Hayne, Callinan JJ - Welcome Brisbane CHH

[1998] HCATrans 106

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 KENNETH MADISON HAYNE

and

THE HONOURABLE JUSTICE IAN DAVID FRANCIS CALLINAN

AT

BRISBANE

ON

FRIDAY, 17 APRIL 1998, AT 9.16 AM

Coram:

HAYNE J
CALLINAN J

Speakers:

Mr R.W. Gotterson, QC, President of the Queensland Bar Association

Mr P.E. M. McCafferty on behalf of the Queensland Law Society

TRANSCRIPT OF PROCEEDINGS

HAYNE J:   Mr Gotterson?

MR GOTTERSON:   Justice Hayne, I am very pleased to welcome you to Brisbane on behalf of the members of the Queensland Bar.  Today is the first occasion on which you have sat as a High Court Justice here since taking office on the 22 September last year.  Previously, you had been, of course, a judge of the Supreme Court of Victoria and then of the Court of Appeal of that State.

At your swearing in ceremony, Mr Neil Young QC, Chairman of the Victorian Bar, briefly acknowledged that you were born in Queensland but went on to say emphatically that you are, and I quote, “a very distinctive product of Victoria and of the Victorian Bar”.  He was aware, I know, of the boastful and proprietorial claim of our own Journal of Record.  It heralded your appointment with the headline:  “Queenslander appointed to the High Court”.  Mr Young would have none of this High Court Judge-snatching.

It is not unknown for us Queenslanders to see our native-born achieve high judicial office after a formal education and a prominent professional career elsewhere.  A predecessor of your Honour’s in this vein was James Richard Atkin.  He was born in Brisbane in 1867 but left for Wales as a five-year-old boy.  Quite probably, he was the object of similar journalistic hubris and in 1928, the same newspaper enthusiastically pronounced:  “Queenslander appointed to the House of Lords”.

Your Honour, I was privileged to speak at your swearing in last September.  Prior to that, I had not met you, nor had I appeared before you.  Those gaps in my professional career were not to last long.  Both the courtroom and occasional social encounters have well placed me to tell the members of the Queensland Bar something of your Honour first hand.  They know to expect from you questions that are direct, concise and to the point.  Mr Young was quite right when he said:

Colleagues from other States appearing in this Court will soon appreciate your Honour’s knowledge of the law and the speed with which your Honour seizes upon the decisive legal point.

That is not to say that socially, your Honour’s conversation is confronting.  It is not.  I hope that at this evening’s dinner, many of my colleagues will take the opportunity to introduce themselves to you.  They will be rewarded by your most enjoyable company.

May it please your Honour.

HAYNE J:   Mr McCafferty?

MR McCAFFERTY:   Your Honour, welcome to Queensland and on behalf of Queensland solicitors I congratulate you on your appointment to the High Court.  I understand that your Honour was born at Gympie in Queensland but while still a child your family relocated to live in Victoria.  After having lost your Honour to our Victorian cousins at such an early age, it is gratifying to welcome your return to Queensland.

Your Honour is no stranger to judicial office and will be well aware that you carry out your functions in a society which is more educated, more diverse, more critical and under the increased scrutiny of an ever watchful but not always reasonably or well-informed media.

In such an environment it is critical that appointees to this Court be well qualified to instil and inspire the public confidence on which rests the rule of law and which is fundamental to the proper functioning of our society as a whole.

In your Honour, the community can be confident that it has an appointee with the requisite legal and personal qualifications.

I extend to you the complete support of the Council of the Queensland Law Society and the Solicitors’ Branch of the Queensland profession and express our hope that yours will be a long and successful career on the Bench.

HAYNE J:   Thank you, Mr Gotterson, and you, Mr McCafferty, for what you have said.  It was very kind of you and I do appreciate it.  I must say that last September I was a little surprised to see the Courier Mail say of my appointment to the Court that a Queenslander had been appointed.  After all, it was more than 50 years since my parents and I had left the State, and I had been educated in Victoria and had spent all of my professional life in that State, so very far south of the Tweed River.

But the statement was, I thought, important.  It was important not because it gave me a badge of honour to which I was not entitled, but because it emphasised the fact that this Court is a national Court, a Court in which all Australians have a stake.  For many reasons, then, I think it very important indeed that the Court continue to sit in each of the major capital cities.  Doing so serves to emphasise the national character of the Court.  Just as importantly, it enables the profession of each State, and the people of each State, to see the Court at work and for the Court to be exposed to the work of the profession of each State.

One thing that came home to me in my last years at the Bar in Victoria was that the practice of the law in Australia was, even then, becoming increasingly national in character and the past six years have done nothing to slow down that trend.  More and more practitioners practise regularly in courts, both Federal and State, in States other than the State in which they live.  I have said elsewhere that I consider this to be important and desirable. 

To take but one example of why that is so, it means that members of the profession and judges are exposed to different ways of approaching problems that all too often are common to all jurisdictions:  delay, cost and the like.  In this way, the best practices can become better known to all members of the Australian profession.  All of us can learn from the experience of others. 

Thank you for your welcome.  I am delighted to sit here for the first time in Brisbane.  It is, after all, the State of my birth and I look forward to coming back here again soon.

Mr Gotterson.

MR GOTTERSON:   Justice Callinan, this ceremony is an occasion for members of the Queensland Bar to celebrate the unprecedented.  Of the six Queenslanders who have been appointed to the High Court, you are the first to reside in Brisbane during your term of office.  This is a beneficial and a popular development.

