Ceremonial - Kiefel J - Welcome Sydney [2007] HCATrans 603 (5 October 2007)

Last Updated: 10 October 2007

[2007] HCATrans 603

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 KIEFEL

AT

SYDNEY

ON

FRIDAY, 5 OCTOBER 2007, AT 9.22 AM

KIEFEL J

Speakers:

Mr Michael Slattery, President of the New South Wales Bar Association

Ms Shauna Jarrett, Junior Vice-President, Law Society

TRANSCRIPT OF PROCEEDINGS

HER HONOUR: Yes, Mr Slattery.

MR SLATTERY: May it please the Court. On behalf of the New South Wales Bar today it is my very great privilege to welcome your Honour on this first occasion of your Honour’s sitting in Sydney as a member of this Court.

Since the announcement of your Honour’s appointment your professional and scholastic life has been examined by a veritable industry of commentators and amateur historians. The milestones of your Honour’s career culminating in your appointment to this, one of the great Courts of the common law world, are a remarkable record of legal achievement. Even the most casual historian looking at your Honour’s professional advancement would first observe your Honour’s personal courage from an early age in taking every opportunity to test your great ability against every available forensic challenge. Such an historian interestingly would also see that your Honour’s success shows much that is fine about the law and the legal profession in this country.

As so many members of this Court have done over its life, your Honour first came into the law without any prior social or family connection with the profession. In that, and in your Honour’s progress, your Honour’s career bears some startling parallels with that of a former member of this Court and one of the hometown heroes of the New South Wales Bar, the Honourable Michael McHugh.

Your Honour left school in year 10 and became a legal secretary. Michael McHugh left school at 15 and became a telegram boy in the Newcastle area. When the idea of legal study first took hold in your Honour and earlier in Michael McHugh, you both took the only opportunity reasonably available to hard-working young people at the time interested in the law and you both enrolled and completed in record time the Barristers Admission Board courses offered in each of our two States.

With a plainly recognised passion for the law you went to the Bar in 1975 at the remarkably early age of 21. Indeed, by your early thirties you had already completed the kind of career as a junior that these days most late 20-somethings are still only planning.

To come to the Bar you left the solicitors firm of Cannan and Peterson which had fostered your legal intellect and helped promote your earliest study of the law. There you worked with a young articled clerk, David Russell, who is now senior counsel practising at the New South Wales Bar.

As you started at the Bar you quickly found the briefs which you so well deserved. It is here that the Queensland Bar and the New South Wales Bar show themselves at their best, as very efficiently rewarding prodigious talent such as that of your Honour.

Just as Michael McHugh was encouraged to come from Newcastle to Sydney by Clive Evatt QC, so did Peter Connolly QC, later Mr Justice Connolly of the Queensland Supreme Court, guide your Honour’s early years and with a watchful eye help steer the first work opportunities to your Honour, what these days we call mentoring. You soon developed a broad and busy court and advisory practice, particularly in local government, defamation, probate and general commercial work.

You quickly became a junior much in demand by McPherson QC, Hampson QC, Callinan QC, Jackson QC, Fitzgerald QC and Pincus QC. You also worked with Pat Keane QC, now Mr Justice Keane of the Queensland Court of Appeal, who once commented of your Honour, “You know that Sue Kiefel is a very helpful junior. She actually identifies the points that are likely to win the case.” May I say at times I have found myself dreaming about such juniors.

It is not readily appreciated, but the institution of senior counsel actually promotes equality of opportunity at the Bar by giving special recognition to counsel who have the simple palpable advantage of their own outstanding merit. As so many of the members of this Court have done, your Honour took silk in record time. In your Honour’s case, this was after a mere 12 years at the Bar and at the age of 33, rather younger in fact than Michael McHugh by a number of years. From there your practice expanded until you were appointed to the Supreme Court of Queensland in 1993 and then the Federal Court of Australia in 1994.

If your Honour’s style as a barrister could be captured it would probably be in Hemingway’s famous description that “Courage is grace under pressure”. With the special human insight that more is achieved by charm and determination than by direct attack, your Honour was a devastating and thorough cross-examiner. You have brought the same courtesy to the Bench with powerful results. Your rich and varied judicial work on the Federal Court has been much admired and referred to in this State as it has been elsewhere in the Commonwealth.

There is something special about the Queensland Bench and Bar. Institutionally they both seem to foster a collateral interest in cricket and the arts. These are some of your Honour’s broad interests beyond the law as they are with the Honourable Ian Callinan QC. For quite a number of years when your Honour was at the Bar you regularly attended the annual New South Wales/Queensland Bar cricket matches. It is a sign of the strong affection in which you are held by our Bar that you were warmly regarded by all attending from Sydney despite your very conspicuous support for your home team.

