Ceremonial Sitting of the Full Court to Farewell the Honourable Justice Jessup
Transcript of proceedings
RTF version - 396 KBTHE HONOURABLE JAMES ALLSOP AO, CHIEF JUSTICE
THE HONOURABLE JUSTICE SIOPIS
THE HONOURABLE JUSTICE GREENWOOD
THE HONOURABLE JUSTICE RARES
THE HONOURABLE JUSTICE JESSUP
THE HONOURABLE JUSTICE TRACEY AM RFD
THE HONOURABLE JUSTICE MIDDLETON
THE HONOURABLE JUSTICE BROMBERG
THE HONOURABLE JUSTICE KATZMANN
THE HONOURABLE JUSTICE KERR, CHEV LH
THE HONOURABLE JUSTICE PAGONE
THE HONOURABLE JUSTICE DAVIES
THE HONOURABLE JUSTICE BEACH
THE HONOURABLE JUSTICE MOSHINSKY
THE HONOURABLE JUSTICE O'CALLAGHAN
GUEST OF THE BENCH
THE HON MICHAEL BLACK AC QC
MELBOURNE
9.30 AM, THURSDAY, 13 APRIL 2017
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ALLSOP CJ: Welcome to the farewell sitting for our colleague Justice Jessup.
I acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which we gather, the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation. I pay my respects to their elders past and present.
I particularly wish to acknowledge the family of Justice Jessup, his wife, Merryl; mother, Peggy; daughter, Simone; and son-in-law, Graeme Pereira; sister, Sue White; brother, Peter; and grandchildren, Fox and Otto Pereira.
I would also like to acknowledge the Honourable Michael Black AC QC, former Chief Justice of the Court, who is sitting with us on the Bench today, Chief Justice Bryant, as well as colleagues and former colleagues of this Court, members of the Court of Appeal, the Supreme Court, the Federal Circuit Court and the AAT, and ladies and gentlemen.
It is with great sadness we say farewell to our colleague, Justice Jessup, but with great joy that we celebrate the contribution and achievements that he has made to the legal and intellectual life of the court and the country.
Justice Jessup, let me begin by extending the gratitude of the Court and its officers, and my personal thanks, for the dedication, distinction and sense of duty with which you have served for over a decade. Others will speak more fully of your prowess at the bar. I wish to say something of your time in the Court. And may I begin by personally thanking you for your support and plain-spoken advice in the years I have had the privilege to be Chief Justice of this Court.
To give proper context to the task of speaking of your contribution, I should commence by noting that when you joined the Court in 2006 you were the leader of the labour Bar in Victoria, whose services were regularly sought Australia-wide. You joined the Court and immediately turned your hand not only to the labour and employment and public law work of the Court, but to subject matters distinct from that work. In particular, taxation and intellectual property cases attracted your interest and dedicated skill. In particular in those areas, but not limited to them, you applied yourself with energy and skill in a way that is a model of the development of judicial skill.
One of the features of this Court's jurisdiction is its diverse range of specialised and challenging work, in which many practitioners spend their whole working lives. One great challenge of this Court and its Judges is to expand the skill and knowledge of Judges into these areas to foster and deepen the skill of the Court as a whole. You epitomised the successful meeting of that challenge. Your work across the Court has been praised by all who read it.
It is as, however, as a Labour Law specialist that your work has been enormously influential. Your judgments reflect a deep understanding and encyclopaedic knowledge of the evolution of the statutory regulation of labour relations in Australia since federation. Employment and industrial matters are areas of the law that address head-on questions of what it is to be part of a society, where power resides in that society and how such power is imagined, construed and negotiated. You understood this, and you understand this, and, more importantly, perhaps, you understood that the role of a Judge in this Court is to conduct and decide every matter with even temperament and fair-mindedness. That approach quickly led to universal acknowledgment of you across ideological divides as a just and highly respected Trial and Appellate Judge. This was equally true of your judgments in other areas of the Court's jurisdiction, of course. Your abiding concern has always been that all parties, including those unrepresented, had the best chance to put their case and that they put it.
