Ceremonial - Crennan J - Welcome Sydney

[2005] HCATrans 958

[2005] HCATrans 958

H I G H   C O U R T   O F   A U S T R A L I A

SPECIAL SITTING  

WELCOME TO

THE HONOURABLE JUSTICE SUSAN MAREE CRENNAN

AT

SYDNEY

ON

FRIDAY, 18 NOVEMBER 2005, AT 9.15 AM

CRENNAN J

Speakers:

Mr Michael John Slattery, QC, President of the New South Wales Bar Association

Mr John Eric McIntyre, President of the Law Society of New South Wales

TRANSCRIPT OF PROCEEDINGS

CRENNAN J:   Yes, Mr Slattery.

MR SLATTERY:   May it please the Court, on behalf of the New South Wales Bar today it is my very great privilege to welcome your Honour on this first occasion of your Honour sitting in Sydney as a member of this Court.

Since the announcement of your Honour’s appointment, a veritable industry of mainly Victorian historians have examined the minutiae of your Honour’s professional and scholastic life.  The main outline of these events is a remarkable history of achievement.  It is truly an account of your Honour seizing every possible chance to test your great intellect and your prodigious capacity for work.

The story starts with your Honour’s primary and secondary schooling in Victoria with you matriculating with Honours in 1962, your Honour’s Arts Degree from the University of Melbourne majoring in history and English literature and your commencement of a Law Degree at the University of Melbourne.  Your Honour had very rapid success at the Bar in Victoria taking silk in a near record 10 years.  Your Honour’s success at the Bar was crowned with your Honour’s election in 1993 as the first woman to lead the Victorian Bar Council and the following year the first woman President of the Australian Bar Association. 

Despite returning so much to the Australian Bar through these appointments, your Honour managed to conduct and further develop your very busy practice principally in commercial, constitutional and intellectual property law.  In what could have been in itself a glorious finale to your Honour’s career, in February last year your Honour was appointed to the Federal Court of Australia.  Now, we celebrate your Honour’s acclaimed and most fitting appointment to this Court, one of the great final appellate courts of the common law world. 

There is, however, an interesting four‑year gap in the Victorian histories of your Honour’s achievement.  The gap covers the critical period 1977 to 1980 when your Honour appears to have made the life‑changing decision to come to the Bar.  I am pleased to say that local research shows that this period is filled entirely with events occurring in the State of New South Wales.  Claims to parts of your Honour’s history are growing.  I understand that your Honour will soon be sitting in Queensland.  Earlier reports from the creative profession in that State are that they are hunting for other gaps in the Victorian record of your Honour’s life.  My sources indicate they will attempt to prove that your Honour was actually born in Queensland.

In 1978 your Honour moved to Sydney with your husband, Michael, when he was lecturing in law at the University of New South Wales.  Your Honour changed your law studies from the University of Melbourne to the University of Sydney.  Despite having achieved Honours in all subjects at the end of your third year of law, your Honour gave up your job at the Sydney Patent Attorneys, Arthur Cave & Co to concentrate on your final year of law.  Your Honour worked at the firm then known as Smithers Warren & Tobias.  It is there that your Honour met David Bennett’s father, who was then a consultant to the firm. 

Your Honour came to the Bar here in Sydney in February 1979 and read with David Bennett, who was then one of our Bar’s most sought after equity commercial juniors.  His practice then more resembled an empire than a practice.  Teams of juniors were sent out daily as emissaries from his chambers to do equity mentions and motions in the courts of Sydney.  No doubt that is what your Honour did as well.  No doubt also, like all his readers, if by chance you did not already possess it, you acquired the methodical precision that comes from reading with someone who needs 30 clocks to tell him the time.

For a time your Honour floated on the Fifth Floor before your Honour returned to Victoria at the end of that year.  It is a matter of some curiosity that despite having completed your reading in New South Wales the then Victorian Bar required your Honour to reacquaint yourself with local customs and requested you read for a further period of six months. 

Your Honour made many friendships within the profession in Sydney in this period which we hope your Honour will rekindle on your now more frequent trips into this State.  After your return to Melbourne, particularly your Honour’s appellate and constitutional practice brought you into regular contact with so many members of this Bar with whom you have developed strong bonds.  You have publicly mentioned two of these, Justice Keith Mason, the President of the Court of Appeal and the Honourable Simon Sheller, and we know that there are many others.