Your Honour is an inspiration to the women and the men of the New South Wales Bar. We all salute your Honour and celebrate your achievement. At this your Honour’s first sittings as a Judge of this Court in Sydney, I not only welcome your Honour as a Judge of this Court but also as a great Australian jurist already much admired in this State.

HER HONOUR: Ms Jarrett.

MS JARRETT: May it please the Court.

Your Honour, it is a great privilege for me to appear today on behalf of the Law Society of New South Wales and the solicitors of New South Wales at this your first sitting of the High Court in Sydney. Our current Senior Vice President, Hugh Macken, expresses his apologies for not being here at this memorable occasion and has asked me to pass on his congratulations to you.

The High Court of Australia, through its deliberations, has not only carved out its own legal history, but in the process helped define the values of this nation and the fabric of Australian society. By extension, each of its Justices has contributed to the legal history of the Court and, in turn, the nation. It is no wonder then that such lengths are gone to to “label” each of the Judges that sit on its Bench, to characterise the very minds that will play a part in shaping this country’s legal history and attitudes.

I have read many articles about your Honour since news of your appointment and have come across many labels that have been thrown up in the last few months that have sought to singularly define your character. However, I believe that if anything can be ascertained about your Honour’s character it is your ability to pursue your ambitions and view what lies ahead as a positive opportunity. As you once remarked to some students, “You can usually do whatever you determine to do. The constraints or limits placed upon a person’s life and career usually come from themselves.”

One does not then become one of the most sought after counsel in Queensland, make the transformation from QC to Benches of the Supreme Court and the Federal Court without having the necessary skills that have laid the foundation for your appointment to the High Court this year. In a chapter from the book A Woman’s Place: 100 Years of Queensland Women Lawyers, it goes into some detail about your Honour’s career and states, “She is self-reliant but always willing to share her wisdom and experience when it is sought. She is dignified but never pompous.”

So in congratulating your Honour on your appointment as the 46th Justice of the High Court of Australia I wish to draw attention to your courage, because this is a characteristic that not only lies at the heart of your success, but is a label that can be worn by all in the profession in order to ethically pursue the practice of law. Your Honour has always considered courage paramount to legal practice and has been quoted as saying, “Each practitioner is the custodian of the profession and what will be passed on to the next generation of lawyers.”

Your Honour, on behalf of the solicitors of New South Wales I welcome your appointment to the High Court of Australia. Your extraordinary path to this Bench I am sure will continue to be told as an example of what can be achieved with self-determination and courage. May it please the Court.

HER HONOUR: Thank you, Mr Slattery and Ms Jarrett, for your kind words of welcome on behalf of those whom you represent. I thank you all for attending today. I am particularly pleased to see some of my former colleagues from the Federal Court and other friends. Mr Slattery, I am pleased to hear that at least initially upon leaving school I was better paid than Michael McHugh.

I have had a connection with Sydney for about as long as I can recall, in part because of family and friends living here. My relations with the Sydney legal profession could have been much closer. I do not suggest any difficulty in our relationship but, rather, that in the 1970s I considered undertaking the Barristers Admissions Board course and starting at the Bar here. In any event, I later worked on occasions as a junior to some Sydney silks and undertook work for Sydney law firms in Queensland. As a senior counsel I appeared in the Federal Court in Sydney. I have, or more correctly my husband has, maintained some former cricketing connections with the Sydney Bar.

In the time spent as a Federal Court judge I would quite often sit in Sydney, more often as a member of a Full Court and sometimes at first instance. I even came to know of some of the local issues, seemingly less controversial now, such as the location of airport runways. In more recent years I have attended meetings in Sydney of the Australian Law Reform Commission. My connection with the Commission introduced me to an even larger number of practising and academic lawyers in New South Wales.

My visits to Sydney over the years have enabled me to keep in touch with former colleagues from my days at the Bar and to maintain friendships with judges on the Federal Court. I was privileged to count amongst them Bryan Beaumont and Peter Hely. I have missed their company in Sydney and the court has missed their intellectual contribution, as it has that of Graham Hill.

Judges always enjoy visiting Sydney. Who would not? It is a vibrant city. Its lawyers appear to draw upon this energy. This level of enthusiasm occasionally causes consternation to judicial folk from a warmer, gentler clime.

The Sydney profession, and the Bar in particular, has a reputation as being strong, in every sense of the word. I cannot help but observe that its ranks include, as they have in the past, some distinguished expatriate Queensland counsel. One of them was famous in Brisbane for acquiring what, in the late 1970s, was an uncommonly large set of chambers and furnishing them in an appropriately lavish manner. Their nickname given by the Bar suggested wide open spaces. I see that that particular leadership of style has reasserted itself. The new chambers in Sydney are even more grand, but rather more vertical.

Thank you for attending today to welcome me.

AT 9.34 AM THE MATTER WAS CONCLUDED