Ceremonial - Crennan J - Welcome Hobart [2006] HCATrans 151 (21 March 2006)

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Ceremonial - Crennan J - Welcome Hobart [2006] HCATrans 151 (21 March 2006)

Last Updated: 4 April 2006

[2006] HCATrans 151

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

HOBART

ON

TUESDAY, 21 MARCH 2006, AT 10.00 AM

CRENNAN J

Speakers:

Mrs Catherine Rheinberger, Tasmania Bar Association

Ms Leanne Topfer, President of the Law Society of Tasmania

TRANSCRIPT OF PROCEEDINGS

MS RHEINBERGER: May it please the Court. On behalf of the Tasmanian Bar Association, it is a great privilege to welcome your Honour on this occasion of your first sitting in Hobart as a member of this Court.

Your Honour is the 45^th person to be appointed to this Court, the 13^th Victorian and the second female. This is the first time that the Tasmanian Bar Association and the Tasmanian Law Society have had female presidents at the same time. The Law Society has previously had one female president and the Bar Association has not had one before now. So it is the first time two females have welcomed a High Court Judge in Tasmania and, more specifically, a female High Court Judge, which I believe does have some significance.

Your appointment, your Honour, has received great acclamation from the legal profession across the country and elsewhere. Much has previously been said about your intellect, your skill, your determination, your warmth, sense of humour and commitment to justice, so it is clearly no surprise that your Honour was considered the best person for the job.

Your Honour was born in Melbourne and attended Our Lady of Mercy College at Heidelberg. From an early age it was apparent that your Honour was destined to excel no matter which path you chose. I have a very reliable source, who is a former teacher of yours, but you would have known her as Sister Theresa. I can particularly vouch for her reliability because she is my aunt and still a Mercy nun. She is now Sister Janice Giesen and she tells me that she taught you English when you were in matric and she describes you as a gifted student, a good thinker with an inquiring mind and a great student to have in her class.

When your Honour left school you began working as a trademark attorney and you completed a Bachelor of Arts in English literature and language at the University of Melbourne and much later a postgraduate diploma in history also from the University of Melbourne, for which you were awarded first class honours. Whilst your children were small you worked part time as a teacher and began studying law part time first at the University of Melbourne and then completing your degree at the University of Sydney. You were admitted to practice in February 1979 reading with the now Commonwealth Solicitor-General, David Bennett, QC.

Your Honour returned to Melbourne and then began to practise at the Victorian Bar. Your practice there was broad based with particular expertise in commercial, constitutional and intellectual property law. It is during this time that your reputation as a distinguished and an outstanding member of the Bar developed. It is then only 10 years into your Honour’s practice at the Bar that in 1989 your Honour was appointed a Queen’s Counsel, obviously in recognition of your Honour’s talent and ability. Then in further recognition of your Honour’s considerable ability, you were appointed to the Federal Court in 2003.

In 1993 you were elected the first female chair of the Victorian Bar Council and the following year your Honour became the first woman president of the Australian Bar Association. A particular achievement of your Honour’s whilst leading the Victorian Bar Council was introducing a scheme for pro bono legal assistance in civil cases in circumstances where legal aid funds were limited. The Law Institute and the government supported the scheme, which is now known as Law Aid and is an ongoing success. Your Honour has also found time to serve on various boards, which include the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission, the Victorian Legal Aid Commission and the Law School Foundation through the University of Melbourne.

Your Honour also has another significant role and that is your role as a grandmother, which I have noted has been the subject of some media attention. Interestingly, the Melbourne Herald Sun’s headline was “Australia’s new High Court Judge is a grandmother who throws wild St Patrick’s Day parties complete with drums and once accidentally turned off a power station”, which I believe is quite an interesting story. Your local paper though, known as the Progress Leader, reported “Susan Crennan, local grandmother, appointed to the High Court”, both papers obviously acknowledging that your grandmother qualities would also bring a further diverse element to your new role.

It must also be humbling and rewarding to now be a member of a Court which includes two of your former lecturers from when you attended the Sydney University, Justice Heydon and Justice Gummow, but I imagine it is not any surprise to them that you have now joined them.

Whilst preparing for today, I have read a number of transcripts and reports and there are a number of comments that reoccur when describing your Honour, comments such as “eminently appointable”, “outstanding intellectual ability”, “intensely competent”, “an outstanding leader at the Bar”, “brings a wealth of experience and diversity”, “is an outstanding addition to the High Court and will make an important contribution to the legal system”.

On behalf of the Tasmanian Bar Association, I endorse all those comments and we warmly welcome you to Tasmania. We congratulate you on your appointment and wish that you continue to enjoy a rewarding and distinguished career. May it please the Court.

