Ceremonial - Kiefel J - Welcome Melbourne [2008] HCATrans 206 (23 May 2008)

Last Updated: 29 May 2008

[2008] HCATrans 206

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

MELBOURNE

ON

FRIDAY, 23 MAY 2008, AT 9.15 AM

KIEFEL J

Speakers:

Mr Peter J. Riordan, SC, Chairman of the Victorian Bar Council

Mr Geoffrey Provis, President of Law Institute of Victoria

TRANSCRIPT OF PROCEEDINGS

HER HONOUR: Mr Riordan.

MR RIORDAN: Your Honour, if the Court pleases. They say good things come to those who wait. Your Honour has already had welcomes from the profession in Canberra last September, and in Sydney and Perth last October. We in Melbourne have been waiting patiently for our opportunity to do likewise for your Honour.

As your Honour knows, having sat here on many occasions as part of the Full Federal Court, we are sensitive types in Melbourne, but we are mindful of the fact that your Honour now has duties throughout the country which kept you away. We were a little concerned that your Honour, particularly being from your Honour’s home State, might find this chilly weather in Melbourne not so very welcoming.

I appear on behalf of the Victorian Bar to offer you the warmest of welcomes, despite today’s weather, on this the occasion of your Honour’s first sitting in Melbourne. I was not proposing to take the opportunity to recite your well-known and outstanding career as has been so competently done on the previous occasions that I mentioned before.

I do simply wish to say that we at the Victorian Bar have great confidence that your Honour will be able to make a great contribution to our Court. Our confidence arises in particular from the fact that your Honour brings to judicial appointment a very solid foundation of trial experience as a barrister. Your Honour was a barrister and practised for some 18 years at the Queensland Bar, six of those years as a busy silk.

You served the Queensland Bar, and before your appointment to the Queensland Supreme Court in 1993 your Honour served for two years as a part-time Assistant Commissioner of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. After about 18 months on the Queensland Supreme Court your Honour was then appointed to the Federal Court.

Your Honour shares this solid foundation of experience as a practising barrister and as a silk and as a Federal Court judge with the Honourable Justice Crennan, who is also in Melbourne for these sittings. In 2005 you were both identified on a list published by The Sydney Morning Herald as the outstanding women lawyers, apparently identified by Justice McHugh as those qualified to be first-class High Court judges.

Justice McHugh was right on both counts and it is a pleasure to welcome your Honour to your first Melbourne sittings. The Victorian Bar wishes you a long and satisfying and distinguished service on the Bench of the High Court. If the Court pleases.

HER HONOUR: Thank you. Mr Provis.

MR PROVIS: May it please the Court, I appear on behalf of the Law Institute of Victoria and Victorian solicitors to welcome you to Melbourne, and at your first sitting in this Court in Melbourne. I confess I was looking forward to recalling your Honour’s entry into the profession as a solicitor in the offices of Cannan & Peterson, now the Brisbane office of Deacons, but the fact is you were not a solicitor at any stage so that pleasure does not fall to me.

In the years you were at Cannan & Peterson you worked as a law clerk. However, at the same time you completed your high school equivalency senior certificate, and the three years of courses for the Bar Board admission as a barrister. You then left Cannan & Peterson and went straight to the Bar. You maintained your connection with that firm. Last year, shortly after your swearing in, you returned to celebrate the firm’s centenary.

Another aspect of your Honour’s professional career that particularly commends itself to us all I should suggest is that after 10 years at the Bar you took sabbatical. More impressive yet, you spent that year at Cambridge University, reading for a Master of Laws degree with a speciality in Comparative Law. You went on to win the C.J. Hamson Prize in Comparative Law.

You returned to Cambridge as a Visiting Fellow in 2001, this time your sabbatical from the Federal Court. You studied the European Court of Justice and later presented an Australian perspective to a Comparative Law seminar at the Max Planck Institute in Hamburg. The breadth and depth of your Honour’s understanding and expertise in these areas of international law and comparative law will surely be valuable in considering the part such laws may have in the development of Australian jurisprudence.

On a lighter note, the Australian Financial Review revealed last week that you played a significant role in designing the elegant judicial robes of the Federal Court, a talented “fashionista” was one description given. Perhaps in addition to your no doubt substantial jurisprudential contributions to this Court we may in time hope for something a little more exciting in the High Court robes than the current distinguished, but rather prosaic, basic black.

On behalf of the Law Institute of Victoria, and the solicitors of this State, I wish your Honour long, satisfying and distinguished service as a Justice of the High Court of Australia. May it please, your Honour.

HER HONOUR: Thank you for your kind words of welcome. My early association with the Melbourne profession occurred as a result of my position as Honorary Secretary of the Bar Association of Queensland in the late 1970s, or what our Chief Justice calls the olden days. I recall meeting Hartog Berkeley and Alex Chernov. I remember amiable meetings and very good dinners, something for which I think Melbourne is justifiably famous.

After my appointment as a judge of the Federal Court I often visited Melbourne for Full Courts. I started at the office block in Little Bourke Street for chambers and graduated, with the Melbourne judges of the Federal Court, to this rather more congenial workplace. I have had the opportunity to spend time in and out of court with most of the judges of the Federal Court, but perhaps more often with the Chief Justice and Justices Heerey, Goldberg, Finkelstein, Ryan and Crennan. Justice Weinberg and I, of course, sat on Norfolk Island as judges of that island’s Supreme Court.

The Federal Court will, I am sure, miss Justice Heerey. He will find more countries in which to cycle in his leisure time. I doubt that Justice Weinberg, who will also be sadly missed, will be cycling, although he will continue on the judicial treadmill.

On this day when I am welcomed by you all, the Chief Justice of our Court sits for the last time in Melbourne. I am glad to be sitting with him on this occasion.

On my return to Queensland, I will be reminded of my Melbourne colleagues and of legal practitioners from this city. That is largely because at this time of year there are so many of them up there.

Thank you again for your words of welcome.

AT 9.22 AM THE MATTER WAS CONCLUDED