Bill Heffernan (NSW, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I will only be a couple of minutes. This is a rare occasion. I wanted to rise tonight to reiterate my strong view that Australia should have a federal judicial commission. I think there is no practical process at the present time to have full public scrutiny of the weaknesses—which we all have—of the federal judicial jurisdiction, which includes Federal Court judges, High Court judges, federal magistrates and Family Court judges.

Recently in Sydney there was an event which I would like to highlight tonight, which I think merits the case for a process—without having a process that becomes a witch-hunt—that the public can adopt to have full scrutiny of judges, whether those judges have an alcohol problem or dementia. As was recently demonstrated in Western Australia, where there was a problem, there was no process to deal with it other than convening both houses of this parliament. I am not sure how you mount the argument to convene both houses of this parliament if you are not allowed to get out there and say it.

Recently in Sydney there was a matter at the Coroners Court. The proceedings of the Coroners Court have been suppressed, and the name of the person, a Federal Court judge, who was the subject of the Coroners Court inquiry—it was an inquiry into the death in bizarre circumstances of a judge—has been suppressed. I think it is a reasonable thing for people to expect that, if you are a person who has sat before the likes of this judge, and he sat in judgement of you in the days and weeks leading up to the circumstances that led to a process in the Coroners Court that is entirely suppressed to the point where not even the people he sat in judgement of know the bizarre life and death issues surrounding the matter, you are entitled to know the state of mind of the judge who was judging you.

The present process does not allow for that. I think it is a reasonable thing to expect that, if I am in court sitting before a judge and being judged, I am entitled to know what the state of mind of the judge is when he is judging me. This was, sadly, the case of a judge who died in a very bizarre circumstance—I am not too sure why it is suppressed—following some bizarre lifestyle choices, as I suppose you could say. I think it is unfair to the people who that person sat in judgement of not to be able to have the opportunity to pursue the state of mind of the judge at the time he sat in judgement on them.

I want to put that to the parliament as a reasonable example of why we should have a process of judicial commission at the federal level so people can have full confidence in the fairness and the performance of Federal Court judges. Obviously, I could go into a lot more detail, which I will not tonight, of other instances. Certainly this judge came to my attention over a number of years for some varying degrees of behaviour, shall I say, in court appearances. That is all I want to say.