It is my privilege to appear today on behalf of the Queensland Bar to welcome and to congratulate your Honour Justice Kiefel on the occasion of your Honour’s appointment to the High Court.
Before even your Honour entered the legal profession, your Honour made an impression at the Queensland Bar. At the recent valedictory ceremony in the Supreme Court of Queensland for his Honour Justice Moynihan, his Honour referred to his time at the bar in the chambers where you worked as a legal secretary from the age of 17. According to his Honour, when it was you that typed up the first draft of an opinion, it seemed unnecessary for the barrister to spend any more time on it.
Others have noted your Honour’s remarkable determination in your rapid transformation from legal secretary to barrister. It is particularly noteworthy that you qualified for admission through the Barrister’s Board examinations, with honours and in the minimum possible time, an early manifestation of your Honour’s innate academic ability and energy.
The same qualities were evident in your Honour’s early years at the Bar.
One of your earliest briefs was to settle a brief for Senior Counsel. Your instructions were to identify the relevant material and to provide concise observations to Senior Counsel. This may seem a curious brief for junior counsel to receive, but not to those who knew the Senior Counsel involved, Mr Peter Connolly QC, later Mr Justice Connolly. Apparently the instructing solicitors were apprehensive — and, it has to be said, not without some justification — that Mr Connolly would throw the brief away if it were not done very well. The brief survived that ignominious fate and you prospered – including appearing as Mr Connolly QC’s junior.
Your talents were very quickly recognised, and you became a fashionable junior barrister, regularly working with the leading silks of the time, notably including Callinan QC, McPherson QC, Pincus QC, Hampson QC, and Jackson QC.
You developed a broad court and advisory practice, particularly in local government, defamation, probate and commercial cases.
After some 10 years at the junior bar, you took leave from your busy practice to study for your Masters degree at Cambridge, with the distinction noted by previous speakers.
Whilst you were in Cambridge, your Honour was introduced to the sport of rowing and to your coach and now husband Michael Albrecht. Rowing is generally not regarded as a contact sport, but I am told that the Bumps on the River Cam brought out your Honour’s competitive spirit.
Two years after your return from Cambridge to Australia, you took silk, in 1987, at the very young age of 33, a public recognition of your success at the Bar and the respect in which you were held by the Supreme Court.
As a barrister, you had a marked ability to make clear seemingly complicated legal issues. Your career was also characterised by sheer hard work and determination. Your broad knowledge of the law, and your energy and thoroughness, were well known, as were your considerable skills as an advocate.
Previous speakers have mentioned your involvement in community matters outside the law, including music and the arts. Within the law, apart from your work as a part-time hearing commissioner with the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, you also found time to participate in professional affairs, including as a member of the Committee of our Association. You also served for a short time as Honorary Secretary, but this aspect of your professional life was cut short by your early appointment as a judge of the Supreme Court of Queensland in June 1993.
At your swearing-in as a judge of the Supreme Court of Queensland in 1993 the then President of the Bar Association of Queensland, Mr Douglas QC, remarked that your appointment as a Supreme Court judge had been well received and was very popular. The same was true of your appointment as a Federal Court judge in late 1994.
The Bar’s confidence in your Honour’s capacity and abilities to carry out the demanding work of a judge of the Supreme Court, expressed on our behalf in 1993, has since been amply justified by your Honour’s work both on that Court and in the Federal Court of Australia.
Your appointment today to the Court at the apex of our judicial system of course brings with it very onerous responsibilities. The Queensland Bar endorses those remarks by the other speakers today detailing your significant academic and practical abilities that qualify you for this important office. In addition, I would particularly mention your Honour’s reputation as a judge who combined efficiency in the disposition of cases with courtesy to those appearing in your Court.
The judgments of this Court can have a profound influence on the law and the Australian community. There have even been occasions on which a powerful dissenting judgment of the Court ultimately has proved to be influential in the Court’s development of legal doctrine.
If your Honour does feel obliged to dissent, your dissenting judgments will doubtless carry conviction: you have a track record, extending back to a time even before you became a judge.
An instance concerns your chambers in the then new Inns of Court in Brisbane. The group’s chambers had just been furnished. The final art work was hung on the feature wall for the approval of the group. All of your chamber colleagues were admiring and expressing their enthusiasm for the work. Your Honour then delivered judgment in your typical down to earth and to the point style:
It was never seen again.
Your Honour’s appointment follows the retirement from this Court of one of your former colleagues at the Bar, Justice Callinan. We endorse the Attorney-General’s comments about his Honour and whole-heartedly congratulate and thank Justice Callinan for his distinguished service on this Court.
Your Honour Justice Kiefel, on this occasion it is my privilege on behalf of the Queensland Bar to repeat our former President’s remarks on the occasion of your first swearing-in as judge 14 years ago: your Honour’s appointment has been very well received and is very popular.
The Queensland Bar takes great pride in your Honour’s appointment. We wish your Honour a distinguished and fulfilling career as a Justice of the Court.
May it please the Court.