Your Honour’s period as Chairman of the Victorian Bar provides something of a cameo of your Honour’s history of courageous and effective leadership within the law.  When asked to define good leadership, former British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, often described it as the capacity to take people where they do not want to go.  Under your Honour’s chairmanship at the Victorian Bar, the Bar Council successfully introduced reforms to permit limited direct access and co-advocacy even though many of your professional colleagues were quite warm in their views that they did not want to go in that direction.  These ideas, which increased access to justice for the disadvantaged and fairness and economic efficiency within the profession, are now accepted throughout Australia.

Your Honour has confessed that as a junior you learnt useful lessons from your leaders at both the Sydney and Melbourne Bars.  At your Honour’s swearing in as a judge of the Federal Court in Sydney last year your Honour said of two of your fellow federal judges, “Justice Gyles as a leader taught me how to cross‑examine without notes.  Justice Goldberg taught me that the judge’s point is the best point.”  Perhaps in this particular environment I expect that your Honour will now find Justice Goldberg’s lesson of some immediate use.

Your Honour’s professional life has always involved juggling both opportunities and responsibilities.  This must have been particularly acute at the time of your Honour’s appearances in constitutional cases such as Cole v Whitfield and in your intensely demanding role as principal counsel assisting in the Tricontinential Royal Commission.  You are an inspiration to many men and women of the Bar who have close and demanding, caring responsibilities for others.  Your appointment celebrates an important fact, that the very highest achievement in the law in this country is consistent with fully meeting those responsibilities.  Your success is also a very special inspiration to the women of our Bar.

In conclusion, may I express the admiration and affection of the New South Wales Bar for your Honour.  In now saluting your Honour for the first time here in the sittings in Sydney, may I say to your Honour not just welcome, but welcome back.

CRENNAN J:   Mr Slattery.  Mr McIntyre.

MR McINTYRE:   May it please the Court.  Your Honour, it is a great pleasure for me to welcome you to your first sitting of the High Court of Australia in Sydney on behalf of the 20,000 solicitors of this State.  It is a rare privilege for me personally to appear in the nation’s highest Court.  The last time I appeared before a High Court Justice the Court was not even sitting in this building.

In the words of your colleague Justice Kirby, the High Court, as the ultimate arbiter of the Australia Constitution and the highest appellate Court in the country plays a vital and often contested role in making and shaping Australian law.  Indeed, those men and women appointed to the challenging and often daunting task of determining the law on behalf of the nation are subject to intense scrutiny, speculation and expectation, perhaps more so now than ever before. 

The Australian public for whom the Court is always a faithful servant sometimes takes a lot for granted.  They assume the independence of the judiciary, the protection of the rule of law and the course of justice prevailing because it has been a tradition of this Court since its establishment over 100 years ago. 

Your Honour becomes the 45^th Justice of the High Court of Australia in the 102^nd year since judges were first appointed to this Court and in doing so you have joined the Bench of one of the most distinguished and esteemed courts in the common law world.  I was honoured to attend your swearing in at Canberra on 8 November last.  The gathering in that splendid building of so many past High Court Judges, heads of jurisdiction throughout Australia, judges, senior members of the Bar, leaders of Bar associations and law societies throughout Australia, many members of the legal profession and interested members of the public were testimony to the high regard in which you are held and the universal approval that greeted your appointment.  The eminent speakers on that day spoke at length and glowingly about your background, skills, intellect and suitability for the very important, but no doubt onerous duty that your appointed role carries.

I cannot hope to aspire to their skills as orators and so I will not attempt to cover the same ground in what would be a far less successful way.  I will simply say that the solicitors of this State heartily welcome your appointment.  At that swearing in ceremony you noted that it had been the high reputation and abilities of the Judges of the High Court which had commanded the confidence of the Australian community and we expect that your Honour will be no exception to that ethos.  You have the unqualified support of the legal profession and it has great confidence in your ability to deliver justice to each citizen and to uphold the dignity and high standards of the Court.

