Anne McEwen (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My thanks to Senator Bernardi for agreeing to share this remaining time. I would like to pay tribute to Elliott Johnston QC AO who died in August this year, aged 93 years, after a lifetime dedicated to the pursuit of justice. Mr Acting Deputy President Fawcett, I am sure you would agree that while South Australia has an enviable tradition of great progressive reformers, Elliott Johnston was without doubt one of the legends of the South Australian left.

At a service held in September at Adel­aide University in his memory, hundreds of people gathered to remember this affable and courageous man who was a lawyer, a QC, a justice of the Supreme Court of South Australia, a royal commissioner, a rusted-on trade unionist, a great orator, a writer, a mentor, a passionate advocate for Indigenous Australians, a football fanatic, a Shakespeare fan, a husband and a father. At other times in his life he was a soldier, a student activist, the founder of a very successful law firm and occasionally a candidate for political office, albeit not a successful one. Perhaps most intriguingly, he was for most of his life a proud member of the Communist Party of Australia.

It is hard to know what aspects of Elliott's life to concentrate upon in this short tribute but a brief biography demonstrates that from an early age he was destined to a life of using his considerable talents in the pursuit of justice and on behalf of those less fortunate than himself. He was born in 1918 in North Adelaide and attended Unley High School and Prince Alfred College, where he was a student with a scholarship, and won the state prize for economics. From there he went to the University of Adelaide where he studied law and so began his life of political activism combined with a stellar legal career. This was the late 1930s, a time of great political realignment and upheaval in the world and in Australia. Following the Great Depression, in which ordinary working people and the disadvantaged suffered most, Australians watched the civil war in Spain and the rise of fascism in Europe, as well as Australia's own commitment to World War II.

On campus, Elliott helped establish the National Union of Australian University Students—the forerunner of the NUS. He was an editor of On Dit, the student news­paper, and with others he started the Radical Club. He was passionate about student democracy and resisted attempts by the conservatives on the university council who, like the Menzies government, wanted to shut down debate and dissemination of left-wing ideas during the war.

Elliott was also instrumental in setting up the University of Adelaide peace group, which was opposed to all wars. However, like so many other young people at that time, he joined the Australian military forces and was eventually called up, undertook military training and was posted to Papua New Guinea towards the end of the war. In 1941, when Germany had turned against Russia, Elliott finally joined the Communist Party of Australia. That was to be a lifelong relation­ship only broken when he had to resign his membership of the party to become a justice of the Supreme Court of South Australia.

In 1942, Elliott entered another long-term relationship and that was with his wife, Elizabeth Teesdale Smith, another lawyer and communist who, like Elliott, used her relatively advantaged background and con­siderable talents on behalf of others. She was the first woman to lead a trade union in South Australia—my former trade union, the clerks union.

Together, Elliott, Elizabeth and their friend and comrade, Harry Krantz, worked to bring about the first common rule industrial award for white-collar clerical workers, the so-called clerks award. That was truly a monumental advance in industrial relations, providing for the first time an award that included a classification structure based on different levels of work that clerks undertook.

Elliott was also passionate about improv­ing the lot of workers who were injured on the job and took on many workers compen­sation cases that provided legal precedents, which are still used today and which became the hallmark of the work of the legal firm he established, Johnston and Johnston, now known as Johnston Withers. He particularly took on WorkCover cases or workers compensation cases for the Greek and Italian migrant communities in Adelaide, who of course worked mainly in the manufacturing sector.

Elliott did not use his legal skills just for industrial matters; he took on many well-known civil and criminal trials, as outlined in Penelope Debelle's excellent biography Red Silk. He and the other lawyers in his firm took on cases arising from protests against the Vietnam War, protests against apartheid in South Africa, cases about women's rights, sex discrimination and native title matters. Not all were successful but Elliott would always give it his best shot and his firm continued to accept many referrals from the Law Society's Poor Persons Legal Assistance Scheme.

As was said by everyone at his memorial service, Elliott was a brilliant legal practitioner and had appeared in the High Court and the Privy Council. By the end of the 1960s, he had reached the stage in his career when, had he not been a communist, he would have been a shoe-in for an appointment as a QC. His name was put forward for that position by the then Chief Justice John Bray but was rejected by the then Hall Liberal government because of Elliott's mebership of the Communist Party—a very controversial decision in South Australia and a decision that was overturned when Labor was elected, and the then Labor Premier, Don Dunstan, made Elliott a justice.

Elliott continued to combine his commit­ment to justice with his legal career. He was particularly supportive of Indigenous Austra­lians and was an inaugural chairman of the Aboriginal Legal Rights Movement and continued as co-patron of that organisation, along with Lowitja O'Donoghue, until his death.

In 1983, Elliott resigned his membership of the CPA and took up the Bannon govern­ment's initiative to join the bench and he was known then as the 'communist judge'. He served until his retirement and in 1989 was appointed lead commissioner of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody and delivered a seminal report into that tragic matter.

It was said at his memorial service that we are unlikely to see a man like Elliott Johnston again. Sadly, I have to agree.