UTS Honorary Doctorate Occasional Address

Chancellor, Pro-Vice-Chancellor, Faculty Dean, Director and members of Council, learned academic staff, distinguished guests, and most importantly, graduating students, and your families and friends.

I acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora nation, the traditional custodians of the land upon which we meet today. The Gadigal are a people of saltwater and sandstone, and we travel through this beautiful city of Sydney being reminded of that connection to country with every Harbour glimpse and sandstone building block. I pay my respects to their elders, past and present.

As you have heard, I am both a graduate of, and a former lecturer at, UTS. I have very much enjoyed my links with the University over the years, including work with the faculty on mentorship and equitable access, and with the Brennan Justice and Leadership Program. I am extremely honoured to have been accorded this Honorary Doctor of Laws.

This award is but one aspect of a very big year of change for me indeed. I was appointed to the Federal Court of Australia in July last year, after nearly 34 years of working as a barrister. I had never practised in a number of areas of the Court’s work – particularly employment law, and intellectual property – and this change involved learning swathes of new information in a short period of time so as not to look like an idiot. I am sure I share this experience with today’s graduating students.

And you are about to have that experience again. Some of you will be going into your graduate professional roles – even if you have been working in law already, as I suspect many of you have been – but now, working as a lawyer. I am sure that the practical academics of the UTS degree will serve you well in finding an interesting and challenging role.

And law is interesting and challenging. Happily the era of aggression in advocacy, and presenteeism in law firms as the main marker of a valuable lawyer, seems to be receding. I was, during my term as President of the NSW Bar, an advocate for flexibility and acceptance of work-life balance, in particular in the context of caring responsibilities, but also mindful of the personal value of the year I took away from full-time practice during which time I lectured here at UTS, as a period of readjustment and re-setting after six years of study and seven years at the bar.

I did my degree here part-time, while working first as a Judge’s Associate and later as a barrister’s personal assistant. In each of those roles I gained a valuable insight into how the sausage of law was made – the facts that get fed into the mincer, then coated with the skin of legal principles, that come out fully formed, as a delicious judgment. I can say delicious because I am very much enjoying writing judgments in my new role.

I enjoyed studying part time although it was a fairly punishing schedule – 6-9pm, three nights a week. We were then located in the Markets campus, which had the added benefit of a swift detour through Chinatown for a takeaway dinner before the train home from Central. I still have friends today with whom I studied at UTS, and I trust that you will also take with you fond memories of the much fancier surroundings of the new Law Faculty premises, and the friends you made – possibly while drinking at the Agincourt Hotel after exams.

Even if you do not intend to practice law, studying a law degree means that you will never look at legislation and rules in the same way. You will be that friend who reads the damages waiver at a fun fair and says “that wouldn’t exclude gross negligence! Let’s gooooo”. I confess I had a Thornton v Shoe Lane Parking discussion with one of my sons in the line at the Ferris wheel at the Royal Easter Show last week, when the exclusion clause appeared on the back of the ticket given to us after we had paid. Being my child is such fun.

I have to confess that I do not recall who spoke at my graduations, either for my BA at UNSW or at my UTS law graduation. I have spoken at graduation ceremonies before and suspect that my words there may not now be recalled either. Doubtless with this issue in mind, the invitation to give this Occasional Address suggested that I make some “light-hearted and memorable observations of relevance to the graduating students”. In an attempt to sell you on a career of litigation, I thought I’d give you a few examples of interesting cases during my time at the Bar.

One of the most memorable was when I acted for a sight-impaired woman who had a seeing-eye dog (not, I hasten to say, an official Guide Dog, for reasons that will become clear in a moment). The small charity which provided her with the seeing-eye dog – the dog’s name was Jean – required my client to travel every few years for a residential training course and to work with the dog trainer, who was married to the founder of the charity. One year, my client returned home not only with the freshly updated Jean but also with the dog trainer. The charity founder was understandably not happy about this turn of events. Unfortunately she managed her feelings inappropriately by sending her son to fetch the dog back (what is known as the extra-judicial remedy of “self-help”). This involved waiting outside my client’s apartment, and pushing her over in the street, then stuffing Jean in the back of a station wagon.

I was instructed by Legal Aid. We got a mandatory injunction from the Supreme Court that Jean be returned. I would like to say that it was a great triumph of my advocacy, but in reality it’s not hard to get a seeing-eye dog returned to a sight-impaired person when that person has been injured in the process. Again unsurprisingly, we were successful in the District Court and got that rarest of creatures, punitive damages.

Another matter I did – albeit as a silk, you wouldn’t be doing this as a first-year reader – was to act for the state of NSW when a local environmental group sought to stop the State from scuttling a warship as an artificial reef off Avoca Beach. The group was called the No Ship Action Group which had to be said clearly and distinctly, and spellchecked in documents. They ran things in an interesting way – I learned about an expert they were going to call by reading about it on Twitter – but I was able to cross-examine a panel of five experts about the bio-availability of marine toxins, and as a result I no longer eat bivalves because they are filter feeders.

The State was successful (subject to some further cleaning of various parts of the ship before it went under) and the scuttling was livestreamed. Ironically given that the arguments from the Action Group included the impact on “large pelagics” (a term we used to avoid saying the word “shark”), the scuttling was delayed by a pod of dolphins playing around the ship for a good few hours. My daughter has a tshirt from the original, delayed-by-injunction scuttling date, and it’s an historic item.

I was briefed in that matter by the State Crown Solicitor. I have also done a significant number of pro bono matters, including a dispute between parents as to the burial of a Maori boy in either his father’s Australia or his mother’s New Zealand, and an inquest into the tragic death of a young man in hospital in an entirely preventable way. In each of these, I was able to use my long experience of advocacy to obtain a result for the client – let’s call it “justice” - which they would not have been able to access any other way.

Each of the cases I have mentioned was unpaid, or paid at lower-than-commercial rates, yet rank among some of the most interesting and valuable experiences I have had. I highly recommend this to you as a way of giving back to your community, and also as a way of gaining experience in some of the more unusual and rewarding cases you might come across.

Can I ask that whether you go into practice or use your degree in some other way, you look for opportunities to use your expertise and qualifications to improve access to justice for people who generally cannot afford lawyers? There is a huge range of ways in which you can do this. Large law firms usually have pro bono practice areas, and a number support community, youth, or Indigenous legal advice centres. In smaller firms, talk to your partners about being supported to work in your local CLC, or by taking on duty lawyer roles at your Local or District court. Join the Law Society or Bar Association’s Pro Bono panels. These are all ways to do practical good with the excellent education and privilege that a UTS law degree bestows.

Again, I would like to express my gratitude to the Chancellor and others who have made me so welcome here today, for the honour of this recognition, and for giving me the opportunity to address you in what, I hope, may be slightly memorable at some point in the future.

Thank you.