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He will be flying all around the country and will still find time to finish off the day with a French lesson.
It is also well known that your Honour is an avid reader and extremely well read and in possession of an enviable library in chambers. Indeed, anyone who has had the pleasure of dialling in to a virtual meeting with your Honour over the past few years may have had the opportunity to catch a glimpse of this beautiful library, the quintessential Zoom background for a Chief Justice.
Your Honour, your significant contributions to our nation's justice system began well before you first took up your post as Chief Justice, and it is safe to assume this will extend to life beyond the bench, as well. I am sure that you will also take the time to enjoy your many interests, perhaps some more time studying French and reading for pleasure, and spend time with your family in regional New South Wales. Your Honour has certainly earned the right to enjoy these pursuits, though I have no doubt that you will continue to be active in public life and the many causes dear to you.
Your Honour, it has been a privilege to be here today to celebrate your remarkable career and contributions as Chief Justice of this Court. At the commencement of your appointment in 2013, I shared my expectation that this Court was in safe hands and would flourish under your leadership. I can now say with confidence, and I am sure those here will join me, that your Honour has exceeded those expectations. Your professionalism, your dedication and your commitment to the improvement of the justice system, Judiciary and the legal profession, both within Australia and abroad, are a truly wonderful example for us all.
Your Honour, on behalf of the Australian Government and the Australian people, I thank you for the extraordinary contribution you've made to the Judicial branch of government and I wish you all the very best as you commence this new chapter in your life. May it please the Court.
ALLSOP CJ: Thank you, Mr Attorney. Mr Dunning. Mr Peter Dunning KC, President of the Australian Bar Association.
MR PETER DUNNING KC: Chief Justice Allsop, Justices of the Federal Court, Chief Justices and Justices of other Courts, the Commonwealth Attorney-General and Solicitor-Generals, distinguished guests, it is my pleasure and privilege in equal measure to speak today on behalf of Barristers of Australia to offer our congratulations and best wishes on the retirement of Chief Justice Allsop. Today is an important day in the history of this large national Court which is fundamental not only to the third arm of our Government, but also because of its broad jurisdiction which touches on the lives of many Australians. We gather here today to mark more than two decades of exceptional public service to the Judiciary by Chief Justice Allsop. A decade ago, Chief Justice, at your swearing-in, amongst other things, you said this:
I am privileged to undertake the Office of Chief Justice of the Federal Court of Australia. This is a Court of great importance to the nation and I am conscious of the responsibility that I carry in undertaking the duties first fulfilled by one of Australia's greatest modern day servant to the law and the community, Sir Nigel Bowen, and later so remarkably undertaken by Chief Justices Michael Black and Patrick Keane. I will not always be able to exhibit the calm, almost serene patience of Sir Nigel and his two successors, but their example in that regard will be a constant discipline for me.
That last sentence is the only topic I will take issue with your Honour on today. Your Honour has been the most courteous of Chief Justices and the Bar is most grateful for the manner in which your Honour has not only dealt with our members but led by example for the Judges of your Court. If not today, in the next couple of days, your Honour will join the pantheon of former Chief Justices of this Court that you spoke so eloquently of on that day.
It is customary on days like today to briefly mention some cases that the retiring Judge has been in, not only to record the Judge's contribution to the law but to give some insight into that judicial career. I will limit myself, very briefly, to just three, but they are only a fraction of your Honour's legacy, a durable metric of your Honour's contribution to the life of this Court and, indeed, the Supreme Court of New South Wales when you were President. Early on, or relatively early on, in your career, your Honour, at first instance, gave judgment in a matter called Walter Rau v Cross Pacific Trading. Your Honour gave a pithy explanation of the obligation of candour on an ex parte application. That erudite exposition has been adopted, without qualification or expansion, by intermediate appellant Courts across this country.
Your Honour's judgment in Caltex Refineries v Stavar in 2009 in the New South Wales Court of Appeal and its distillation of the salient features test in novel negligence case has become the standard instruction for the discernment of duty in such cases. Your Honour's judgment in Hands v the Minister for Immigration and Border Protection merits special mention. It was a decision of the Full Court of this Court in which Justice Markovic and Justice Steward concurred in the reasons that your Honour had offered. Having described the appellant in that case, in your own words, as "far from perfect", your Honour then went on to record the manner in which this gentleman had been dealt with in the assessment of his matter. Having said that the submissions put forward on behalf of the Minister were much too definitional in character, your Honour said this:
That said, nearly 30 years after the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, two decades after the Stolen Generations Report aEUR| it is surely now part of Australian society's cultural awareness and appreciation that kinship, family and community lie at the heart of Aboriginal society, underpinning its laws, rules, and social behaviour.
