Some humble pie for Nine’s legal eagles; NSW Libs’s handover moving at a glacial pace

Dr Munjed Al Muderis is suing Nine newspapers and 60 Minutes. Picture: John Feder

Barristers acting for Nine newspapers and 60 Minutes came out swaggering on Tuesday at the opening of a defamation trial brought by Dr Munjed Al Muderis, a world-leading expert in osseointegration surgery.

Scheduled to run for 12 weeks, Nine’s barrister, Matt Collins, KC sought to truss up a rationale for some of the reporting on Al Muderis’s practices. For while Al Muderis was not “some sort of monster”, Collins said, there was still a public interest in conveying “what happens when surgery of this kind fails”. The surgery allows amputees to connect a prosthetic implant.

Defences fail, too, sometimes – or teeter at the brink of it. What other conclusion can be drawn when Nine’s lawyers blindsided everyone in the Federal Court on Friday with a humiliating offer to take the case back to mediation. This after their witnesses were subjected to a very rude deconstruction of their evidence by Al Muderis’s silk, Sue Chrysanthou,SC, in her opening remarks on Monday. As expected, Chrysanthou shot a curled lip at Nine’s offer.

Dr Munjed Al Muderis.

She told the Federal Court of having been burned trying to mediate with its lawyers in the preceding weeks, when a peace offering was made and Nine arrogantly rejected it. “I mean, if that’s the position that the respondents are still in, then a mediation is an utter waste of time,” she said.

Au contraire, came the word of a poor junior tasked with announcing Nine’s furtive capitulation. It certainly wasn’t Collins or Renee Enbom, KC sallying forth with news of the backdown.

“They think there is some merit in it,” the junior said. “I wouldn’t have suggested it if they thought it was a waste of time.”

Dr Al Muderis’s barrister, Sue Chrysanthou. Picture: Christian Gilles

It certainly capped off a bizarre morning of argument between the two sides, in which Nine’s lawyers – there are four of them – conceded they weren’t ready to cross-examine witnesses, even though the trial had already started.

And why blame them? Consider that one guy, on Nine’s account, “lost his house, relationship and job” following his surgery by Al Muderis … except these were already gone from his life prior to the operation in November 2017, as Chrysanthou told the court (the house was sold, the relationship ended, and the business ceased trading a year before Al Muderis even touched a scalpel).

It also hardly helps the ­defence that this same witness, a motorbike crash victim, went on to laud Al Muderis in an interview given to this newspaper 18 months after his surgery, saying, “He gave me my life back” and “without Munjed I’d be stuffed”.

Lib quest continues

The Liberal Party’s quest to find a replacement for NSW director Chris Stone is still grinding forward at an impressively sluggish pace, approaching its sixth full moon since Stone dispatched a farewell letter after March’s election loss.

Stone remains in the role conducting a “transition” for whoever succeeds him, although it would appear much of that work is simply managing the state’s corruption watchdog and its demands for paperwork, as Margin Call reported in August.

The search has been a bit of a debacle. It started with people hearing from former Nationals MP Adrian Piccoli, now a senior client partner at Korn Ferry, but he appears to have been sidelined once ex-federal MP Jason Falinski was voted party president in July. That kicked off a fresh round of CV collections.

Tony Barry, a former deputy state director in the Victorian division, was considered a frontrunner for the role but he’s based in Melbourne and chose to back out early. Some suspected Barry’s application might have been tainted on account of his work with RedBridge Group, which polled for the teals in a number of states during the 2022 federal election (before he signed up to a role).

Chris Stone wants to hand over the role of state director if a replacement can be found. Picture: Lee Hamilton

Utter rubbish, according to a senior Liberal who spoke to Margin Call. “The teals brought advanced US political campaigning to Australia, so anyone involved or adjacent to that campaigning has clearly got IP we’d like to tap,” they said of Barry.

Luke Nayna, who runs strategy and comms for NSW Liberal leader Mark Speakman, was another applicant considered by federal director Andrew Hirst, Peter Dutton, and Dutton’s chief of staff, Alex Dalgleish. No dice there, Margin Call hears.

Now it’s Richard Shields, a former deputy state director, who’s firming as the frontrunner on the shortlist, with former Don Page chief of staff Namoi Dougall understood to be one of a handful of contenders interviewed by the star chamber of Falinski, Marise Payne and Mark Coure, but also Hirst, Dutton and Speakman, in order to, as the same official worded it, make sure “their careers weren’t in the hands of a nincompoop”.

Margin Call is told there’ll be further news of the appointment closer to the end of the month.

The name game

Earlier in the week this column reported that the nation’s peak oil and gas lobby was undergoing an identity crisis and had decided to rebrand itself with a compact new name – one that won’t mention “oil” or “gas”.

Painfully alliterative and suffix-laden in its current form, the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association will soon be known, as an entity, by the far more soothing Australian Energy Producers Limited, or so it says in the company’s notice to the corporate regulator, flagging the costume change.

Margin Call is expecting some play on either Energy Producers Australia or the Energy Producers Association when the name is announced. Either way, it’s a cynical smearing out of the fact their stakeholders are covered in more oil than Daniel Plainview.

It’s ‘‘gas week’’, after all, in the federal parliament from Monday, with APPEA scheduled to hold a cocktail reception on Wednesday evening. More hot air in the house, eh? Presumably that’s where the name change will be given its first outing. An APPEA spokesman declined to comment.