The breadth of your influence of your work in the labour and employment area is nowhere more apparent than in the many adverse action cases which you determined under the Fair Work Act. Your judgments have been particularly influential in relation to the proper construction of those provisions. Many examples could be cited; others will no doubt do so.
In Thomson, you wrote a definitive judgment about the duties imposed on officers of registered organisations and consequences of dereliction of such duties. You also wrote with erudition in relation to the common law of employment in the Commonwealth Bank v Barker, as a dissenting member of the Full Court in relation to the term of mutual trust and confidence in a contract of employment. You gave an exhaustive analysis of the authorities in Australia, England and elsewhere. The High Court agreed with you, and unanimously upheld your dissent.
Those who know you appreciate the ferocity of your work ethic, your keen eye for detail and the thoroughness of your approach. Your judicial method left no stone unturned, as you maintained concern for what you have described as the archaeology of the Act. The undertaking of such legislative excavation betrays a mind at work that appreciates the evolutionary nuances of the law. The jurisprudence of the Court is the richer for your efforts.
You have given generously to the collegiate life of the Court, in particular participating in important committee work over the whole of the decade or more that you've been on the Court. Perhaps it was the technical expertise I am told honed in earlier days in rallies that led you to embrace the technological change and implement it in your own courtroom and in your own working life. You have been one of the most passionate drivers behind the electronic court file, which is the digital record of the court, that has transformed and is transforming the court. You have pioneered in-court use of that electronic court file, and you have done away with hard copy documents and authorities in favour of digital files.
Your colleagues and staff note your intellectual curiosity has never been tempered by your heavy workload, and that you assume a gleeful expression when a tricky point of industrial law enters your docket. They all tell stories of your love of cricket and AFL, and describe a recent occasion when you nearly fell off your chair upon a rumour of Gary Ablett Jr's return to Geelong. Your humour and ability to impersonate are the stuff of Federal Court legend. Everyone speaks of your quiet decency and kindness. You have made my time as Chief Justice for four years easier by your hard work, your capacity, your insight and your honest plain speaking. You have the gratitude of the Court and the Australian people for a distinguished career as a fine Judge.
The Honourable Kevin Andrews, on behalf of the Attorney-General.
THE HONOURABLE K. ANDREWS MP: May it please the court, and, sir, may I too acknowledge the traditional owners of the land, the Wurundjeri people.
It's a great pleasure to be here today on this occasion to farewell and to celebrate the career of the Honourable Justice Christopher Jessup, and may I say, sir, at the outset that the Attorney-General, Senator Brandis, regrets that because of ministerial requirements he is unable to attend on this special occasion, but has asked me to extend to you, sir, the Government's most sincere thanks and to convey his best wishes for you in your future beyond today.
Your Honour retires today after more than a decade of dedicated service to the Federal Court of Australia, which is the culmination of a long and distinguished career in the law. And it's a testament to the respect that you command that so many current and former distinguished members of the judiciary are present here to farewell you today. And, in particular, I acknowledge, and I understand are in court, the Honourable Susan Crennan, the former Justice of the High Court of Australia, and, indeed, a former Federal Court Judge; the Honourable James Allsop, the Chief Justice of the Federal Court; the Honourable Diana Bryant, the Chief Justice of the Family Court of Australia; the Honourable Michael Black, the former Chief Justice of the Federal Court; current Judges of the Federal Court, the Federal Circuit Court of Australia and the Supreme Court of Victoria; former Federal Court Judges; and Mr Richard Niall QC, the Solicitor-General of Victoria.
And as your Honour the Chief Justice pointed out, we're honoured today by the presence of your Honour's family, your wife, Merryl; your daughter, Simone and son-in-law, Graeme; your granddaughter, Fox and grandson, Otto; your mother, Peggy; your sister, Sue; and your brother, Peter. And I understand that your son, Stuart, unfortunately, is unable to join the court this morning.
As we celebrate your Honour's achievements today, it's fitting that we reflect on the path of your career to date. Your Honour undertook schooling at Malvern Grammar, and then at Scotch College, Hawthorn. You graduated from Monash University with a Bachelor of Economics with Honours in 1968, and with a Bachelor of Laws with Honours in 1970, sharing the Supreme Court Prize with Justice Mark Weinberg, who I understand is also in court today.