Your Honour went on a little later:
If modern Australian society's cultural awareness and appreciation should be taken to be as I have stated, surely that should be at the very foundation of a decision which affects Aboriginal family and community. The appellant's place in that community and the effect on the Aboriginal community of his removal were matters of significant importance. They were not considered or barely considered.
On behalf of the barristers throughout Australia today, I acknowledge the First Nations People of our lands, and it is appropriate that I note your Honour's distinguished contribution in this area of jurisprudence. It stands as an elegant reminder to all of us that we must each do what we can to address that matter. Moreover, the case stands as an icon that fidelity to principle and a just outcome are not incompatible; indeed, the opposite. They are entirely compatible. Your Honour has had a judicial life that has been a life well lived. Your Honour is joined today by many members of your family. They should have justifiable proud in your Honour's extraordinary contribution to the law and the community in Australia.
They should share the accolades that are rightly delivered to your Honour on this day. The sheer number of them speaks, itself, to the warmth of your Honour's personality and the depth of your humanity. Your Honour, as a Judge, was, in equal measure, decent, compassionate, brilliant, humble and incisive. The Bar salutes your service, Chief Justice. Those of us, myself included, who had the privilege, and that it was, to appear before you, were better Judges before it, and that was not just because of the anxiety in the lead-up to pitching ourselves against your Honour's intellect. It was because an appearance before your Honour was this elegant, challenging viva that you came out better for as a barrister if not necessarily successful. Can I also, particularly, note the assistance of your Honour and, indeed, all members of the Court during the COVID pandemic which so significantly affected the lives of our members. We will never forget the effort that your Honour and all of the Judges put in to addressing those difficult circumstances.
Chief Justice Allsop, simply put, you are one of the great Judges the Bar has ever produced, and it is my privilege to congratulate you and thank you for that today. The Bar wishes your Honour and your family many happy years in the next stage of your career. May it please the Court.
ALLSOP CJ: Thank you, Mr Dunning. Dr Higgins as the Senior Vice President of the New South Wales Bar Association.
DR RUTH HIGGINS: May it please the Court. I acknowledge the Gadigal of the Eora Nation, the Traditional Custodians of the land on which we meet. I pay my respects to their Elders, past and present. I extend that respect to First Nations People present today.
Chief Justice Allsop, it is such a privilege to speak on behalf of the New South Wales Bar Association today, to mark your Honour's retirement as Chief Justice of this Court and, more broadly, from a distinguished judicial life. The President, Gabrielle Bashir SC, is in Court today and regrets that she cannot attend. She asked me to convey her sincerest best wishes.
Your Honour's path through the law has been, as we have heard, singularly linear. Despite or, perhaps, because of this, the characteristic movement of your Honour's reasoning on the bench has been to view things in the round in a way that facilitates the coming together of opposites. In this, you have been influenced by the psychiatrist and philosopher Dr Iain McGilchrist. As he observed in The Master and His Emissary:
Our talent for division, for seeing parts, is of staggering importance second only to our capacity to transcend it in order to see the whole. We need the ability to make fine discriminations and to use reason appropriately, but these contributions need to be made in the service of something else.
Vocationally, the "something else" which your Honour has served includes this Court and the New South Wales Court of Appeal. You have presided over and brought unity of purpose to each of those institutions. That is perhaps best captured by the image of your Honour coming into chambers during the COVID lockdown, calmly accompanied by your dog Zac, while leading the Court, unexpectedly but swiftly, into virtual trials conducted across states and time zones, maintaining the administration of justice through a pandemic. The life of the law is relational. It is a man and his dog and his colleagues working in a building with a troubling tendency to flood, but the law's functioning must be formal and effective and uninterrupted. And so it was.
