George Brandis (Queensland, Liberal Party, Attorney-General) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak—and close the debate, I expect—on the motion that the Senate take note of my explanation. And I will expand upon that explanation.

I have never seen such a farce made of Senate procedure in the 17 years I have been here as I have seen this morning. After lengthy questioning at Senate estimates on both the principal hearing day and the spillover day, after two hearings of a references committee where the Labor Party and the Greens got absolutely nowhere, they seek now to try and revive this flogged, dead horse of an issue on the last morning of sittings. I am going to use my time to address a couple of the issues of fact in relation to the Bell litigation, and, secondly—

Senator O'Neill interjecting—

if you would have the courtesy to hear me in silence, please, Senator O'Neill—elaborate upon the grounds of public interest immunity which I felt compelled to take in discharge of my duties to the Commonwealth, on advice.

Let us talk about the Bell litigation. Mr Acting Deputy President Whish-Wilson, indulge me, if you will, for a moment. The Prime Minister described the Bell litigation as the Jarndyce and Jarndyce of Australian law. Jarndyce and Jarndyce, for those unfamiliar with it, is the fictional suit which was the subject of Charles Dickens's novel Bleak House. This is how Charles Dickens described Jarndyce and Jarndyce:

Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on. This scarecrow of a suit has, in course of time, become so complicated that no man alive knows what it means. The parties to it understand it least, but it has been observed that no two Chancery lawyers can talk about it for five minutes without coming to a total disagreement as to all the premises. Innumerable children have been born into the cause; innumerable young people have married into it; innumerable old people have died out of it. Scores of persons have deliriously found themselves made parties in Jarndyce and Jarndyce without knowing how or why; whole families have inherited legendary hatreds with the suit. The little plaintiff or defendant who was promised a new rocking-horse when Jarndyce and Jarndyce should be settled has grown up, possessed himself of a real horse, and trotted away into the other world. Fair wards of court have faded into mothers and grandmothers; a long procession of Chancellors has come in and gone out; the legion of bills in the suit have been transformed into mere bills of mortality; there are not three Jarndyces left upon the earth perhaps since old Tom Jarndyce in despair blew his brains out at a coffee-house in Chancery Lane; but Jarndyce and Jarndyce still drags its dreary length before the court, perennially hopeless.

That is an apt description of the Bell litigation. There are very few of the directors still alive who were parties to the commercial transactions in the 1970s and 1980s that led to the Bell group of companies being put into liquidation some 30 years ago. And, like the young child who was promised a rocking horse when Jarndyce and Jarndyce should be settled, there is a man who began his legal career working on the Bell litigation as an articled law clerk in Perth who now sits on the High Court, so long has the Bell litigation proceeded.

What the former Western Australian government, with the support of the Labor Party in the Western Australian parliament—