Stephen Conroy (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to support the matter of public importance. I was pleased to hear that Senator Canavan believed that there was some behaviour that was absolutely unacceptable. Let me read to you the following quote:

Probity may be affected by conscious bias for or against a particular litigant or class of litigants. The law compels judges who have such a bias or may reasonably be thought to have such a bias to disqualify themselves ...

That is a quote from none other than Justice Dyson Heydon from a 2002 address to an assembled gaggle of his right-wing friends. Pithy and accurate, Justice Heydon was striking at the heart of the values that underpin our society's approach to justice. But Justice Heydon and the royal commission over which he presides have departed so far from these values that their respective roles are now untenable. Furthermore, Mr Abbott's $80 million dollar royal commission has been exposed as the cynical, political Star Chamber that it is.

In February 2014 Mr Abbott repaid the favour after he himself was sent to Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship by none other than former Justice Heydon. But Mr Abbott did keep an election promise, one of the very rare examples of him doing so. He took the necessary steps to establish a royal commission that would be specifically tasked with pursuing his political opponents. There was no pretence about this at all. Its whole job was to denigrate former Prime Minister Julia Gillard and to attack, undermine and smear the current Leader of the Opposition. The terms of reference were fatalistic. They implicitly accused the trade union movement of engaging in unlawful conduct and explicitly directed the royal commission to pursue particular unions. It was immediately clear to all that this royal commission would act as the Liberal Party's publicly-funded political dirt unit. Not satisfied with just having a little dirt unit in their press secretaries gathered together under their Whip—not content with that—they wanted an $80 million plaything with coercive powers to smear their political opponents. This was a Star Chamber from the first day and it has been exposed again as a Star Chamber in the last few days.

Tony Abbott needed someone to head up this dirt unit. Enter Dyson Heydon. After a youthful appointment as a law professor, Justice Heydon was elected Dean of the University of Sydney Law School in 1978. His tenure in this role must surely have been successful, because one of his school's students at that time went on to become the Prime Minister of Australia, Mr Tony Abbott. In fact, as I said, Justice Heydon was lucky enough to examine the future Prime Minister in detail as he sat on the Rhodes scholarship committee that awarded Tony Abbott his scholarship. Surely the Prime Minister is eternally grateful for the privilege. Following a brief yet controversial stint as Justice of the New South Wales Supreme Court's Court of Appeal, Prime Minister John Howard appointed Justice Heydon to the High Court in 2003. Justice Heydon spent his 10 years on the High Court benches as a judicial activist, regularly dissenting from the moderate rulings of his colleagues and, in doing so, pursuing his right-wing ideologies in the minority.

His family has a longstanding relationship with the Liberal party. His father had even acted as an advisor to the Liberal Menzies government. So Mr Abbott had his man: a respected lawyer, an ideological right-winger, and a man whose family had enjoyed successive generations of Liberal Party patronage.