Your Honour served articles with the late Honourable Justice Stephen Alley of the Australian Conciliation and Arbitration Commission, then a partner in the firm Moule, Hamilton and Derham, a prominent Melbourne industrial relations lawyer. Your Honour went on to complete a PhD at the London School of Economics in 1974, having produced a thesis on the operation of industrial relations law on trade unions in Britain and Australia. The following year, in 1975, your Honour signed the roll of counsel in Victoria and seized the opportunity to put your expertise in employment and industrial relations law into practice as a barrister.
As many here this morning will be well aware, your Honour came to be regarded as one of the leading industrial relations lawyers in the country. Your 30 years of practice at the Melbourne Bar gave you a wealth of experience in the areas of employment and industrial law. During your time at the bar, you also practised in areas including commercial law and administrative law. In 1987, in recognition of your experience, skill and leadership within the legal profession, you were appointed Queen's Counsel. Your qualities and impressive capacity as a barrister have been described in glowing terms by your peers. I am told you dealt with your briefs meticulously, always holding yourself to the very highest of standards. I'm further advised that your Honour earned the nickname The Ice Man at the bar, by virtue of your calm unflappability in Court, in conference, and, indeed, everywhere else.
Over the course of your time at the Bar, your Honour engaged extensively with the legal profession in many other ways. You devoted your time in positions including as chairman of the Victorian Bar Council in 1992/93, as chairman of the Federal Litigation Section of the Law Council of Australia for four years from 1994, as president of the Industrial Relations Society of Victoria, and as a founding member of the Australian Labour Law Association's management committee. Your Honour published widely during your career, particularly on industrial law, including contributions to the Australian Journal of Labour Law and other publications.
In light of your numerous achievements and significant contributions, as well as your highly successful career, it perhaps seems only natural that your Honour was appointed to the Federal Court in 2006. indeed, I understand it came as no surprise to those around you when you were asked to serve on the Bench. At the time of your Honour's elevation to this Court, you have been praised for your excellent knowledge of the law, your diligence, and, indeed, your integrity. In addition to your credit, your inner ice man apparently survived your passage to the Bench. Your Honour has been complemented on your calmness and courtesy on the bench, which, I am advised, withstood regular provocations from both unrepresented litigants and intemperate counsel from time to time. It has been suggested that this tolerance could perhaps be attributed, at least in part, to your Honour's regular exercise regime and practice of yoga.
Other aspects of your Honour's approach to the bench merit a mention too. Your Honour is reportedly a fan of Gilbert and Sullivan's works, and I understand that having attended a production of Pirates of Penzance in Sydney, you found yourself with the rare and enviable opportunity to employ Gilbertian lyrics to assist you in construing the Fringe Benefits Tax Assessment Act 1936. In Virgin Blue Airlines Proprietary Limited v The Commissioner of Taxation, a 2010 case, the issue at hand related to whether car parking facilities at an airport were provided "at or in the vicinity of a person's primary place of employment", hence the interpretation of the word vicinity was pivotal. Your Honour explained:
We are also entertained by the notion, given to us in The Pirates of Penzance, that a band of pirates might have it in mind to engage in a kind a mass nuptial with the Major-General's daughters, an idea apparently rendered the more feasible because there was "... a doctor of divinity ... located in this vicinity".
You went on, your Honour:
In this context, "vicinity" was used in a sense which implied convenience of access for an immediate purpose.
Your Honour's ability to express concepts so clearly through the seamless incorporation of literary allusions will no doubt be sorely missed on the bench.
Having reflected on your Honour's achievements today, it is perhaps logical to turn our minds to what your Honour's future may hold. Retirement, of course, marks a new and exciting chapter in one person's life, wherein one has the opportunity to pursue passions for which one previously had insufficient time. I understand that your Honour has a keen interest in sports cars, and that, indeed, in younger years your Honour enjoyed rally car driving. Perhaps a return to the racetrack or the rally course is imminent.