The introduction of concise pleadings was a significant initiative of your Honour's time as Chief Justice. As you observed in ASIC v ANZ Bank Group Limited, the statement and the answer are to be viewed as the combined narrative which encompasses the case. Not in a rigid or overtechnical way, but in a way that, through its narrative, coherently expresses the respective cases as to the conduct that is said to contravene or not contravene the provisions. That initiative was a genuinely original one. It returned the form of pleading in this court to the origins of a bill in equity, while fitting it to modern disputes and avoiding the perils of prolixity and endless particulars. It recognised the call for a coherent narrative in law, and that law ultimately writes itself upon the pages of the lines of people, as your Honour has put it, offering those people finality of resolution in accordance with settled principle.
Intellectually, there is something else which your Honour has served in your judicial and extrajudicial writing is the pursuit of the often ineffable but always necessary human element in law. That is a subject which can seem elusive because we are the subject. As your Honour observed last year in your address "thinking about law, the importance of how we attend and of context", law is not all about taxonomy, systems, rules and definition. It is not all about short answers to simple questions. If it were, we would not have Moses v Macfarland, or an insistence on individualised justice in sentencing, or an insistence on fairness in the exercise of public power, or mercy, or unconscionability at the thematic force of equity, or the countless other manifestations of values in the law.
These kinds of concerns have animated your Honour's contribution to this country's jurisprudence across many fields of law. In a further page from Hands v Minister for Immigration and Border Protection, while discussing the consequences of failing the character test under the Migration Act, and the reach of executive power, you observed genuine consideration of the human consequences demands honest confrontation of what is being done to people. Such considerations do not detract from aEUR" indeed, they reinforce aEUR" the recognition in an assessment of legality, that those entrusted with such responsibility be given the freedom of lawful decision making required by parliament.
Your Honour has also found this humanity in perhaps less obvious places. The Court's insurance list is another significant achievement of your time as Chief Justice. In ASIC v TAL Life Limited (No 2), you said this: "The second insurer was not just a contracting party, viewed in a disembodied way, with rights and obligations and law, but a person to whom and to whose financial security the policy was important". Your Honour captured the fact that risk is a pervasive source of human uncertainty and vulnerability, which the law principally allows us to manage through contracts of insurance. So, too, your Honour has observed that bankruptcy is not just about debt collection, but also about how that status changes a person, how it marks and alters a life.
Before your Honour turned to the law, you briefly taught English and history, as we have heard, but, in truth, your Honour never ceased being a teacher. You have, for some time, taught our legal community through living the thing that you wished to teach. You have an exemplary Jurist, Judge and leader. There has been no delusive exactness, but there has been great clarity of purpose. Your Honour has always been profound, if not always audible. Chief Justice Allsop, on behalf of the New South Wales Bar, thank you for your service to the administration of justice. That gratitude is manifest here today. Phil Boulten SC, speaking 10 years ago to welcome you as Chief Justice of this Court, observed that when you were first sworn in as a Judge of the Federal Court, the Court was filled to the gunnels. Today we have spilt over the gunnels and are washing down the AVL links that connect the various rooms of this truly national Court. I hope that Zac is somewhere in the building. I know that your multigenerational family is. We wish you fulfilment, your Honour, in everything you now choose to do. There are so many poems still to read and hungry chickens to feed. Nevertheless, Chief Justice, the New South Wales Bar will miss you. May it please the Court.
ALLSOP CJ: Thank you, Dr Higgins. Mr Murphy, President of the Law Council of Australia.
MR LUKE MURPHY: May it please the Court. I also respectfully acknowledge that we are meeting on the traditional land of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, and I pay my respects to their elders, both past and present, and elders from other communities who may be here today. I acknowledge the Attorney-General, the Honourable Mark Dreyfus KC MP, the Honourable Michael Daley MP, President of the Australian Bar Association, Mr Peter Dunning KC, vice-president of the New South Wales Bar Association, Dr Ruth Higgins, president of the New South Wales Law Society, Ms Cassandra Banks, all judicial officers, dignitaries, family, friends, and most of all, your Honour, Chief Justice Allsop. I am honoured to appear on behalf of the National Legal Profession to congratulate you on an exemplary career.
One of my colleagues, when deliberating over whether to leave a job about which they were particular stressed about leaving their current colleagues and employer, was given some advice that has stuck with them. They were told to think of choosing to leave a job like lifting your hand out of a bucket of water. In the immediate aftermath, the departure leaves ripples, but they quickly disappear, and the water or workplace returns to its former resting state, as if you were never there. My experience tells me that that is a good descriptor that is apt in probably 99 out of 100 cases. There are a few, however, very rare exceptions, and your Honour's departure is one that I will have no doubt will leave a long and lingering impact.
