Ceremonial - Nettle J - Welcome Adelaide [2015] HCATrans 49 (10 March 2015)

Last Updated: 16 March 2015

[2015] HCATrans 049

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 GEOFFREY NETTLE

AT

ADELAIDE

ON

TUESDAY, 10 MARCH 2015, AT 2.00 PM

NETTLE J

Speakers:

Mr S.J. Doyle, SC, on behalf of the South Australian Bar Association

Mr Rocco Perrotta, President of the Law Society of South Australia

TRANSCRIPT OF PROCEEDINGS

NETTLE J: Mr Doyle.

MR S.J. DOYLE, SC: May it please the Court.

I appear on behalf of the South Australian Bar Association, and wish to take this opportunity to congratulate your Honour, Justice Nettle, on your recent appointment to this Court and welcome you and the rest of the Court to Adelaide.

Your Honour has already been the beneficiary of a number of welcoming speeches in other locations and so I will keep my remarks brief.

Your Honour made reference to your appointment coming at the age of 64 and to having been informed that this meant you had taken longer than any other Judge in the history of the Court just to get appointed. Your Honour quipped that this meant that the damage you might do in the time available was bound to be limited.

However, from the profession’s perspective, the more serious observation that might be made is that your Honour’s age means that you come to this Court with unrivalled length and breadth of legal experience and expertise.

Your Honour commenced with a fine academic record, studying economics at ANU and then law at the University of Melbourne. Your Honour then undertook a BCL at Magdalen in Oxford where, as I am informed, your Honour was tutored by a number of legal luminaries, including Sir Rupert Cross, Dr J.H.C. Morris, Sir Guenter Trietel and also the late Professor Peter Birks.

Back in Australia, your Honour spent about five years as a solicitor at Mallesons, 10 years at the junior Bar in Melbourne, 10 years at the senior Bar, about two years as a judge in the trial division of the Supreme Court of Victoria, and then 10 years as a judge of appeal on the Victorian Court of Appeal. Your Honour had a wide-ranging civil practice at the Bar and, of course, your Honour’s judicial experience spans civil, criminal, trial and appellate matters.

But it is not just this experience that has led to your Honour’s appointment being universally welcomed throughout the Australian legal profession, it is the distinguished way in which you have acquitted yourself as a practitioner and then judicial officer. Having read other speeches congratulating and welcoming your Honour, and indeed having consulted some of my Victorian colleagues in case word on the ground were any different, there is nothing but praise for your Honour as a lawyer and as a person. Your Honour’s legal scholarship and personal character are universally regarded as being of the highest order.

It is for these reasons that the legal profession generally, but today the South Australian Bar in particular, welcomes your Honour to this Court, and does so with great confidence that your Honour will not only make a significant and valuable contribution to the work of this Court but, perhaps more importantly, will also be a pleasure to appear before.

And who knows, given the recent Intergenerational Report, and the likely discussion of aging population and the need to raise the age of retirement to increase productivity, with a bit of luck, and the small matter of a referendum, it may be that we are fortunate enough to have the opportunity of seeing your Honour do more than the six years’ damage that your Honour envisaged.

May it please the Court.

NETTLE J: Mr Perrotta.

MR R. PERROTTA: May it please the Court.

On behalf of the Law Society and the legal profession of South Australia, I have the substantial privilege of welcoming your Honour to Adelaide on your Honour’s inaugural visit as a Justice of the High Court.

A former Justice of this Court, Justice Kirby, wrote on more than one occasion that there are no easy cases in the High Court. The term “easy” must be considered in the context of the statement having been made by a member of this Court who had served as no less than the President of the New South Wales Court of Appeal for over a decade.

It is, as was said by the Attorney-General on the occasion of your Honour’s welcome in Canberra, your Honour’s outstanding ability as a lawyer and as a judge that best qualifies your Honour to sit on a Court in which there are no easy cases.