I'm also told that your Honour's time on the bench, you also had time to oversee of your Peerick vineyard near Avoca. I'm reliably informed that your Honour's wine is of excellent quality and graces the wine lists of several fine establishments in the area. I understand that you not only established your own vineyard, but undertook a Bachelor of Applied Science in Wine Science from Charles Sturt University via distance education. So perhaps your Honour will enjoy having more time to dedicate to your passion of winemaking, and I trust your friends and family will be not too reluctant in reaping the rewards of this hobby. In the near future, I understand your Honour is also looking forward to a coming trip to Israel, as well as spending plenty of time watching cricket at the MCG. Perhaps, most importantly, I trust your Honour's retirement will also provide more time for you to spend with your beloved family.
So, in closing, it seems fitting to offer a quote from the great W.S. Gilbert, which I have adapted ever so slightly to suit our present purposes. If I may be so bold to venture a sentiment on your Honour's behalf, I suggest that as a retiring Judge the culminating pleasure that you treasure beyond measure is the gratifying feeling that your duty has been done.
Your Honour, on behalf of the Government and the people of Australia, please accept our most sincere thanks for your significant contribution to the Federal Court of Australia and for your tireless efforts in the administration of justice in this country. May it please the Court.
ALLSOP CJ: Thank you. Mr Alstergren, president of the Australian Bar Association.
MR W. ALSTERGREN QC: If it pleases. I acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land upon which we meet and pay my respects to their elders past and present. I have the honour of appearing on behalf of the Australian Bar Association and each of the independent Bars of Australia to celebrate your Honour's career on the Court, and, of course, at the Bar, and to truly thank your Honour for the extraordinary service you have provided this court, the public, and, of course, our profession.
Your Honour has many admirers nationally. One described your Honour as the clearest thinker in a generation of Australian industrial lawyers. You are known as the quintessential barrister. As we've heard, you came from Monash with an Honours degree in both economics and law, sharing the Supreme Court Prize with the great Mark Weinberg. After articles, you went to London and earned your PhD. Upon returning to Australia, you immediately came to the Bar, something we will always be very grateful for. I will leave it to my learned friend, Ms Batrouney, the president of your home Bar, to speak more fully about your Honour's career as a barrister, the extraordinary contribution you made to the Victorian Bar, and, of course, in your role as chairman of the Bar.
At the Bar, your Honour was known as a masterful advocate. You had three readers, all of whom appeared with your Honour as juniors, and all who say they learnt an enormous amount from you. You engaged them in the true traditions of the Bar in a lot of your work. Whilst they would say that much of what they drafted for you may have been left on the editing floor, they learnt an enormous amount. They learnt about your Honour's style of economic and incisive submissions. They also learnt how to cross-examine.
Your readers, Geoffrey Giudice, Simon Marks and Bryan Mueller, all went on to highly successful careers in the law, much with thanks of your Honour. Geoffrey Giudice practised at the Victorian Bar for 13 years and then served as a Judge of this Court, and as President of the Australian Industrial Relations Commission. Simon Marks is a leading silk and a member of the Victorian Bar Council. And Bryan Mueller practised for more than 15 years at the Bar, and is now a member of and Melbourne director of Workplace Litigation, a specialist industrial law firm.
As counsel, your Honour was always known for your astuteness, steely resolve and self-effacing nature. Your Honour always saw very clearly the other side's case. A great strength, even if occasionally, in meeting the case, your Honour ended up meeting a much better argument than your Honour had ever seen or made. I will leave it to my learned friend, Ms McLeod, to elaborate in detail on your Honour's heroic defence of the independent bars as chairman of the Victorian Bar in the face of an attack by the competition theory ideologues. However, it would be remiss of me not to express the gratitude of the national Bars for that effort.
Your Honour came to the Bench in June 2006 with a formidable and justified reputation as a first class academic, a national leader in the profession, especially in the areas of Industrial Law, Commercial Law and Intellectual Property. Over your 18 and a half years as silk, your Honour led many leading juniors, including now Justice O'Callaghan, who was appointed in February this year to replace your Honour in the Victorian Registry. Your Honour was also well known and highly respected for having treated barristers and litigants, especially litigants-in-person, with great courtesy, even when, perhaps, sometimes this was not always fully deserved.