Your Honour, on behalf of the solicitors of New South Wales may I welcome you to our State and city and convey our best wishes for a rewarding career on the Bench of our highest Court.  May the Court please.

CRENNAN J:   Mr Slattery and Mr McIntyre, I thank you for your generous remarks today and the expressions of goodwill from those you represent.  I thank you all for attending and am particularly pleased to see a member of family and also friends who have made a special effort to be here. 

As you have both recounted, I first became a barrister in New South Wales before, unaccountably to all of you, going south to Victoria.  Because I spent some happy years living in Sydney it means that any return I make always has some of the subtle pleasures of a homecoming, not least today.

I had the benefit of completing a Law Degree at the University of Sydney during which I was taught by two of my judicial colleagues, Justice Gummow and Justice Heydon.  I went directly to the Bar and it was a stroke of good luck and a privilege to read with David Bennett in his final year as a junior barrister.  His distinctive legal talents were well matched by his generosity, both with his time and mind, with a reader who had very little prior experience of any legal practice.  He was appointed Queen’s Counsel at the end of my reading period and is now Solicitor‑General for the Commonwealth.

I sublet a room in 1979 from David Kirby and my nearest companions were John Sackar and David Bloom.  Terry Tobin was nearby and it was through him that I met Michael Sexton - David Kirby going on to serve as a justice of the Supreme Court and Michael Sexton now serving as Solicitor‑General for the State of New South Wales.  I was speaking just then of the Sixth Floor of Wentworth Chambers and Justice Michael McHugh, whom I now succeed, was then a silk located on the same floor on the Selborne side.  The fact that he had a general practice struck me then as something to aim for and, insofar as I left a general practice after some 24 years in practice as a barrister, I can thank my instructing solicitors for that including some from New South Wales.

I was led by Queen’s Counsel from New South Wales of the highest calibre and to mention only a few and confining myself to exclude those who may appear before me, these included the late Sir Maurice Byers QC, Roger Gyles QC as he was then and the late Bryan Beaumont QC as he was then (the latter two were later judicial colleagues on the Federal Court of Australia), and also Ken Handley QC as he was then, now a justice of the Court of Appeal of New South Wales. 

Naturally I met many junior counsel when working as a junior myself in this State.  Many became great friends and I watched their progress toward taking silk and afterwards with great interest.  Two women barristers in that group were Patty Bergin and Ruth McColl, both now serving as judges respectively in the trial division of the Supreme Court and in the Court of Appeal of New South Wales.

The late Les O’Brien, my clerk on the Sixth Floor at Wentworth Chambers never failed to assist me with chambers when I worked here and eventually I became an interstate member on level 13 of St James Hall.  When I was Chairman of the Victorian Bar my “opposite number”, as they say, was Murray Tobias QC, a very determined, but diplomatic leader of the New South Wales Bar, now on the Court of Appeal of New South Wales.  He was involved in many of the early initiatives which have led to the present reality of a national profession.  He was assisted at the time by Bret Walker who undertook the extremely demanding task of simplifying and modernising the rules under which barristers operated; the lead shown then by the New South Wales Bar was eventually followed by other Bars.

As Queen’s Counsel I was opposed to or worked with very fine advocates from New South Wales and as a judge of the Federal Court I was assisted by the forensic skills of many barristers from New South Wales.  This occurred particularly when I had the pleasure of sitting in intellectual property matters or on Full Courts in Sydney with judicial colleagues not only from Sydney, but also from other States. 

That short account lays a proper foundation, I think, upon which I can express the opinion that the Bar of New South Wales, assisted by the solicitors of New South Wales, is and has been a repository of great legal knowledge, forensic skills and ingenuity.  This has not only assisted the administration of justice in this State, but also more widely in the nation.  The responsibilities of a High Court justice are heavy, given that the Court is the final Court of Appeal in criminal and civil matters and determines disputes between citizens and government and between governments within our federal system.  Because judicial power must be exercised in accordance with judicial process, it is also the final protector of the rights of citizens. 

However, I look forward to discharging those heavy responsibilities confident of the co‑operation and assistance of both branches of the legal profession of New South Wales and I thank you all for your attendance and support.  Adjourn the Court.

AT 9.30 AM THE COURT ADJOURNED