A decade of Manly’s Westy holding power to account 

We celebrate our ten year anniversary as a small business operating on Sydney’s Northern Beaches this month and we think it’s quite a feat. To still be alive as a business that is. Not least because I never had any intention of going into business, and am no good at it anyway, but also because many people over the years have tried to kill us off.

We are a journalism business you see, a business focused on the rising power of corporations over Australia’s democracy: dark money in politics, corporate and political corruption, that sort of thing. The most recent assault was from none other than BHP, Australia’s largest company, which sued us in the Federal Court last month to muzzle our coverage of the wage theft of its coal miners. We stared them down and they dropped the case against us.

Fending off BHP and its phalanx of lawyers, solo in court, proved a little distracting but we do enjoy support in the community which makes it all worthwhile. Special thanks to Penny and the crew at Manly Library for their help in using the photocopier and signing interlocutory applications as Justice of the Peace! My greyhound Johnnie, whom we appointed General Legal Counsel and Global Vice President Human Resources, has also been a terrific support. By our side through the good times and bad, Johnnie never complains, unless being dragged past the sausage sizzle at South Steyne without a result.

Although most of our stories in Michael West Media and The West Report on YouTube involve issues of national import, we are proud of our work around the Northern Beaches Hospital – where we expect to take our last breath one day. It is now back in public hands, and we played a small part in this by investigating, over many years, the financial shenanigans around the previous owners who we tracked to the Cayman Islands. As a regular customer of NBH we have always received excellent service, but it is our view that essential public service monopolies should not be privatised. Public health outcomes are incompatible with private profit.

My grandmother Dorothy Conti was born in Manly, and my parents had a place at Newport for many years, so I enjoy a long connection to the Beaches, the “Centre of the Universe” as we call it. As a small business focused on big business and politics, we spend most of the time on the phone, slaving over a hot computer, but do enjoy the odd lunch with a contact or a trip into town to go to a meeting, or court.

So, our day-to-day business connections with the local community are limited, except for process servers. Don’t get me wrong, some of our best friends are lawyers, but they can be annoying, always scouring for work as they do. We are presently dealing with another legal threat, and this one is local, a very colourful character who is threatening a defamation lawsuit for impugning his allegedly impeccable character.

It is the support of people in this community and others which really keeps us going though, the financial support and the odd kind word. It’s not the money, that’s for sure, but somebody’s got to do it. Even if the stories about multinational tax avoidance, transparency, corporate lobbying or government policy are really boring, they need to be told.