In charge of stuff, can’t send email: Dyson Heydon isn’t alone

DYSON Heydon isn’t alone. One high-profile MP negotiated the NBN without even knowing how to use a computer. Does it matter if you can’t send an email?

OPINION

Dyson Heydon’s confession of email incompetence is causing a fury fed by total disbelief, and marks an important change in how we evaluate our leaders.

It is now clear you are considered by many unworthy of a senior position — such as royal commissioner — if you’re not a deft and frequent emailer.

It’s the new sign of something suspicious if the ability isn’t obvious, even if it isn’t necessary for the job. It is tech treason to not be an internet traveller.

About 200 billion emails are sent every day globally, and if you don’t dispatch or read even one of them on a screen you are up to something dodgy.

Which of course is rubbish and merely a measure of our absorption in the amazing connections and information flow of the new digital world.

But what next?? Unfriendly employer relations for anyone without a Face Book page? Instant dismissal if no Instagram?

Dyson Heydon volunteered his tech shortcomings Monday in his 67 page explanation for refusing to accept submissions he stand aside from the trade union royal commission.

But worse for email junkies, he was downright hostile towards emails.

A man who likes to spend a few days replying to a message and not a few hours, he found them “oppressively compelling a speedy response”.

“At the outset, it should be noted that there is evidence that I have no computer and that all email correspondence is sent and received by my personal assistant,” he said.

“Indeed it is notorious among the legal profession that I am incapable of sending or receiving emails. The consequence is that I read emails only after they have been printed out for me.”

Former High Court judge and royal commissioner Dyson Heydon. (AAP Image/Joel Carrett).

This was part of his case that he had not seen the Liberal Party connections and fundraising prospects of an invitation emailed to him. But he no doubt understood the mutterings his email aversion would cause, in particular his admission he doesn’t read attachments if they

are not printed out.

The entrenchment of digital proficiency as a requirement for employment has increased rapidly. It wasn’t as widespread five years ago.

In September, 2010, I wrote a news report revealing Tony Windsor — the independent MP holding out for better internet connections for his electorate in return for supporting the minority Gillard government — didn’t actually have a computer.

“I can’t operate a computer,” the then member for New England said. “I haven’t got one on my desk. But I’ve got people in here who can.”

The interesting point was not that Mr Windsor couldn’t use a computer. It was that he was fighting for better services to those who could.

But he knows his way around a mobile phone and last night joked on Twitter about his internet inadequacies: “I’m his PA — he uses sign language similar to Border Force — he signed me ‘hi Malcolm’.”

No one seriously suggested in 2010 he was not qualified to be the local member because he was a stranger to a keyboard, certainly not some of the folk currently marking down Dyson Heydon for the same.

Twitter has carried numerous comments mentioning elderly relatives who send emails with the ease of making a cup of cocoa as contrasts to Mr Heydon, aged 72.

“I have a blind friend who sends me emails. Could possibly help Dyson,” read one tweet.

In search for worthiness, the debate has become the base question of whether someone could get a job if they could not marshall the internet. It was a sneaky way of questioning

whether Mr Heydon was qualified for his job.

It was imposing a tech standard of the past decade on someone who had firmly established his credentials in the age of the fountain pen.

Originally published as In charge of stuff, can’t send email: Dyson Heydon isn’t alone