Ceremonial Sitting - Welcome to the Hon. Chief Justice Murray Gleeson, AC (Perth) P00/1998 [1998] HCATrans 376 (19 October 1998)

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 CHIEF JUSTICE ANTHONY MURRAY GLEESON, AC

and

THE HONOURABLE JUSTICE IAN DAVID FRANCIS CALLINAN

AT

PERTH

ON

MONDAY, 19 OCTOBER 1998, AT 2.00 PM.

Coram:

GLEESON CJ

CALLINAN J

Speakers:

Mr W. Martin, QC, President, Western Australia Bar Association

Ms K. O'Brien, President, Law Society of Western Australia

TRANSCRIPT OF PROCEEDINGS

GLEESON CJ: Yes, Ms O'Brien.

MS O'BRIEN: If it please the Court. I am very pleased on behalf of the Law Society of Western Australia to welcome your Honour the Chief Justice and your Honour Justice Callinan to Perth where you will each sit for the first time as members of the High Court.

I congratulate each of your Honours on your recent appointment to this Court. I note that your Honour's achievements, respectively, in the law and elsewhere, have been extolled with great eloquence and wit in other jurisdictions. Of course I take no exception to those remarks and wholeheartedly endorse them. Today I wish to speak briefly about the importance of the visit of the High Court to this State.

Your Honours fulfil an important role in accessibility to justice by making the annual trip to Perth. Notwithstanding the relative ease and speed of travel, it is still a time consuming and expensive exercise for Western Australians to get across the Nullabor Plain. No less for your Honours who have come the other way. Nowadays there is considerable and ever increasing media focus on the courts, not only in the context of particular decisions but generally. Everyone from governments to so-called shock jocks clamours for courts to be more user friendly, less procedurally complex, faster, cheaper, more efficient, more effective, more understandable, not to mention more in touch, more representative and more accountable.

These individual demands make up the complex notion of access to justice. It might be that the amazing combination of computers, satellites and human ingenuity can achieve access to justice in terms of efficiency. Video conferencing can bring participants in the court process from all over the country together on a TV monitor. Today the internet makes outlines of submissions and decisions available in the blink of an eye. With less than the blink of an eye a paralysed man can get a computer to speak for him. Soon it will be possible for judges to think their decisions perhaps, and have them instantaneously transmitted on to screens located in the lounge rooms of the litigants, the chambers of the advocates, the electronic law reports, the newspapers or whatever their electronic equivalent might be.

The courts could well be the Truman Show of the 21st century. The courts are dealing with troubles in the lives of citizens. Important issues such as protection of reputations, property disputes, and so on, but more fundamentally, the rights of the citizen when matched against the power of governments, the right to a fair trial, the liberty of the individuals. The High Court is the ultimate bulwark against tyranny of governments and, as such, is the protector of democracy which is increasingly fragile.

So we should give careful consideration to whether we want the system of justice reduced to microwaves. We should all have the opportunity of seeing for ourselves how the courts exercise their grave responsibility. All of us should be able to see and hear the putting and testing of submissions, the exchange of views and experience the atmospherics of the courtroom. The openness of the courts to public scrutiny is so important to access to justice in its most fundamental sense.

So, your Honours, we are very pleased that we are not communicating today in cyberspace. We are pleased to see and hear you in real life. The not inconsiderable effort and time taken by the court and its staff to come to Perth is sincerely appreciated. We hope each of your Honours enjoy your short time in Perth. While you are here there will be opportunities for your Honours to meet members of the profession in other than an across the bar table encounter in this Court.

We welcome the High Court to Perth and we especially welcome your Honours as its newest members. May it please the Court.

GLEESON CJ: Thank you, Ms O'Brien. Mr Martin?

MR MARTIN: If it please the Court, it gives me great pleasure to appear today on behalf of the Western Australian Bar Association upon the occasion of your Honours' first visit as members of the highest Court in the Commonwealth to welcome each of your Honours to the greatest State in the Commonwealth. And lest it be thought that I am indulging in parochial hyperbole, may I point out that in describing this State as the greatest State in the Commonwealth, I am speaking literally correctly although there are many of us who reside here who would argue that the assertion has more than a degree of figurative truth as well.

In speaking today, I am cognisant of the fact that I have been allowed much less time than the usual 20 minutes permitted before the long staff with the hook on the end of it comes out to remove one from the stage, if not exactly kicking and screaming, sometimes whimpering.

The pleasure of welcoming each of your Honours today is much enhanced by the fact that each of you have enjoyed substantial practices in this State, notwithstanding the tyranny of distance from your home States. I must acknowledge, however, that the profession in Western Australia was not alone in recognising the outstanding professional abilities of each of your Honours, each having enjoyed truly national practices long before that phenomenon became fashionable.

In the case of your Honour the Chief Justice, the selfish disappointment of the local profession upon your appointment 10 years ago as Chief Justice of New South Wales, which deprived us of the benefit of your assistance, has now been redressed by your appointment to preside over the ultimate national Court. This appointment did not come as a surprise to us in the West, I have to say, not because a Western Australian Attorney General presumably had some hand in it, but because it was an open secret that the profession and the community nationally supported your Honour's appointment.

This is not the occasion to attempt to chronicle the many qualities and past achievements which made your Honour's appointment so obvious, but if it were, reference would no doubt be made to your Honour's contribution to legal scholarship and education, and as leader of the largest Bar in the country and laterally Chief Justice of the largest Supreme Court in the country.