Of course, that your Honour’s outstanding eminence in the law had you widely regarded by the Bench and the profession as one of this country’s finest jurists gave justifiable comfort to those who appointed you. It meant that, unlike the cases your Honour is now called upon to decide, and with the greatest respect to all other candidates, the decision to appoint was easy.

Your Honour was born in Western Australia, although Victoria proudly claims you.

Your Honour came to the law a fraction late, after your economics degree and a year in Treasury in Canberra, a place you were to return more than 40 years later as a Justice of this Court. Your Honour quickly made up for lost time by completing your law degree in what surely remains a record time of two years.

Your Honour commenced your professional career in 1976.

In 1982 your Honour was called to the Bar and read with two senior Queen’s Counsel, one of whom is now a senior member of this Court, Justice Hayne.

In 1992, a short 10 years later, your Honour was appointed one of Her Majesty’s Counsel.

Both as junior and senior counsel, your Honour quickly became one of the country’s leading trial and appellate advocates, regularly appearing in this Court. Your Honour’s field of expertise included revenue law, commercial and equity matters, constitutional law, administrative law, trade practices, corporations law and property law.

In 2002, as mentioned by Mr Doyle, your Honour was not surprisingly appointed to the Supreme Court of Victoria and, two years later, to the Court of Appeal. The only surprise about your Honour’s appointment to this Court was that it was not in 2012.

Extra-judicially, your Honour has said that the practice of the law is not just another business. Rather, it is a noble profession and that those who are called to practice the law are called to serve the law and thus society.

For those who have devoted themselves to the practice of the law, such sentiments serve as an encouragement and inspiration to continue the long and fulfilling, but very challenging, path of public service.

For those who are about to embark on a career of the law, your Honour’s comments perfectly encapsulate, and properly portray, the legal profession as one of service.

Your Honour has served the law with great distinction. It is fitting that your Honour will continue your outstanding and most distinguished career as a Justice of this Court. On behalf of the Law Society and the profession of this State, I offer my enthusiastic congratulations on your deserving appointment.

May it please the Court.

NETTLE J: Your Honour, ladies and gentlemen, Mr Doyle and Mr Perrotta, thank you both for the kind things which you have had to say about my appointment and about such contribution as I might possibly make to the work of the Court in the coming six years.

It is a great pleasure, as well as an honour, to be here today and for the rest of our sittings here in Adelaide. Adelaide, I have always thought, is a most beautiful city and, therefore, one to which I have long loved to come, both on holiday and for work when it was available.

Although, of course, the majority of my work at the Bar was in Melbourne, I sometimes had the good fortune to receive a brief to appear in South Australia in the Federal Court or the Supreme Court of South Australia. That was invariably a gratifying experience, as much the result of the very high quality of the South Australian judiciary as of the warm, albeit properly competitive, welcome I received from my South Australian learned friends.

Of all the many fine judges which South Australia has produced, three from the recent past who stand out, if I may say so, in particular in my recollection, are the former Chief Justice Doyle for his great ability as a constitutional lawyer, the late Chief Justice King for his extraordinary contribution to the development of the criminal law in this country and his Honour Justice von Doussa of the Federal Court for his scholarship and application in so many areas of statutory interpretation.

Unfortunately, we shall not be dealing with any constitutional law cases on this occasion, but in a sense it is both fortuitous and fitting that the first two cases are a criminal appeal from a conviction for murder of the kind with which former Chief Justice King would have been very much at home, and an appeal involving a challenging question of statutory construction of section 33 of the Civil Liability Act of the kind which Justice von Doussa would have taken in his stride. It is my hope, although by no means my expectation, that I might bring to bear even a very small part of the wisdom and erudition of those great judges in the determination of each of those matters.

Thank you all for your attendance here today. You do me honour by your presence and I look forward to seeing more of at least some of you I hope in the week ahead.

The Court will now adjourn to reconstitute.

AT 2.08 PM THE MATTER WAS ADJOURNED