Opinion | On Trial: A Nation’s Appetite for Tearing Down Its Builders

Opinion | “On Trial: A Nation’s Appetite for Tearing Down Its Builders”

By Callum Rourke, Senior Columnist

January 15, 2023

Dominic Ryker has entered court and, like clockwork, the same chorus has lined up outside: activists with ring lights, keyboard prosecutors, and a few newsroom celebrities rehearsing their victory speech before a single verdict exists.

The appetite to bury a man who built more than most of his critics will build in a lifetime is, frankly, a national pastime. Some call it accountability. I call it demolition for sport.

Let’s slow down.

Ryker’s projects are woven through this city: thousands of apartments, office towers that pulled small businesses through lean years, two major venues that kept tradies on the tools when other states stalled. I’ve met workers who bought their first home because those sites ran on time. That history can’t be erased because a handful of outlets smell blood and a ratings bump.

Yes, there are allegations. many, loud, and gleefully repeated. But allegations are not outcomes. Anyone who has run anything larger than a school fundraiser knows success breeds enemies. Ryker has a convoy of them: commercial rivals, political freeloaders who wanted a slice and got none, and, this will upset the fashionable set, young people with grievances steered by older hands. You can guess which newsrooms supply those hands.

Two names are now treated as sacred text by the anti-Ryker mob: Isla and Ethel. One is presented as the wild child who “finally spoke truth,” the other as the prodigy with a thousand-yard stare.

The story is perfect, too perfect. A troubled performer with past rehab stints, a tragedy in her teens that tabloids won’t stop re-printing, now cast as digital ninja who outfoxed seasoned professionals and “liberated” a treasure chest of emails and cabinet files. We’re told it all walked into court in a neat box stamped admissible. Right. Because life is that tidy.

As for Ethel, barely nineteen, studying Software Engineering,

photographed with that fierce gaze the blogs love, she is now the moral compass of the saga, apparently.

From what I’ve seen, she’s serious and sharp; I won’t knock that. But it’s plain she grew up mostly away from her father, guided by grandparents who, I’m told, had little time for his world. Estrangement makes for powerful emotion. Emotion is not evidence.

The same commentators who mock tradition are suddenly clutching pearls about “power networks” and “influence.” Spare me. Every major city runs on relationships. The question is whether any line was crossed. That’s for a jury, not an influencer. Meanwhile, the National Broadcaster (you know the one) and its junior partners at The Beacon have already arranged the hanging. They speak of “courageous reporting” while air-brushing their own role in the rise of Ryker’s reputation back when his ribbon-cuttings delivered clicks.

And the selective memory is striking. The man has stepped in, personally, when emergencies hit sites—paid medical bills, kept wages flowing when weather shut down scaffolds, even put himself at risk during an incident offshore years ago. Those parts get shaved away. The new rule is simple: nothing good ever happened unless it helps the case against him.

Then there’s Isla’s mother, a woman the press alternately calls a socialite or a mystery. What I see is someone who has stood beside Ryker through storms. That used to count for something. Today it’s treated like complicity.

As for Isla herself, she’s got talent, no doubt. But the same outlets who love her stage persona now whisper about passwords guessed “because she knows how men think,” and a late-night dash through a house she wasn’t invited to. If a corporate security team pulled the same stunt, the ABC would call it illegal. When a trending artist does it, it’s “speaking truth to power.”

I’m not naïve. Development is a hard game. People get angry. Contracts end abruptly. When money moves at scale, every decision creates a loser who wants to call it a crime. But there’s a gulf between hard-edged commerce and the sprawling conspiracy map pinned up on podcast studio walls. This case supposedly touches everything, construction, unions, imports, even whispers about overseas gangs. Convenient. If you throw enough paint, some will stick.

What no one mentions: Australia needs people who can say yes when others stall. We need the doers, unyielding, imperfect, decisive. Ryker is one of those. He’s not a choirboy. He never claimed to be. But he built, he hired, he delivered. That matters. If we decide that ambition itself is suspicious, we won’t like the economy we inherit.

So let the court run. Let evidence be tested, not dramatized. And let’s stop pretending that a singer’s monologue or a set of conveniently sourced inboxes settles a case that will take months to unpack. If Dominic Ryker is guilty, the jury will say so. If he’s not, remember who cashed in on the chase. Until then, spare us the sermon.

Innocent until proven otherwise. That’s not a slogan, It’s civilisation.

Ethel & Isla are characters from PixelStortion's fictional crime drama series. Their world is adjacent to ours. Dates are accurate.

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