On the bright side, though, you do not just leave a hole in our justice system. You leave behind a legacy for which we will always be grateful. Your Honour's legacy was recognised in the awarding of your appointment as a Companion of the Order of Australia earlier this year. Your Honour's AC was awarded for eminent service to the judiciary and to the law, to organisational and technological reform, to legal education and to insolvency law. As we have, you have led this court for a decade, and this has included a period of time where we have experienced some of the most significant challenges to the traditional operation of our judicial system, and we needed to introduce substantive changes in order to adapt and survive. Under your guidance, the Federal Court not only survived but its response ensured the principles of continued access to justice for all was at the heart of decision making and significant efficiency gains were achieved. A few weeks ago when welcoming a new Justice to this Court, I quoted from a speech that your Honour gave entitled Being a Judge. As you have in many speeches, and in your actions, you reminded us in that speech that the purpose of judicial power, the purpose of the law itself, is or should be to protect people. I will not quote from that speech again today because we do not need words to show all of us present what being a judge means. You have been a shining example each day since your elevation in 2001. Your actions have spoken most loudly. On behalf of the Australian Legal Profession, I thank you most sincerely and deeply for the contributions you have made and wish you well for your retirement. May it please the Court.
ALLSOP CJ: Thank you, Mr Murphy. Ms Banks, President of the Law Society of New South Wales.
MS CASSANDRA BANKS: May it please the court. I would also like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which we stand today, the Gadigal of the Eora Nation, and I pay my respects to their elders: past, present and emerging. I acknowledge and welcome all Aboriginal people here today.
Your Honour, today I appear on behalf of the Law Society of New South Wales and the solicitors of New South Wales. I am honoured to come before the Court for this farewell sitting in order to thank you, on behalf of the solicitors of this State, for your enduring contribution to the law. As promised, your Honour, I will be brief, but that is certainly not a reflection on your esteemed career.
Your Honour has been a distinguished servant of the law for many years and a Chief Justice of the Federal Court of Australia for just over 10 years. Your humility and humanity have been matched only by your intelligence and ingenuity. In meetings with me and my predecessors over the years, you have demonstrated a deep understanding of the challenges that solicitors face and a keen interest in fixing problems before they arise. Your Honour's understanding that the use of technology in the justice system was something to be embraced has led to a jurisdiction being arguably best in class when it comes to managing large and complex matters spanning different jurisdictions in the most fair and efficient manner. This has been a hallmark of your decade leading the Court.
In 2019 you spoke of the importance of Courts taking a lead role in the responsible implementation of technology in the law and in legal practice, with a specific emphasis on problem-solving and the facilitation of the just resolution of disputes in a quick and inexpensive manner while still maintaining the fundamentally human character of the Courts. It was no accident, then, that the Federal Court led the way in managing the response to the pandemic just one year later, ensuring that the business of the Court was maintained with the least disruption as possible. Since the pandemic restrictions have eased, you have championed the opportunity to learn from the practices that were forced to change and to harness those that can deliver long-term benefits. You noted that this is a challenge about which our system had to be open-minded, honest and thoughtful. In a speech on the impacts of COVID-19 on the justice system last year, you said, and I quote:
Neither the law, nor the Court process is all about abstractions, systems, rules and definitions. At the heart of the law, the courtroom and Court process is the human element shaped by human experience.
For your foresight and leadership on these issues, the Law Society expresses its deep respect and gratitude. You have repeatedly stated the Courts are human institutions, and you have lived this value, showing compassion, understanding and strong desire to see justice done, particularly in relation to vulnerable cohorts caught in the justice system. Your interest in and empathy for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, in particular, stands out as a sign of your abiding commitment to justice.
You have noted that native title cases provided you with an insight into the complex task of reconciling history and injustice with present day realities, rights and responsibilities; that the resolution and recognition according to law of the long-existing rights of the Indigenous peoples in this country is not only important to them, as litigants, but also for the nation as a whole. It is an extraordinarily difficult national task, involving the need for goodwill, patience and determination. Your Honour has been a model of those admirable traits, and we thank you for your service. On behalf of the Law Society of New South Wales and the solicitors of New South Wales, we wish your Honour a happy retirement and our best wishes to you and your family. May it please the Court.
