What should the penalty be for a Chief Judge of the District Court who destroys the community's confidence in the law and the court system?

In yesterday's comment I described the act that resulted in Pauline Hanson's deep humiliation and three year jail sentence as at worst 'the technical misdemeanour of incorrectly registering a political party' which meant the second charge of falsely claiming money from the Electoral Commission automatically followed. One cannot be seen separate from the other.

On the Nine Network's 'Today' show this morning, former Labour Government Minister, Graham Richardson and retired Queen's Counsel, Chester Porter (57 years experience as a barrister), agreed that Hanson's act was no more than a 'technical' wrongdoing and that the sentence was an utter outrage hardly to be comprehended by a person of normal intelligence. After all, Pauline Hanson's One Nation party won 11 seats in the 1998 Queensland election and in the federal election of the same year secured one million votes. As Richardson pointed out, the absence of formal membership of the party was hardly meaningful or relevant in the circumstances.

The conduct of the case by Chief Judge, Patsy Wolfe, and her totally disproportionate sentence has caused outrage and consternation throughout the nation sapping the community's confidence in the courts and bringing further opprobrium on lawyers and judges in general.

Judge Wolfe said in sentencing to Hanson '[t]he crime you have committed undermined public confidence in the political process...' Quite apart from this being a false statement (Hanson did no such thing), if Hanson gets three years for this then what should the Chief Judge get for destroying the community's confidence in the workings of the law and setting her fellow judges up to general ridicule?

Following Chief Judge Patsy Wolfe's own rule, she should be stripped searched, humiliated and locked up for twice the Hanson sentence.