Ceremonial - Crennan J - Welcome Adelaide [2006] HCATrans 429 (7 August 2006)

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Ceremonial - Crennan J - Welcome Adelaide [2006] HCATrans 429 (7 August 2006)

Last Updated: 19 September 2006

[2006] HCATrans 429

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

ADELAIDE

ON

MONDAY, 7 AUGUST 2006, AT 2.02 PM

CRENNAN J

Speakers:

Mr R. Whitington, QC, President, South Australian Bar Association

Ms Deej Eszenyi, President, Law Society of South Australia

TRANSCRIPT OF PROCEEDINGS

CRENNAN J: Mr Whitington.

MR WHITINGTON: May it please, your Honour, it is my very great pleasure to welcome your Honour to the High Court Bench on behalf of the South Australian Bar.

In doing so, I become the first counsel to address a Justice of the High Court in the new Adelaide courtroom of the High Court. The building itself is an imposing reflection of the judicial power of the Commonwealth and is fittingly named after Dame Roma Mitchell, a trailblazer in the law and public life in this State.

By my reckoning this is the fifth such sitting for your Honour. So far your Honour shows no evident signs of ceremonial fatigue. I am sure your Honour’s evident stamina is the product of years of hard labour at the Bar. There are advantages in what the economists call relative backwardness. That, your Honour, is a polite euphemism for being last or almost last. Principally, it is that you get to springboard off the efforts of others who have gone before you. The main disadvantage in the present context is the difficulty in finding something original to say. I am also conscious of the dangers of addressing the Court too long on matters well known to it.

With that caveat, I would like to say something for the benefit of the present audience about your Honour’s antecedents. Your Honour was born and raised and attended school in Victoria and took your first university degree at the University of Melbourne. I understand your Honour worked initially as a trade-mark attorney and later as a secondary school teacher. You commenced your law degree in Melbourne and then moved to Sydney with your family and completed your degree at the University of Sydney.

On entering the legal profession your Honour read with David Bennett, now the Commonwealth Solicitor-General and well known to many at the South Australian Bar, in his last year as a junior. You were then admitted to the Bar in New South Wales. Subsequently, your Honour and your Honour’s family returned to Victoria and there you established an extensive advocate’s practice with special emphasis on commercial, constitutional and intellectual property matters. You took silk after only 10 years.

I read that not only did your Honour practice in most jurisdictions in Australia, but you also had occasion to work in the United States, England and Switzerland. Moreover, your Honour was admitted, so I am told, to the Irish Bar. This makes you the second member of the Irish Bar after Justice Callinan to be appointed to the High Court. As one wag has remarked, that makes the score Republic of Ireland two, South Australia nil.

In 2004 you were appointed to the Federal Court as one of the resident judges. All the while, your Honour successfully combined professional and family responsibilities, including raising three children. To the ordinary reasonable man or woman on the Glenelg tram that evidences a formidable degree of energy, discipline and intellect. As well, your Honour has acquired a reputation as a prescriptive grammarian. Solecisms at the High Court Bar must now be regarded as an endangered species.

Your Honour’s history has led to a degree of cross-border sniping. In Victoria you are most definitely regarded as a Victorian. In New South Wales, however, there is a tendency to claim you as one of their own because of the crucial years you spent there between 1977 and 1980. At one ceremony there was a mention of a possible threat from Queensland to declare that State your place of birth. How other High Court historians will record your home jurisdiction only time will tell, but I must warn your Honour that should it come out that you have spent more than a long weekend in South Australia there is a serious risk we will proclaim you the first South Australian to be appointed to the High Court.

As the representative of the South Australian Bar I want to focus for a moment on your Honour’s outstanding record of service to the organisational life at the Bar. Your Honour served on the Victorian Bar Council for something approaching seven years and you served a term as President in 1993. You served as President of the Australian Bar Association in 1994 and 1995. Under your stewardship both bodies achieved substantial reforms, including Victoria, reforms increasing access to pro bono legal assistance in civil cases.

In South Australia, the independent Bar was only established in 1964. Since then members of the Bar Association have provided the large majority of senior judicial appointments to federal and State courts in South Australia. A number of those appointments have been women, including several from amongst the ranks of silk. Presently, our Bar has 177 members, including 26 women. Four of those women are Queens Counsel. One, in fact, has been Queens Counsel since 1982. Many of those women have had to meet or are meeting the challenge of accommodating professional and family responsibilities. Your Honour’s career will stand as an enduring example to all of us in the legal profession, women and men, who have to meet that same challenge.

On behalf of the South Australian Bar Association I wish your Honour a long and rewarding tenure on the High Court and I am sure your Honour will receive the highest standard of assistance from South Australian counsel during your time in the Court.

May it please your Honour.

CRENNAN J: Thank you, Mr Whitington. Ms Ezsenyi.

MS ESZENYI: May it please the Court. It gives me great pleasure, on behalf of the Law Society of South Australia, to welcome your Honour Justice Crennan, on your first visit to this State as a Justice of the High Court.

We trust that you and your fellow Judges will be most comfortable in the beautifully designed facilities of the new Commonwealth Law Courts.

