In
my brief term of office as Attorney-General of the Commonwealth,
two events served to establish a relationship between Sir Harry
Gibbs and myself. First, I was responsible for recommending to
Cabinet his appointment as a Justice of the High Court of Australia.
Cabinet acceptedmy recommendation. He was sworn in on 4 August,
1970. I thought of him as the obvious candidate. So did Barwick.
I proposed no alternative nominee. He replaced Sir Frank Kitto,
whose letter of resignation I had received only a few weeks earlier.
Sir
Harry's path to the High Court had been paved with disappointment.
He was appointed to the Supreme Court of Queensland in 1961. There
he soon established a reputation based on his undoubted competence,
extending to fields (such as criminal law) where his practice
at the Bar had not taken him. In 1966 the Chief Justiceship of
that Court fell vacant upon the retirement of Sir Alan Mansfield
to become Governor of the State. Many thought Gibbs to be the
appropriate choice of successor. But his juniority in the pecking
order told against him; Mack J succeeded to the office. He was
senior, but inferior in ability, to Gibbs, who viewed with concern
the prospect of a long association in office with his new Chief.
A major difference between them was that Mack CJ possessed a more
relaxed work ethic than that which actuated Gibbs in the discharge
of judicial duties.
However,
Gibbs derived some solace from an informal understanding that
he was earmarked for appointment to the then proposed Commonwealth
Superior Court, then on the drawing board as a scheme for relieving
the pressure of work on the High Court. Even in those days there
was such pressure. It has become greater since, notwithstanding
drastic limitation of rights of appeal by means of an across the
board requirement of special leave, and the ultimate establishment
of the Federal Court of Australia in 1976.
In
the meantime, Gibbs was appointed Federal Judge in Bankruptcy,
where the work load was not sufficient to absorb his energy and
talents. Some of the slack was taken up with his appointment under
a concurrent commission to the Supreme Court of the Australian
Capital Territory.
The
second event that served to establish a relationship between Gibbs
and myself was that in 1970 I instigated and then appeared as
Commonwealth Attorney in the litigation that opened the door to
effective Commonwealth trade practices legislation. This litigation
became known as the Concrete Pipes Case.1 Sir Harry
was one of the seven Justices who heard that case in March, 1971,
a hearing that was contemporaneous with ructions in the parliamentary
Liberal Party that led to my loss of office later that month.
This
was not my first appearance before a Court of which Sir Harry
was a member. I had earlier---only a week after participating
in his welcome to the Bench---appeared with WP Deane, QC and KR
Handley on behalf of the Commonwealth in Kotsis v. Kotsis,2 a case in which I was able to persuade only
Sir Harry, among a Bench of seven Justices, that the attempted
investiture of Commonwealth judicial power in the Supreme Court
of New South Wales enabled a deputy registrar of that Court validly
to make an order for interim costs in a matrimonial cause under
the Commonwealth Matrimonial Causes Act. That decision was
delivered on 24 December, 1970. Barwick and I found ourselves
in New Delhi a few weeks later, at a Commonwealth Law Conference.
I remember him making, after his fashion, a jocularly disparaging
but friendly remark about the strength of my argument.
The
tables were turned nearly twelve years later when a Court of seven
Justices unanimously overruled Kotsis, with Sir Harry in the centre seat.3
That was one of the very few High Court cases which Maurice Byers,
QC lost while in office as Solicitor-General of the Commonwealth.
He relied unsuccessfully on Kotsis to argue that a Master
of the Supreme Court of NSW had no power to exercise invested
federal jurisdiction to determine a question of privilege from
production of documents, on the ground of public interest immunity,
in an action in which the Commonwealth was a party. Between Kotsis and the HCF Case, Sir Harry, in Knight v. Knight4 supported, albeit with expressed
reluctance, the earlier decision, thus demonstrating his loyalty
to the judicial principle embodied in the doctrine of stare
decisis.
If
one seeks an underlying, albeit unexpressed, reason for Sir Harry's
dissent in Kotsis it was, I surmise,
essentially this: his basic approach to the working of the Constitution
was that the component organs of government (federal and State)
should, as far as possible, be meshed together in their working.
The investiture of federal jurisdiction in State courts---described
by Dixon as the "autochthonous expedient"---would work
with full effectiveness only if State courts were allowed to operate
in accordance with the structure of their organisation under State
law. If that meant that some invested functions would be exercised
by persons who did not hold commissions as judges of the Court,
so be it. An official such as a Master or Registrar could be a
part of the Court, even though not one of its judges. This was
the pragmatic view that appealed to Sir Harry as a lone dissentient
in Kotsis.