On the Bench, your Honour formed great and lasting friendships, one with an old adversary at the bar, Peter Gray. You both have love of law, especially Industrial Law, a passion for access to justice, and perhaps equally importantly, the Geelong Football Club. Discussions on the weekend's game and recruitment off-season would often transcend the corridors of this Court. It even influenced matters internationally. Justice Gray was at a conference in Hong Kong. A light sleeper, he heard in the middle of the night, about 2 in the morning, a ping from an incoming text on his mobile. It caused him to immediately sit up, read the text and call the front desk and seek access to Australian television to check whether a crisis that had been alleged had, in fact, occurred. The ping was a text from your Honour to tell Justice Gray that Collingwood had beaten Geelong in the finals. His Honour Justice Gray had a very long trip home after getting that news.
Your Honour is also well known and highly respected for the dedication of your judicial role, and you remain a great example to all of us. Your retirement is a great loss to the Bench and to the administration of justice. Thank you for the extraordinary service and the honour you have done the Australian profession. On behalf of the Australian Bar Association and each of the barristers of Australia, may I wish your Honour and your family a fulfilling and rich retirement. May it please the Court.
ALLSOP CJ: Thank you. Ms McLeod, President of the Law Council of Australia.
MS F. McLEOD SC: May it please the Court. I too acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which we meet, the Wurundjeri People of the Kulin Nation, and pay my respects to elders past and present.
It is a very great privilege to appear this morning representing the Law Council and its constituent Law Societies and Bar Associations to pay tribute to your Honour on the occasion of your retirement from the Bench. I echo the remarks of previous speakers who have touched on your Honour's accomplishments and your distinguished years of service through your Honour's many years of practice as a Barrister of immensely persuasive intellectual power of advocacy; in your contributions to our professional associations, including as Chairman of the Victorian Bar Council; as the founding member of the Australian Labour Law Association Management Committee; and as Chairman of the Federal Litigation Section of the Law Council of Australia, a time in which your Honour was incredibly productive and highly regarded; and, of course, for more than a decade of service as a Judge of this Court.
Degrees with Honours from Monash University in Economics and Law, followed by your PhD in Industrial Relations Law were sound foundations for your practice and later pre-eminence in Industrial Law. Your Honour's doctoral thesis, Some Aspects of the Operation of the Law Upon Trade Unions and Their Organisational Components in Britain and Australia, became indispensable to both legal and industrial relations researchers. Indeed, I understand the number of readers interested in your comparative analysis had something of a kick-along with your appointment to this Court.
Your Honour is described as a serious intellect of great courage. Few in our profession can forget the heroic stance your Honour and others took in the early 1990s, when the Bar Council faced attacks on the independence, even the very existence, of the Independent Bar. The attacks came through law reform papers and draft laws and were mounted, in large part, through the press, who appeared to have the benefit of confidential briefings well ahead of the rest. The proposed legislation was bad, but popular in some quarters. Your Honour marshalled skilful arguments, challenging the assumption of those who asserted that the Bar was uncompetitive and should be regulated out of existence. Many thought the battle was lost, but your Honour valiantly persisted, carefully and persuasively making the case for the Bar's existence. In the end, through the combined efforts of the Bar leadership, including your Honour, the Bar prevailed and survived where others did not. It has led your colleagues to remark that if you're going to war with Chris Jessup beside you, all will be well.
Some words from the War-Song of Dinas Vawr by Thomas Love Peacock, a favourite, I believe, are apt:
We made an expedition;
We met a host, and quelled it;
We forced a strong position,
And killed the men who held it.
Another fine example of your Honour's skill with words may be seen at Melbourne Law School's event in 2015 in the Judges in Conversation series hosted by this Court. Professor Neil Duxbury, Professor of Law at the London School of Economics, argued that if your rights are written down in constitutional form, you know where your rights are and what your rights are. Your Honour added in agreement that if rights were not in the Act and not in the Bill, they were not fundamental rights at all. Your Honour took an opposite view, however, to that of Professor Duxbury on laws being written in plain English. Your Honour argued that it made English plain, but the definition obscure:
We might be able to see it, we might be able to read it, but are not able to understand what it implies.