CRENNAN J: Thank you, Ms Rheinberger. Ms Topfer.

MS TOPFER: If it please the Court. I had the great honour of being present at the High Court on 8 November 2005 when your Honour took the oath of allegiance and office as a Justice of the High Court of Australia. It was for me an awe-inspiring occasion, where I had a real sense of the enduring importance of our common law system. I heard the words of welcome from the Attorney-General, Mr Ruddock, Mr North, the president of the Law Council of Australia, Mr Martin, the vice-president of the Australian Bar Association, and Ms McMillan, the president of the Victorian Bar.

The High Court was packed with members of the judiciary, representatives of the Bar and law societies of Australia and the public. I understand that the number of people at the swearing in was the largest in the history of the High Court, which is a testament of the high regard and esteem in which you are held. It is therefore with great pleasure that I appear today on behalf of the Law Society of Tasmania to welcome your Honour to Tasmania at the first sittings in this State since your appointment.

As my learned friend has said, you are the 45^th Justice of the High Court in its 102-year history and only the second woman appointed. Hopefully this will eventually cease to be a cause for comment. As Mr Ruddock said, your Honour’s appointment is recognition of the intellect, skill, determination and commitment to justice displayed throughout your career”.

What impressed me, when listening to the welcoming speakers and your response, was the breadth of your life experience and the balance that this will undoubtedly bring to the High Court, your prodigious capacity for hard work, your obvious meteoric rise to the top and your keen sense of humour and warmth.

My learned friend has expounded in some length to your background, so I will not repeat those here, but becoming a Justice of the High Court of Australia is an amazing achievement. It must also be a daunting and onerous task. John North said at the swearing in ceremony:

Your Honour will be intensely conscious of the fact that when you lay aside your pen, or possibly your mouse, after having completed a judgment, a die will have been cast whose stamp will endure for a long time. It will of course endure for a much longer time if you have found a common line with sufficient of your colleagues, but even dissenting judgments, sometimes seemingly out of step with the times have an enduring value. So the independence of a High Court Justice is different from that of any other Australian judicial officer, because it is more complete.

So we, as legal practitioners, must constantly communicate and remind our politicians and the public generally that an independent judiciary is indispensable in a free society living under the rule of law. As legal practitioners in Tasmania, we value highly the continuing visits of the High Court to this State. We are small and perhaps easily forgotten in the scheme of things, but Tasmania is part of the Federation and the High Court is an integral part of the judicial hierarchy of this State. We hope that we can provide the Court with sufficient work to justify its continuing attendance here. We hope too that one day we will be able to welcome a Tasmanian as a Justice to the High Court.

Once again, we welcome your Honour to Tasmania and we congratulate you on your appointment. We look forward to your return and the Court’s return in years to come.

CRENNAN J: Thank you, Ms Rheinberger and Ms Topfer. It is a great pleasure to be here in the State of Tasmania and I thank you both for your very generous remarks today and the expressions of goodwill from those you represent. Whilst I did not practise as a barrister in Tasmania, I did work from time to time with members of the legal profession from Tasmania and I was always impressed by the thoroughness of the assistance I received from them.

During the early 1990s as a member of the Law Council of Australia, it was impossible not to be conscious of the real contribution to national debates made by practitioners from this State. This State’s representatives hosted at least one memorable meeting of Law Council members where, appropriately enough, debates touched on the need to ensure that there were no artificial barriers to legal practice throughout Australia.

I met outstanding local legal practitioners during the course of my time practising the law. I met Solicitor-General Bale when he appeared for Tasmania, during the course of constitutional cases. I met Mr Fabian Dixon, SC and also Greg Mellick, SC. Later when sitting as a Human Rights Commissioner in Hobart, I very much appreciated the skills and assistance I received from those appearing before me in what are important and often difficult cases in that jurisdiction.

To those remarks must be added, I think, an appreciation of the fine and superbly preserved architecture here and of the role played by this State in shaping the egalitarian ethos of the nation forged in the 19^th century. The Supreme Court of Tasmania is proud of its status as the oldest of the Supreme Courts of the Australian States, having commenced sitting in 1828, just a short while before the Supreme Court of New South Wales first sat.

Tasmanians are also entitled to feel justly proud of the contributions to the jurisprudence of the country made by the judges of this State and also by judges who hail from this State but serve on courts elsewhere. My former colleague from the Federal Court, Justice Peter Heerey, has kept me well informed and always up to date about the manifold delights and strengths of Tasmania.

The responsibilities of a High Court Justice are heavy, given that the Court is also 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 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 the legal profession of Tasmania. I thank you all for your attendance and support today.

Adjourn the Court till 10.15.

AT 10.12 AM THE COURT ADJOURNED