Ideological warrior Dyson Heydon lets his ultra-conservative credentials hang out … Not a good look … The varied quality of “punctilious integrity” … Stainless commissioner stains the Royal Commission
IT’S not a surprise that Dyson Heydon would accept an invitation in the service of a Conservative cause, even if he is a conducting a commission of inquiry into trade unions, and appointed to that job by a Conservative government.
Conflicts are only in the eye of the other side of the ideological divide.
Dyse’s big jobs in life, the High Court and as a royal commissioner, have both been courtesy of his patrons from the Tea Party end of Australian politics.
He is a servant of extremely conservative views. One High Court judge said Heydon is “to the right of the Duke of Marlborough”. People who know him, and others at the bar, nonetheless, have vouched for Dyse’s integrity, his fairness and his strict adherence to the law, as he sees it.
Young students at the 2013 end-of-year university law ball in Canberra, may have more colourful memories of him, and so too students at Oxford where he teaches, while concurrently serving as a royal commissioner back on home turf.
The very reason he was appointed by the Abbott crowd to the job of stitching-up unions was because the government believed not only that he had solid legal credentials, but the necessary warrior ideology.
Bookshelves Brandis defended Heydon on Thursday (Aug. 13) in suitably florid terms. He has an “absolutely stainless reputation for punctilious integrity”.
Heydon may not for one minute think he is the government’s man, yet that is not what the government thinks.
It is unhelpful if people of the calibre of Brandis “QC” are vouching for the royal commissioner’s integrity.
Indeed, if we peer past the stainless reputation there are glimpses of something else.
For instance, he only withdrew from speaking at the Liberal lawyers knees-up and party fundraiser after he knew the media was onto it.
Apart from his political patrons rushing to prop him up, redacted correspondence was released between the royal commissioner and the organiser of the Sir Garfield Barwick spruik, Gregory Burton of 5 Wentworth, in a feeble attempt to show everything was above board.
Cheques for the event were to be made payable to Robert Carey, 7th floor Wentworth-Selborne.
Yet, the invitation, which was first notified by the bar on April 14, was emblazoned with the Liberal logo. It also seems Heydon was sent a copy of the invitation with Burton’s email.
Shomething wrong here, shurely.
Fundraiser or not, what was the royal commissioner thinking when he accepted an invitation to speak at in honour of the patron saint of NSW Liberal lawyers, Garfield Barwick, at a beano under the escutcheon of the Nasty Party.
And what could the Liberal organisers have been thinking when they invited him? Was there no flicker of recognition that there could be consequences for the $65 million “get Labor” royal commission? Even Poodles Pyne was gobsmacked:
“Why a barrister in the Liberal Party thought it was a good idea to invite him is beyond me, but Dyson Heydon’s doing a terrific job.”
It rather diminishes Dyse’s little lecture about “credibility” delivered to opposition leader Bill Shorten.
This is well-established, shameless, Tory behaviour. Who can forged David (Fruity) “Flint’s” appearance on the John Laws show, to extol the wonders of the monarchy, while at the same time he was chairing a Broadcasting Authority hearing into Laws, Alan Jones and other broadcasters and their “cash for comment” proclivities.
Fruity clung onto his job for a while amid wild protests that he was flawed and compromised. Ultimately, he had no choice but to step aside.
A source just emailed a message, in the Dyse’s defence, that Bob French CJ gave the keynote addresses at the 25th and 30th anniversary dinners for the Environmental Defenders Office, notwithstanding the EDO always represents one side of the matters potentially before his court.
Heydon’s infamous Quadrant dinner of October 30, 2002 also still lingers as a rancid memory. This was widely seen as Dyse’s job application speech for Mary Gaudron’s vacancy on the High Court.
To the gnarled trogs and nasties who assemble for the Quad-Rant dinners Heydon unleashed a full frontal attack on Anthony Mason and the High Court’s “activism”. He also sliced into chief justice Nicholson of the Family Court, Michael Kirby of the High and, of course, the late Lionel Murphy.
Quad-Rant published a version of Heydon’s speech in its January-February 2003 edition, and in the interim the Howard government had appointed him to the High Court.
Dyse saw to it that the unpleasant digs at other judges made at the dinner were removed from the published version in the magazine.
You can read the main bits that were excised here
Was that just an abundance of caution to protect sensitivities or a display of two-faced opportunism?
In any event, it casts a fresh light on what is now called “an absolutely stainless reputation for punctilious integrity”.
Then there was the occasion when outgoing president of the NSW Court of Appeal, Keith Mason, at his farewell ceremony, blew the whistle on Heydon.
Mason told a stoney-faced assembly that the High Court was “haughty”; adopted “blinkered methods”; asserted a “monopoly in the essential development of aspects of the common law”; tried to prevent intermediate appellate courts from “venturing contributions that may push the odd envelope”; shut-off “the oxygen of fresh ideas”; had “changing orthodoxies”; and an “unduly inward focus”.
Mason’s remarks were a response to the derogatory way the High Court dealt with the NSW Court of Appeal’s findings in Say-Dee Pty Ltd v Farah Constructions Pty Ltd.
The High Court judgment demolished the court of appeal’s thinking in an unpleasant manner. It was widely acknowledged that the judgment from on High was written by Heydon and everyone knew that the subject of Mason’s heartfelt response at his retirement was Heydon’s personally offensive language.
So much for a “stainless reputation for punctilious integrity”.
There’s more on Dyse …