Sir
Frank Kitto, whose resignation paved the way for Sir Harry's appointment,
had been, in more than one sense, a formidable judge. His appointment
from the Bar in 1950 brought to the Court a luminous legal mind,
deeply versed in equity jurisprudence. He possessed a gift for
clear oral and written expression. However, great patience was
not one of his virtues: he did not suffer gladly counsel whose
contributions to argument he regarded as insufficient or deficient.
By contrast, Sir Harry's patience and courtesy were legendary.
In demeanour he was always a model judge. In many appearances
before him I never heard a discourteous or acerbic word from his
lips. He would test counsel's argument with very pertinent questions,
but never with an edge in his voice.
Kitto
was only 67 when he left the Court. I have no doubt that tensions
between himself and Barwick contributed to his decision. I remember
that when I was working with Barwick in London on a Privy Council
brief in October, 1955, he described Kitto's contribution to the
Bank Case as that of an "equity
draftsman". That was an unjust "put down": Barwick's
multiple good qualities, which I greatly admired, did not obliterate
a tendency to engage in occasional harsh criticism of others.
Participation
in the decision of the Full Court in Strickland v. Rocla Concrete
Pipes5 was a
major task faced by Sir Harry in his first year on the High Court.
What was at stake was the extent, if any, to which the corporations
power expressed in s. 51(xx) of the Constitution authorised the
enactment of Commonwealth legislation for the regulation of trade
practices. The Trade Practices Act 1965 which Barwick,
prior to his elevation to the Chief Justiceship in 1964, had pioneered
when in office as Attorney-General, was the embodiment of his
determination, as a self-styled radical Tory, to achieve reform
in this area of the law.
The
first obstacle to progress was the 62-year-old decision of the
High Court in Huddart Parker v. The Commonwealth,6 given
in the days prior to the extirpation (in the Engineers Case) of the doctrine of
reserved State powers. In short, this doctrine denied constitutional
validity to any Commonwealth law that trenched upon the supposedly
exclusive power of the States, implicitly reserved by s. 51(i),
to regulate trade and commerce conducted within their borders.
According to this old doctrine, the grant of power to the Commonwealth
by s. 51(i) to legislate with respect to inter-state trade and
commerce excluded by implication any power to legislate with respect
to intra-state trading activities.
By
1971, Huddart Parker
was an anomaly---an isolated island around which modern constitutional
principle to the contrary had developed. But because it was directly
in point, it was a road-block that had to be removed. Otherwise
the spectre of invalidity stalked the 1965 Act. I appeared for
the prosecutor in the first stage of the Concrete Pipes Case,
in the Commonwealth Industrial Court. The defendants were charged
with failure to register an agreement which, if the Act were valid,
they were liable to register. As was expected, that Court regarded
itself as bound by the decision in Huddart Parker,
which had invalidated key provisions of the Australian Industries Preservation
Act on the ground that
the corporations power did not support them. That Act was the
legislative product of the Deakin Government, which was of liberal
hue.
As
leading counsel for the Commonwealth in the Concrete Pipes
Case I had the assistance
of a galaxy of talent: Ellicott, QC (then Solicitor-General for
the Commonwealth), WP Deane, QC and AM Gleeson. We obtained leave
to appeal without difficulty, and then settled down to an argument
which lasted for six days in March, 1971. I have a vivid recollection
of an unsuccessful attempt by Richard Fullagar, QC, for one of
the respondent companies, to persuade Barwick to disqualify himself
on the ground of apprehended bias, because of his participation
in the drafting and parliamentary progress of the Act under challenge.
In the course of that argument, Barwick's displeasure was obvious.
Leading counsel for the other respondent, JW Smyth, QC, a downy
bird if ever there was one, did not join in the application---an
abstention which left Fullagar isolated.
In
contemporary conditions the argument in such a case would seldom,
if ever, be allowed to last so long. Judgment was delivered on
3 September, 1971. By then I was six months out of office, swept
to the back-bench by the onward march of troglodytic influences
in the Liberal Party which had led to John Gorton's replacement
by William McMahon. The new Prime Minister, in uttering his words
of dismissal, expressly---but hardly courageously---relied on
pressure in the parliamentary party as the ground for doing so.
The pressure was the product of the position I had taken on trade
practices and on the territorial sea issue. About the latter I
shall say more later.
The
result of the Concrete Pipes Case was that the Commonwealth lost the battle
but won the war. All the seven Justices, including Sir Harry,
disapproved of Huddart Parker as an anachronistic
relic of a bygone age. They consigned it to legal history's dust-heap.
However,
five of the Justices, not including Sir Edward McTiernan or Sir
Harry, dismissed the appeal on the ground of the inoperability
of severance provisions designed to preserve partial validity
in case the reach of the Act trespassed to some extent beyond
permissible constitutional limits. In a judgment of that signal
clarity which everyone practising before him came to regard as
a hallmark of his judicial style, Sir Harry upheld the effectiveness
of the severance provisions; in his view they were effective to
preserve the validity of the 1965 Act in its application to corporations
of the kind referred to in s. 51(xx) of the Constitution. So in
two important constitutional cases heard during his first year
of office, Sir Harry exhibited his judicial independence by delivering
powerful dissenting judgments expressed in customarily felicitous
and succinct language.