ALLSOP CJ: Thank you, Ms Banks. Thank you all for coming today. I am humbled by the presence of so many friends and colleagues. I am very touched, and you do the Court great honour. Thank you to the speakers: Uncle Michael West, Ms Banks, Mr Murphy, Dr Higgins, Mr Dunning, and Mr Attorney. I acknowledge at the bar table the new Attorney General of New South Wales, the Honourable Michael Daley; the Solicitor-General for the Commonwealth, Dr Stephen Donoghue KC; my former Attorney, the Honourable George Brandis KC, and Dr David Bennett AC KC, the former Solicitor General of the Commonwealth of Australia.
There is so much and, in a sense, so little to say when you are on your way, but I wish to take this opportunity in this magnificent courtroom that my Chief Justice the Honourable Michael Black created to thank those to whom I owe a debt of gratitude. I also wish to reflect very briefly upon the Court, recognising as I do that time has moved and the next Chief Justice is sitting with me, Justice Mortimer, who has my congratulations of the warmest kind and the congratulations of all the Judges of the Court.
First, not last, is my family. I am blessed by having my mother and my father here today. Words cannot fully express my gratitude to and love for them. They are two quite remarkable people who have loved, supported and cared for Richard, Ann and me and still do. Through their sacrifices, they ensured that we all obtained a first-class education, and they gave us a happy and loving home. Never did they require us to conform to their view of our future. They allowed us, through their wisdom and love, to make our own mistakes and make our own paths. They saw me enter the judiciary in this approximate space in the old Court 21A in 2001, and like Mr Attorney, they are here to see me out.
My son William and daughter Julia are both here. I love you very much. It gives me the greatest pleasure to see you here with Emily and Sophia, and it is also hugely touching to have most of the rest of my family here. My sister Ann, the glue of the family, and her partner, John Cotterill-Dormer, have a beloved Ring Cycle in Bendigo. I cannot compete with the power of Wagner. She will listen to Wagner live and me on recording aEUR" a fair exchange. Julie Cotterill-Dormer, John's sister, is here to represent his family.
Richard, my brother, and wife Judy are here with his daughter Katherine and grandson aEUR" and they have left, and if someone could go and get them, I would appreciate it very much, if they are outside aEUR" Alexander, or Sandy; Richard's son James and fiancA(c)e Barbora. Roslyn Wilson, James and Katherine's aunt, is also here as well as Judy's children, Sarah and Alexander Swan; and my dear cousin Susan, my late uncle's daughter, is here. Thank you all for coming. On such a day as this, the importance of family emerges. Here too is Sandy, my partner, whose love and support for the last six years has enriched my life and supported me. I love her very much. Here also are her sons, Byron and Charles aEUR" or Charles was, but they had a wedding to go to. Wagner and nuptials are more important. And Byron's wife Rachel is here, and Charles' wife Jasmine was here with him. Thank you all for coming.
There are too many people to acknowledge individually, but a mixture of protocol, affection and duty demands that I make an effort. Your Excellency The Governor, the Honourable Margaret Beazley, formerly a colleague on the Court of Appeal and friend of the Bar, thank you for coming. My fellow Chief Justices, Justices Kiefel, Kourakis, Blow, Grant, Ferguson, Quinlan, Alstergren and Bell, thank you for coming. Justice Gageler and Justice Gleeson and Justice Jagot of the High Court, I am honoured by your presence.
(I now have to read my own writing).
And former Chief Justice of the Family Court, the Honourable John Pascoe; the Honourable Keith Mason, my predecessor as President of the Court of Appeal and long-time friend; former High Court Chief Justice, the Honourable Murray Gleeson; my Chief Justice, as I said, the Honourable Michael Black; former Justices of the High Court, the Honourable Mary Gaudron, the Honourable Michael McHugh, the Honourable William Gummow, and the Honourable Michael Kirby; my former Chief Justice on the Supreme Court, the Honourable James Spigelman; so many other colleagues and friends from the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court, including President Julie Ward, also a former associate of Sir Nigel, and other judicial officers, friends and colleagues from the bar; former colleagues from the Federal Court and the Supreme Court.