The South Australian profession looks forward to the annual visit of the High Court and particularly to the civic reception hosted by the Lord Mayor, at which we will have an opportunity to meet more informally later in the week. But today is a more formal occasion. It will be nine months tomorrow since your Honour was sworn in as a Justice of the High Court of Australia and since that time you have been welcomed in a number of States. Well-deserved words of praise have been uttered on those occasions so you have possibly heard all of this before. But as your Honour well knows, listening to repeated submissions comes with the territory.

It is now South Australia’s turn to welcome you and, on behalf of the profession, record our sentiments on the first day of this week’s sittings and to congratulate your Honour on your appointment to this honourable Court.

Your Honour and your colleagues will have heard representatives of other States say how important it is that the High Court travels to them and that the Court continues with the tradition of participating in a welcoming ceremony for Justices who are making their first visit. Our past practice in South Australia has been to liken these occasions to “wise men visiting from the East”. I am now pleased to say that that metaphor is no longer wholly applicable.

As the economic and political power of Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra grows, and as electronic communication between far-flung cities becomes more seductive, there is a tendency for major institutions to become centralised in the Sydney/Melbourne/Canberra triangle.

However, the profession and the people of this State take the view that justice is not one of those institutions which can be concentrated exclusively in one place. The visits of this Court to South Australia are of both symbolic and real importance to the people of this State. Accordingly, we are grateful to the Court for continuing to visit and also to your Honour for agreeing to participate in this ceremony.

Your Honour is the 45th Justice of the High Court in its 102 year history. You are the second woman appointed to this Court. I know that your Honour seeks no special acknowledgment for being a woman, but South Australia welcomes you and your appointment with the same enthusiasm with which, over the years, we have welcomed women to the role of electors, and to Parliament, and to the profession of the law. The High Court sits today in the Roma Mitchell Building, named after one of this State’s great jurists, Dame Roma Mitchell. She, too, was educated in her early years by the Sisters of Mercy and she too walked the path of justice with distinction. She would have taken great pleasure seeing you welcomed to this place.

From the time of the announcement of your appointment to the High Court, all that could be said about your Honour’s considerable professional career and qualities has been said, both in the media following the announcement of your appointment and at the various welcoming ceremonies which have been held throughout the country. However, it would be remiss of us not to acknowledge your Honour’s outstanding reputation as a jurist and someone who has already made a significant contribution to the law in Australia – as a judge of the Federal Court, where you served with distinction; as distinguished silk; as President of the Victorian Bar in 1993, and, of the Australian Bar Association in 1995; as a Member of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, and as a Board Member of the Victorian Legal Aid Commission.

One of your most notable achievements as President of the Victorian Bar was to establish a formal pro bono scheme, in conjunction with the Law Institute of Victoria and the Victorian Government. That scheme is now known as law aid it has become enormously successful and continues to thrive today.

The responsibilities of a High Court Justice are heavy. This Court is the final protector of the rights of citizens. We have every confidence that your Honour will discharge that heavy burden with skill, learning, compassion and determination. In that process you will have the co-operation and assistance of the South Australian legal profession.

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

CRENNAN J: Thank you. I am most grateful to both speakers for their generous remarks today and also for the expressions of support which each of them has conveyed from those they represent.

It is a considerable pleasure to return to this very fine city, conscious as I am of the distinctive contribution South Australia has made and will continue to make to the life and development of the nation. South Australia and Victoria led the other States, then colonies, with the early introduction of manhood suffrage which proved a template for the subsequent development of an egalitarian consciousness in all Australians which remains vital today.

Early in my career at the Victorian Bar I was privileged to meet constitutional lawyers from South Australia. I first met Chief Justice Doyle, then Solicitor-General for the State, in, I am fairly sure, Cole v Whitfield although it may have been an earlier case. It is worth mentioning that Cole v Whitfield was memorable, not only because it finally put to rest debates over section 92 of the Constitution, but also because of the high level of constructive co-operation between the States in sharing the necessary tasks of preparation. This was done to ensure relevant research was thorough and all arguments were covered without any unnecessary repetition on the hearing of the matter.

I also need to mention the late Justice Brad Selway. His very considerable talents were justly honoured in this city last weekend. His untimely loss was keenly felt by all his colleagues on the Federal Court of Australia. Justice Mansfield and I first met through the Australian Bar Association many years ago and he, together with Justice Finn and Justice Lander later became judicial colleagues of mine on the Federal Court.

It should also be recorded that my visits to appear as a silk in Adelaide were made so much easier by the efficiency of local juniors, but what impressed me most was their hospitality and their pride in this city. One not only invited me home after a busy day in court to dine with his wife and meet his young child, but he also cooked the dinner from very fine local ingredients.

South Australia is entitled to feel proud of the achievements of many of its lawyers and the contributions to the jurisprudence of the nation made by a number of its judges. In this context I need to remember and acknowledge that Dame Roma Mitchell, combined learning and abundant common wisdom as she did so well in her contribution to the administration of justice in this State, remains an enduring model for women judges.

In other States on the occasion of being welcomed by the local profession I have made a point worth repeating. It is one which has also been made today and that is that the work of a High Court Justice involves heavy responsibilities. However, I look forward to discharging those responsibilities confident of the assistance which I have been promised today from the South Australian legal profession.

Once again, I thank all of you for your attendance and support.

Adjourn the Court until 2.15.

AT 2.15 PM THE COURT WAS ADJOURNED