Your Honour is, of course, only the second State Chief Justice to be appointed Chief Justice of the High Court, but when regard is had to the fact that this elite group comprises your Honour and Sir Samuel Griffith, it seems not unlikely that this is a course which might commend itself more often to future governments.

Your Honour's renowned capacity to very quickly identify the real issues in a case is no doubt of particular assistance in your present office. I first encountered this phenomenon when your Honour was engaged to lead me on an appeal. Your Honour arrived from Sydney the afternoon before the hearing and very succinctly, but effectively, pointed out that of the 12 grounds of appeal which I had laboriously prepared and researched, 11 had no significant prospect of success and we should, therefore, focus upon the only one that had any legs. Can I just say that in future special leave applications I will happily settle for your Honour being interested in just one of my grounds of appeal.

The Western Australian Bar takes pride in the fact that your Honour Justice Callinan is the first practising barrister to be appointed to this Court since Sir Keith Aickin in 1976. We also take pleasure in the appointment of a former President of the Australian Bar Association, especially one who inaugurated the very successful biennial conference of that Association. We are slightly less enthusiastic about the observation that your Honour is the sixth Queenslander to be appointed to the Court, which six include three former Chief Justices as compared to two puisne Justices from this State (for the transcript - that is p-u-i-s-n-e) although at least that is two more than either South Australia or Tasmania. These figures are not prepared on a State of origin basis of course, because your Honour was, in fact, born in northern New South Wales and Justice Hayne was born in Queensland.

Your Honour, if one were forced to choose one word to describe the qualities which rendered your Honour Justice Callinan such an appropriate appointment to this Court, one might be attracted to choose the word "breadth". I hasten to add that I use the word figuratively, but not to describe any personal characteristic of your Honour. The breadth of your Honour's professional practice was extraordinary. Your Honour was truly "master of all trades" within the law, including a number of years spent as a solicitor. But the breadth of your Honour's interests outside the law is equally remarkable, whether as sportsman, given your attributes in both cricket and rugby - and I digress to observe that a front row which included your Honour and the Chief Justice of this State would include a pretty awesome twosome, a novelist, playwright, patron of the visual arts, board member of the ABC and chairman of the Queensland TAB, and I have wondered whether in this latter capacity your Honour ever had occasion to consider whether the agency might have run a book on special leave applications to this Court. I suggest that it might not have been bad business, because the pay outs would be few and far between, with very few short priced favourites.

The Bar of this State is also pleased to note that in the appointment of each of your Honours, the tradition of intellectual rigour which characterises proceedings in this Court has been maintained, but we are confident that neither of your Honours will feel the need to reinforce superiority of intellect with ferocity of temperament.

Finally, can I reiterate the remarks of the President of the Law Society and suggest that it is impossible to overstate the importance which the Western Australian community and the legal profession in particular, places upon the annual visit of the Court to this State. At a time when it has to be said that the public appreciation of the role of this Court has been distorted by political spin, which appears to thrive on misinformation and ignorance, it is vital that the human face of the Court and the apolitical nature of its deliberations be exposed to the widest possible audience.

So, in conclusion, I welcome each of your Honours back to the greatest State in the Commonwealth. May it please the Court.

GLEESON CJ: Ms O'Brien, Mr Martin, your Honours, members of the Western Australian legal profession, ladies and gentlemen.

Justice Callinan and I are most grateful for the warm welcome that you have extended to us on the occasion of our first visit to Perth in our new capacities. We can assure you that no court tries harder than this Court to be user friendly. We are always anxious to hear and listen to everything that counsel has to say, once.

Both of us have had the pleasure of visiting this city on many previous occasions. As you mentioned, we both came here in the course of our practice as barristers and over the years made a number of friends amongst local practitioners.

I was admitted as a barrister and solicitor of the Supreme Court of Western Australia about 20 years ago and greatly valued my association with the Western Australian legal profession. Later, as Chief Justice of New South Wales, I had a good deal of contact with Western Australian members of the judiciary, especially Chief Justice Malcolm, who is an old friend and professional colleague.

One of my first visits to Perth was in the early 1970s to attend a Summer School. My wife and I were met at the airport by a local barrister, Mr Daryl Williams, who kindly showed us this beautiful city.

It has been interesting to watch the growth and development of the legal profession in Western Australia over the last 25 years. As in other places, some of the law firms have grown enormously and the independent Bar has flourished. Western Australian lawyers have a reputation for professional excellence and have made their mark in every aspect of the administration of justice in Australia. I pay particular tribute to the judges of this State who, in both State and Federal jurisdictions, have made, and continue to make, a notable contribution to Australian justice.

All Courts, including this Court, depend heavily upon the competence and integrity of the legal profession to enable them to administer justice fairly and effectively. Our adversary system, which reflects the value our society places upon personal autonomy, deals with disputes on the basis of the arguments and the evidence which the parties, through their lawyers, choose to advance. Such a system can only hope to operate with reasonable fairness and effectiveness if judges can rely on the competence and ethics of the profession. As a former Chief Justice of New South Wales used to say, "Without an independent, competent and fearless legal profession, the community will hear little of the message of justice".

We value this welcome from the Western Australian legal profession and thank you for your goodwill.

The Court will adjourn to reconstitute.

AT 2.12 PM THE COURT ADJOURNED