it is, in fact, perfectly possible to rob the fans in rugby league: the South Sydney Rabbitohs continue to charge for membership, for instance. But that’s beside the point, which is of course why Slower and LA Law are – accidentally or on purpose – suggesting that it’s up to a court of law to do the NRL’s disciplinary job for it. I can only assume these two would be in favour of tasering refs for making bad decisions, or even the death penalty for players who lie down faking head injuries to milk penalties. It’s the only language they understand.