There are friends for life from school days here and many, many others, including Tim and Marj McMullen, who taught me about teaching history to teenagers, lessons that I later deployed in explaining things to attention deficit disordered Judges. Speaking of teaching and school, my former colleague on the Court of Appeal and friend, and with whom I read, the Honourable Roger Giles, is here. He taught me lots aEUR" more than lots aEUR" about quietly getting one's way in Court. My clerk, Paul Daley, who taught me many things about the operation of the law that are best not discussed in a circumstance such as this. And I am honoured also to have present the Honourable Andrew Rogers. Thank you for coming. You taught me and my generation, through a mixture of fear and flattery, how to run a commercial list and how to behave in one. We did not forget, and your ideas were the foundation of modern case management. And the concise statement to which Dr Higgins referred was nothing new. It was in your practice note in 1983.
I thank the Attorney for his kind words. We worked together in 2013 and have done since last May. May I now, on leaving, thank you for your courtesy and attention to the important conventions of the relationship of the two offices we hold in the two branches of government which we inhabit. I have enjoyed our working relationship. Former Attorney Brandis, thank you for coming and thank you for the very same things: your courtesy and attention to the important conventions of that relationship. I enjoyed working with you very much. And, unfortunately, the Honourable Nicola Roxon, the Attorney-General in office at the time of my appointment, could not be here today, and she asks that apology be especially noted.
In other, shorter sittings in other cities, I have thanked the profession of each state. I do so again in New South Wales. Their independence and quality of advocacy is a hallmark of the administration of justice in this State. The power of executive government, the power of wealth and privilege and the power of popular sentiment and opinion cannot be faced effectively by courts without an independent and learned profession to stock its numbers and to give fearless advocacy. In those other sittings in other cities, I have thanked the Chief Justices and Supreme Courts for their friendship, collegiality and assistance. I do so again today, particularly to Chief Justice Bell and Former Chief Justice, the Honourable James Spigelman and the Honourable Tom Bathurst, who cannot be here today.
Our federal judicature, that is, Commonwealth and State Courts, requires a daily process of mutual respect, friendship, collegiality and a proper rejection of institutional hubris. This is drawn from the essential humility that we must display, that is demanded of us on a daily basis, by the apparent skill and talent of those around us in our own and other Courts. Australia is fortunate to have a judiciary of great quality, which navigates and mediates the not easy path laid by a federal structure by the use of tact, mutual respect, collegiality and friendship. These are not just good professional manners. They embody a demand of the Constitution.
I must also thank my staff who, over the years, have put up with me. My kindness is exaggerated at times. My EAs, Marie Miller, Ann Tarragano, Fiona Piercy and Nicole Sinclair, have given me more assistance than I sometimes deserved. They have been loyal, patient and attentive, for which I am very grateful. May I especially thank Fiona, who has been with me on and off as a either secretary or EA since 1992. My current staff, Amy Lee and Lucy Nason and Vic Ulberg, join a long list of associates, too many to name, many of whom are up there in the last two rows in the dress circle. Without exception, they were remarkable young people whose talents enabled me to appear more learned than I really am.
I have been, and the Court has been, more than fortunate to have had, and to have, two of the finest Principle Registrars and CEOs that a Court could have, Mr Warwick Soden and Sia Lagos. Very different people and styles, but both instrumental in the efficient and innovative working of the Court. Warwick Soden, working with Chief Justice Black, always sought to achieve technological excellence in the Court. His guidance of the ECF, the electronic Court file, that is, the digital record, not paper record, of the Court, to launch in 2013, not long after I arrived, was seminal in the growth and efficiency of the Court since then. He handled Canberra and those in it as would a conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. As well, he administered, when necessary, any one or more of the three types of operation taught to him by his first Chief Justice, the Honourable Murray Gleeson, when he was, that is, when Warwick Soden, was CEO of the Supreme Court. The three operations were, first, the operation one has with an anaesthetic; second, the operation one has without an anaesthetic; and, third, the operation one has when one does not know one is having an operation. If I may respectfully say, I think, then Chief Justice Gleeson may have specialised in both the second and the third of those operations. Certainly, Warwick specialised in the third.
