Kim Carr (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister Assisting the Leader for Science) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of answers given by the Attorney-General (Senator Brandis) to questions asked by opposition senators today relating to the Solicitor-General.

We, on this side of the chamber, keep returning to the Attorney's evasions on this matter because they raise fundamental questions of integrity, and questions of integrity go to the issue of fitness to hold office. In particular, no more could this be said than when it comes to the question of the first law officer of the Commonwealth. Integrity, of course, goes broader than that, to the wider legal system, which is tarnished when the principal officer lets it down.

The law is a noble profession. Some would say, of course, that it is the oldest of professions—bar one. Lawyers are sometimes denigrated as a profession, and we know that is unwarranted. The legal fraternity understands very well that duplicity will undermine public trust in the law. The late John Mortimer, an eminent practitioner at the English bar and creator of perhaps the greatest fictional lawyer, Rumpole of the Bailey, reported these remarks by his father when he was urging him to pursue a legal career,

No brilliance is needed in the law. Nothing but common sense, and relatively clean fingernails … Learn a little law, won't you?

The young Mortimer explained his father's meaning in this way:

It was my father's way to offer the law to me—the great stone column of authority which has been dragged by an adulterous, careless, negligent and half-criminal humanity down the ages—as if it were a small mechanical toy which might occupy half an hour on a rainy afternoon.

Mortimer's point was very simple: the authority of law, the great stone column, is at risk if it is undermined by those who treat legal processes and the edifice of law as trifles to be manipulated for advantage. Sadly, that is exactly what has been happening.

We have heard numerous evasions from the slippery and oleaginous advocates that we have here—and we have the chief law officer of this land, the great law lord of this land, Lord Brandis himself. The Attorney-General has usurped the Solicitor-General's capacity to provide independent legal advice—the senior offices of the Commonwealth. Even the Governor-General and the Prime Minister—