In
constitutional cases concerned with the competitive interplay
of constitutional power between the Commonwealth and the States,
his inclination was generally towards a federalist solution; tending
to be sceptical of the expansion of Commonwealth power at the
expense of the States. For example, he took a narrow view of the
external affairs power in s. 51(xxix) of the Constitution, as
illustrated by his dissenting judgment in the Territorial Sea
Case7 and later
in Koowarta v. Bjelke Petersen.8
I appeared in the first of those cases for the Commonwealth, but
in a non-speaking role, led by Maurice Byers, QC. Gough Whitlam
had paid me the compliment of instructing that I be briefed, in
recognition of the role that I had played as Attorney-General
in promoting the case for Commonwealth legislation designed to
establish legislative paramountcy in this area. That role led
one journalist---the late Ian Fitchett---to describe me as John
Gorton's "evil genius".
Sir
Harry's first judicial encounter with the case-encrusted intricacies
of s. 92 of the Constitution was in SOS Mowbray v. Mead.9 The issue
was whether a Tasmanian statute prohibiting the sale within that
State of cooking margarine to which there had been added either
a prohibited colouring substance or a prohibited flavouring substance
infringed s. 92 insofar as it applied to sales of such products
within the State by a company which had imported them for the
purpose of so selling them. The court split 4-3 in favour of the
validity of the law. To Barwick's disappointment (as he later
intimated to me) Gibbs was one of the majority. I too was disappointed
because I, with John Spender, had appeared for the importer, SOS
Mowbray, a subsidiary of Marrickville Margarine, which had led
the charge in several challenges based on s. 92 to State legislation
dealing with trade in commodities.
The
case turned on a knife's edge. One became embroiled in an argument,
originated by Barwick's epoch-making submissions in the Bank
Case, as to whether the
admitted burden on inter-State trade was direct or remote. It
is difficult to criticise the reasoning on either side of the
judicial divide. In essence the matter for decision was one of
impression. The case illustrated the high degree of technical
artificiality which had enveloped the interpretation of s. 92.
But Barwick thought that Gibbs "had let the side down"---which
was an unjust conclusion.
The
Tasmanian legislation was obviously designed to protect the local
dairy industry: there was no public health factor justifying the
prohibitions under attack. The importer would quite possibly have
done better under the simple rubric established in Cole v.
Whitfield,10 according to which the
criterion of infringement of s. 92 is the discriminatory, protectionist
impact of legislation on inter-state trade. In thinking as he
did about Gibbs's adhesion to the majority in SOS Mowbray, Barwick
was perhaps giving expression to an underlying concern that a
new member of the Court showed signs of breaking away from the
complex and technical juridical doctrines that his work as counsel
(in the Bank Case)
and as Chief Justice had developed with respect to s. 92.
In
writing about the judicial work of Sir Harry from the perspective
of an advocate, it is unavoidable that I should, in part at least,
assess his contributions to the law mainly through the lens of
my own experience of appearing before him. I make no apology for
doing so. That brings me to Hospital Products v. United States
Surgical Corporation.11
This
was a case in which the principal protagonists were denizens of
a commercial jungle in New York city. My client, Hospital Products,
in the person of one Alan Blackman, prevailed upon United States
Surgical Corporation in the person of one Leon Hirsch, who, with
his wife, controlled it, to appoint Hospital Products as the Australian
distributor of surgical stapling devices for which USSC had acquired
patent protection in the US but not in Australia. Blackman utilised
the appointment, obtained by making fraudulent assurances of his
intention to serve the interests in Australia of USSC, as a cover
for setting up an ingenious reverse engineering operation conducted
on USSC demonstration instruments obtained under the distributorship.
By means of that operation he was able to displace USSC product
with facsimile product, thus appropriating and developing the
Australian market for his own benefit in breach of a statutory
obligation, arising under the proper law of the contract, to use
best endeavours to promote the sale of USSC's product.
USSC
went into battle in the Equity Division of the Supreme Court of
NSW with the flag of fiduciary duty flying at its masthead. The
case became a leading decision on the place of this equitable
doctrine in commercial contracts. Sir Harry was in the majority
for allowing an appeal from a judgment of the Court of Appeal,
which had substituted explosive indignation for calm consideration
of principle by subjecting the whole of Hospital Products assets
to a constructive trust. Sir Harry burst the bubble of USSC's
forensic pretensions in his usual pithy way by saying:
"What is attempted
in this case is to visit a fraudulent course of conduct and a
gross breach of contract with equitable sanctions. It is not necessary
to do so in order to vindicate commercial morality, for the ordinary
remedies for fraud and breach of contract were available to USSC
........".