Sia Lagos, Athanasia Lagogiannis, when she came to this country at 12, is a little like Mary Gaudron, a force of nature. She has understood this Court intuitively. She understood the people in it. Without her, the last 10 years of reform, change, that have been, apparently, driven by the Judges but significantly by her, would not have been possible.
The Registry and Registrars that Warwick Soden and Sia Lagos have led deserve praise that time does not permit. The Court could not operate without every cog in the Registry who serve the Judges with diligence and distinction.
To my colleagues, former and present, there are more thanks to give than is possible today. It has been a privilege to be your colleague and, for some of you, your Chief Justice. No one could find a happier Court to work on or to lead, and for those with whom I served in the Court of Appeal who are here today, thank you for your friendship on that wonderful Court. It is important to mention both Courts. The first Chief Justice of this Court, the remarkable Sir Nigel Bowen, had been a member of the Supreme Court as a member of the Court of Appeal and then as Chief Judge in Equity. He had a great affection for that Court. He led this Court to its teenage years with an expressed loadstar for its direction: the development of a national Court of learning, intellectual rigor and civility in collegiate partnership with the great Supreme Courts of the country whose standards he wished to emulate. He said as much on the first sitting of this Court in February 1977 in this approximate place. I venture to say, and I hope, that such has come to pass in no small measure from his legacy of tact, patience, decency and insight, shared and carried on by later Chief Justices of the States and of the Courts in the federal judicature.
So, what is this Court now? It is a truly national aEUR" indeed, it is a continental Court aEUR" of plenary, federal, civil jurisdiction soon, according to published policy of Federal Governments, to be a federal criminal Court in important, white collar crime. It has grown from a small particular jurisdictionally based court to one of general federal jurisdiction, based on section 76(ii), in section 39B(1A)(c) of the Judiciary Act 1903 (Cth), slipped into a Miscellaneous Provision Act after Gould v Brown and as Wakim loomed.
The Court has come to terms with Wakim. The Court embodies, within one Court, the seamless operation of multiple jurisdictions or multiple Courts without formal division. It is a national commercial Court, based on Commonwealth legislation, within the whole controversy. It is a national intellectual property Court of great distinction. It is a national tax Court of great distinction. It is a national industrial relations and employment Court based on the corporations power, therefore, now covering almost all workers in the country. It is a national administrative and constitutional law Court, supervising all decisions of officers of the Commonwealth. It is a national Admiralty and maritime and shipping Court recognised around the world, and it is national Native Title Court, dealing with one great pillar of reconciliation, the rights of First Nations People to the land they have inhabited for 60,000 years.
The challenges and difficulties of organising and maintaining coherence and consistency in such an interlocking body of jurisdictions are challenging for a Chief Justice, but also for the Judges of the Court. But they are challenges defeated daily by good organisation and the attention to detail of the Judges of the Court. The governance of these internal seamless Courts requires development, but this will come naturally and incrementally as the Court, in its organisation, settles down. The organising coherence of the jurisdiction of this Court is a series of subject matters upon which legislation is passed. They are the legal specialities, or subjects, that the framers of the Constitution and the people of Australia considered appropriate for national legislation and, through the notion of matter, for administration by the judicial power of the Commonwealth by any Federal Court created or by the great Supreme Courts and lower Courts of the States, as invested.
Let me say something that is not intended to be controversial, but emblematic of those things, and why the Court is somewhat different from Supreme Courts. Some refer, at different times, in a wave-like pattern, to the need for a Federal Court of Appeal. In my respectful view, that is problematic. Why? Because the areas of which I speak, the great subject matter areas of the Court, are more than often complex and truly specialised areas aEUR" not all, but many, such as intellectual property, tax, admiralty and maritime, Native Title and others aEUR" that requires the very best Judges in those areas to hear first instance matters and the same very best Judges in those areas to hear appeals. A well organised Full Court system can bring about the focused experience in those different areas for consistent quality jurisprudence.
To all my colleagues of the last 10 years, thank you. A Chief Justice could not have received more support and guidance than you gave me. Everything aEUR" everything aEUR" that has been done has been done by you as a group and with the invisible guiding hands of Mr Soden and Ms Lagos.
Finally, to my successor, soon to be Chief Justice Mortimer, my warmest congratulations. You will be a wonderful Chief Justice. I wish you a successful and enjoyable body of years leading a wonderful Court with wonderful colleagues.
The Court will now adjourn.
____________________
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