A rocky ride when ferrymaster Moy was aboard

Cardinal Michael Pelly in the Financial Review did a fine job trying to riffle under the robes of the Federal Court and find out what’s going down. 

Other inside sources have been in touch with Justinian’s News Deck with further granular details about the court and its machinations. 

The top brass at the FCA’s People, Culture and Communications division and the roiling IT problems are illustrative of the challenges Registrar and CEO Sia Lagos has in retaining the skilled executives necessary to keep the show afloat. 

The fond memory of Darrin (Chainsaw) Moy still lingers. He arrived at the FCA from an HR job at Sydney Ferries and promptly sank a swathe of court deckhands. 

By late 2017, staff were so put out by Darrin throwing people overboard that industrial action was commenced, prompting the temporary closure of registries and delay to hearings. 

See: More strike action at federal courts 

After his stint at people & culture, Darrin in early 2022 became the court’s acting executive director of strategy and corporate services. The permanent position was advertised in early 2023, with Marnie Williams winning the title. 

Darrin went on extended leave and by September last year he had decamped for an appointment as CEO of NSW’s ICAC. An earlier plagiarised treatise he issued, Enterprise Bargaining Update No. 1, is still causing tinnitus in the ears of court personnel. 

Marnie only hung around for 10 months. Since November 2023, the chief information officer Paul Kennedy has been acting executive director of strategy and corporate services.

Nathan Price, the project manager for CourtPath, moved into the slot of acting CIO, in charge of all the court’s IT operations. Previously he had been a product delivery manager at the AAT and before that an applications manager at the Migration Review Tribunal. 

CourtPath: bells and whistles

This might explain why 10 people have been seconded from the AAT to tinker away on CourtPath. 

Even so, staff have been told that IT operations will be downsized – a way to pay for CourtPath’s cost overruns. IT people not working on CourtPath, i.e. those who manage the legacy digital platform, were referred to internally as “blacksmiths” and told to re-skill and get with it. 

CourtPath is described by those close to the technicals as all whiz and no bang, a pretty facade over the top of the older operating system. 

More redundancies are imminent, and no-one is certain how CourtPath will function if the people running the old digital system introduced in 1990 are shuffled off. 

These internal announcements were made just as the Australian Public Service was conducting its 2024 employee census – a survey where the court performed poorly last year. 

Cost effective redundancies are not something the court can crow about. In the three financial years Sia Lagos has been CEO, the court has spent $5.6 million on redundancies, and this is while the workforce increased by 312 or 27%. 

In the same period, the AAT spent $741,000 on redundancies and reduced its headcount by 76, or nine percent.

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Justice Jackboots: ticked off by the CJIt has been reported in the fishwraps, that Justice Ian (Jackboots) Jackman has been receiving social visits in his chambers from Dicey Heydon. 

Debbie Mortimer CJ doesn’t like Dicey hanging about the corridors where young female staff and associates are passing back and forth. 

She also took Jackboots to task over his judgment in Smart Education Program Pty Ltd  (in liq) v CLGS Australia Pty Ltd, where he trenchantly criticised Kathleen Farrell, who had carriage of the case up to her retirement, for her “unwillingness to discharge the judicial function”. 

Jackboots’ pen has not lost its acidity. In ASIC v American Express Australia concerning Corporations Act contraventions relating to David Jones credit cards, HH said in relation to the construction of s.994C of the Corporations Act: 

[52]: I regard the matter as so obvious that it does not raise a real issue of construction at all …

[54]: To my surprise, the parties jointly submitted that that obvious construction is wrong … Oddly the parties did not then provide any reasons or submissions as to why their argument may be wrong. Given that there was no contradictor in the case, this was a dereliction of the duties of counsel to the Court, as senior counsel for both parties ultimately accepted. Quite apart from the duties of counsel to the Court, barristers owe it to themselves in all proceedings (irrespective of whether there is a contradictor) to consider the opposing point of view, if only to spare themselves and the Court from the kind of insubstantial arguments that rise like bubbles to the surface and disappear … 

[57]: When I told senior counsel for ASIC that the point was far too subtle for my mind, and requested some elaboration, senior counsel replied that there was nothing further she could say beyond what had been put in writing. That may be so, but if a submission is to be put then counsel should be in a position to explain it, or at least to give it some paraphrasable meaning. 

[64]: It was at this point (if not earlier) that the parties’ submissions completely lost contact with any form of rationality.