At your swearing in ceremony in Canberra in February, I noted one extraordinary aspect of your elevation, that you were the first practising barrister in 22 years to be appointed to this Court.  Such appointments are rare and when they do occur, the appointee is usually one who has contributed very significantly to the profession of the Bar, as well as being a barrister for many years.  This your Honour did, not only as a former President of each of the Australian Bar Association and the Bar Association of Queensland, but also as a participant in many conferences, seminars and symposiums which were conducted by both associations and, at a State level, in conjunction with the Queensland Law Society.  You convened the first national conference of the Australian Bar Association at Surfers Paradise back in 1984.  That event initiated a series of memorable gatherings to be extended by this year’s conference in London and Dublin.

Considered purely as a welcome, this morning’s ceremony for your Honour has a touch of the out of time and the out of place.  You have already sat as a single Justice in Brisbane; and, of course, you are well known to us all.  To the person with a good eye and a strong arm, your new chambers will be, quite literally, but a stone’s throw from your old ones.  May I say that it is in keeping with proper standards that new chambers are being fitted out for you in this building.  It is a good thing that the High Court’s budget has been able to extend to this.

To adopt Mr Neil Young’s turn of phrase, your Honour is a very distinctive product of Queensland and of the Queensland Bar.  We, of course, regard these as very high commendations.  These accolades from Mr Young and myself recognise the significance that the Bars and indeed the public at large, attach to diversity in regional backgrounds in membership of the Court.  We trust that this feature will continue to be recognised as opportunity allows.

Justice Callinan, the Queensland Bar takes great pride in your appointment and wishes you very well in office.  I look forward to greeting you as an honoured guest at this evening’s Bar Association Annual Dinner.

May it please your Honour.

CALLINAN J:   Mr McCafferty?

MR McCAFFERTY:   Justice Callinan, your Honour, on behalf of the Solicitors of Queensland I congratulate you on your appointment and welcome you back to your home State of Queensland.

The Queensland Law Society has a long standing associate with your Honour, having briefed you in a number of matters over the years.

Your Honour has also contributed greatly to the education - not to say the edification - of the Solicitors of Queensland.   In particular I recall a series of six lectures on the then new Evidence Act, which your Honour delivered to a packed lecture auditorium at the then Queensland Institute of Technology in 1977.

The usual tariff for providing a continuing legal education presentation is a bottle of scotch.  In recognition of the quality and extent of your Honour’s contribution in relation to the Evidence Act I recall that the payment there was a whole case of Glenfiddich!

Your relationship with the Solicitors’ Branch of the profession has, however, not been without its challenges.  Notwithstanding the receipt of briefs, fees and Scotch from the coffers of the Society, your Honour still continued to bowl out members of the Queensland Solicitors’ Eleven in their contests with the Bar Association. 

In addition to an effective spinner of which Shane Warne would be proud, your Honour is fortunately also blessed with a strong intellect and a mind that enjoys both the intricacies and the logic of the law.

In addition to your Honour’s undoubted legal skills, the community can also be confident that in you they have a judge who is able to look with sympathy on the often tangled affairs of his fellows and yet, who through the rigorous forensic experience of the Criminal Courts, has at the same time that detachment and distance which is such a critical part of the rendering of wise judgment.

The Solicitors’ Branch of the Queensland profession rejoices in your appointment and on behalf of the Council of the Queensland Law Society, I extend to you our complete support and express our hope that yours will be a long and successful career on the Bench.  Your Honour.

CALLINAN J:   Mr Gotterson, Mr McCafferty, it almost goes without saying that it is a great pleasure for me to be welcomed to the High Court by the two branches of the profession in my home State.  It is also a matter of great pleasure to me that I do occupy chambers in Brisbane, I might say, on a much more modest scale than has been suggested in the newspapers, both actually and prospectively.

I have numerous affinities with both the Solicitors and the Bar of Queensland.  After I graduated I practised as a solicitor for five years.  They were both interesting and instructive years.  There is no doubt that service in a solicitor’s office provides valuable training for the Bar.  I think I became aware in those days of some of the practical day-to-day problems of solicitors and, in particular, benefited, I hope, from the regular and direct contact with lay clients that a solicitor’s life demands.  I have never regretted those years and am grateful for the help and advice that I received from my much more senior colleagues, Messrs William Conwell and Ernest Bush, in the firm in which I practised as a partner.

My years at the Bar, some 32 of them, also presented me with many opportunities to do interesting work, to make new friends, and to participate in what I always found very agreeable, the collegiate life of the Queensland Bar, whose numbers in my time grew from about 100 to something of the order of 500 people.  I saw many other changes but today is not the occasion to speak of them. 

In accepting appointment to this office, I am conscious, deeply conscious, of three matters.  The first is the very high standard of work and reputation of those who have preceded me from this State.  Secondly, the need to keep at the forefront of my mind the impact that decisions of this Court may have on the community, and the position of the High Court as an integral part of the judicial system of each of the States of Australia including, of course, this my home State.

I am very grateful to you, Mr Gotterson, and you, Mr McCafferty, and those whom you represent, for the kindness and warmth of your remarks and welcome.  I will do what I can to try to be worthy of the confidence that you have expressed in me.  Thank you.

HAYNE J:   The Court will now adjourn to reconstitute for the business of the day.

AT 9.31 AM THE COURT ADJOURNED