Lest
it be thought that Sir Harry's judgment in Hospital Products disclosed a negative
attitude to the development of principle in the field of fiduciary
duty, one need only turn to United Dominions Corporation v.
Brian Pty Limited,12 where
my victory in the former case was soon afterwards counter-balanced
by experiencing the ashes of defeat on a question not then burdened
with much authority. The question was whether "A", one
of several intending partners, was under a fiduciary duty to disclose
to the others in the course of negotiating for a partnership,
all material facts known to A, but not to the others, that might
affect a decision by an ignorant party whether or not to enter
into the proposed partnership. With characteristic circumspection,
Sir Harry forebore from propounding any general rule that "persons
negotiating for a partnership always stand in a fiduciary
relationship" to each other in the course of the negotiation.
But he added: "I have no doubt that they may sometimes do
so".13
The
issue was whether the facts of the case opened the door to fiduciary
obligation. One of the properties earmarked for inclusion in the
proposed joint venture was owned by SPL, one of the intending
venturers, which had given to UDC, another intending venturer,
in connexion with another transaction, a mortgage containing a
collateralisation clause, under the terms of which UDC was entitled
to appropriate and receive from SPL moneys that might be derived
from the proposed joint venture. UDC had not disclosed this clause
to Brian Pty Limited, one of the venturers, during the course
of negotiations. Brian was understandably put out when it found
that what otherwise would have been part of its share of the profits
had been eaten up by the operation of the collateralisation clause.
Views
will always differ as to the position taken by Sir Harry when,
in July-August, 1986, a sharp difference arose between him and
Murphy J concerning the question whether the latter should take
his seat on the Court while his conduct was under scrutiny by
a Commission, appointed by the Commonwealth Government, and constituted
by three former judges (Sir George Lush, Sir Richard Blackburn
and The Hon Andrew Wells) to consider whether Murphy's conduct
in relation to Morgan Ryan amounted to "proved misbehaviour"
within the meaning of s. 72 of the Constitution. Sir Harry's publicly
announced attitude was that his colleague should not sit while
his conduct was under investigation. Murphy's strong view to the
contrary, also publicly announced, was that he had a constitutional
right and duty to sit until his guilt of misbehaviour was established.
The
totality of my professional involvement on behalf of Lionel Murphy,
before the Senate Committee which considered the allegations concerning
Morgan Ryan, later in the High Court, led by Maurice Byers, QC
(when back in private practice), and later again in the Court
of Criminal Appeal when Murphy's conviction at his first trial
was set aside, combines to make it inappropriate for me to say
much about those unhappy and (as they appeared at the time) potentially
cataclysmic events. I confine myself to saying:
(a)
The public position adopted by Sir Harry demonstrated the
steely determination of a mild-mannered man to act as he thought
right in agonising circumstances under which a lesser person would
have taken a softer option.
(b)
History may well have taken a different course had Lionel
Murphy exercised his option of testifying before the Senate Committee.
It is a pity that Murphy, who displayed resolution during the
whole unhappy affair, did not exercise that option.
Sir Harry
went into compulsory retirement at the statutory age on 5 February,
1987. His enforced departure from the Court demonstrated the unwisdom
of the constitutional change, effected by referendum during the
lifetime of the Fraser Government, reducing the tenure of federal
judges to age 70. Sir Harry (like all the others who have followed
him in the office of Chief Justice) was very much at the height
of his powers when the statutory time clock struck, as was demonstrated
by his powerful and lucid contributions to public debate on a
number of issues for many years afterwards.
1.
Strickland v. Rocla Concrete Pipes (Concrete Pipes Case) (1971) 124 CLR 468.
2.
Kotsis v. Kotsis
(1970) 122 CLR.
3.
See The Commonwealth v. Hospital Contribution Fund of
Australia (HCF Case) (1981-1982) 150 CLR
49.
4.
Knight v. Knight
(1971) 122 CLR 114.
5.
Loc. cit..
6.
Huddart Parker v. The Commonwealth (1909) 8 CLR 330.
7.
New South Wales v. The Commonwealth; Victoria v. The
Commonwealth; Queensland v. The Commonwealth; South Australia
v. The Commonwealth; Western Australia v. The Commonwealth; Tasmania
v. The Commonwealth (Territorial Sea Case) (1975) 135 CLR 337.
8.
Koowarta v. Bjelke-Petersen (1982) 153 CLR 168.
9.
SOS Mowbray v. Mead (1971) 124 CLR 529.
10. Cole v. Whitfield
(1988) 165 CLR 360.
11. Hospital Products v. United
States Surgical Corporation (1984) 156 CLR 41.
12. United Dominions Corporation
v. Brian Pty Limited (1984-1985) 157 CLR 1.
13. Ibid.,
at 6.