No surprise, then, that you are privately more fond of the Welsh poets than the Fair Work Act.
Your Honour has also been described as a distinguished editor notably of the late Justice Stephen Alley's Second Edition on Industrial Law in Victoria, as a dry wit apparent to many in Chambers or in the Essoign, overhearing conversations punctuated by sporadic roars of laughter. You are also a judicious expert on wines, especially shiraz, and, as we have heard, a computer whiz, embracing technology long before laptops and mobile phones were de rigueur at the Bar. It was rumoured that your laptop at the Bar Table occasionally was observed featuring not the rolling transcript and exhibits, but reports of the rolling weather impacting upon your vines in the Victorian Pyrenees.
As Mr Andrews has noted, your Honour has always been unflappable. On one occasion your Honour was mid-flight on your feet, making a submission in Court with a glass of water in hand. Your Honour dropped it, with dramatic effect, but without stopping, you continued with the submission as if it had always been intended. In addition to your Honour's professional learning, experience and intelligence, you are also a man of great humanity. I extend to you the best wishes of the profession to you, your wife, Merryl, and your family, for your future and to the next adventure. May it please the Court.
ALLSOP CJ: Thank you. Ms Batrouney, President of the Victorian Bar.
MS J. BATROUNEY QC: May it please the Court. I too acknowledge the traditional owners of the land upon which we meet, the Wurundjeri People of the Kulin Nation, and pay my respects to their elders past and present. I appear on behalf of the Victorian Bar to pay tribute to your Honour's service in the law to date. I say "to date" because your Honour's friends doubt that the bucolic delights of your vineyard will keep your Honour fully occupied for long.
Your Honour signed the Bar Roll in February 1975 and read with Stuart Murdoch, later a Judge of the County Court. In your very first year, your Honour served on an ad hoc one year Standing Committee of the Bar, the Advisory Committee on Civil Law Reform, headed by Richard Searby QC and Peter O'Callaghan QC. In 1976 your Honour was one of the founding members of the newly established list of Wayne Duncan. Your Honour had three readers: Geoffrey Giudice, Simon Marks and Bryan Mueller. You took silk in 1987. Preeminent in Industrial Law, your Honour maintained diversity in your practice: General Commercial Law, Administrative Law, Tax and occasionally Intellectual Property Law. You also appeared in the High Court in a Crimes Act challenge to police interview procedures.
Your Honour's coolness under fire is legendary. Let me give a couple of examples. In one High Court case, your Honour read a passage from the judgment of six High Court Justices. It was the Court at its most dense and impenetrable. Justice Gaudron said, "Dr Jessup, what do you mean?" Your Honour responded, coolly, "We mean what their Honours mean." In another High Court argument, your Honour cited Portus, a landmark 1972 High Court decision. Your Honour asserted that no member of this Court has ever doubted the authority of that decision. Justice McHugh said, "Well, I don't know about that." Your Honour's immediate response was, "Well, perhaps your Honour will be the first." In this Court, Justice Peter Gray differed from your Honour when you were counsel. Your Honour retorted, "Well, your Honour, one of us is wrong, and it's not I."
Over and above a substantial national practice at the highest level, your Honour's service to the community at the Bar was extraordinary. Your Honour served more than three years on the small seven silks executive committee of the Bar Council, including your years as vice-chairman and chairman. As Ms McLeod has outlined, they were arguably the most perilous in the history of our Bar. In addition to dealing with that crisis, within days of your Honour's election as chairman of the Bar Council, there was a change of government in Victoria and the new government abolished the Accident Compensation Tribunal, dismissing its judges. Your Honour began your first chairman's newsletter with the wry comment that the first day of October 1992 was not the best day to ascend to office. Your Honour was an outstanding Bar chairman. It's because of your Honour's efforts and those of the other Bar chairmen through those challenging years that the independent Bar is still here.
Chief Justice Allsop has spoken of your Honour's substantial contribution as a member of this court to the development of labour and industrial law jurisprudence. Further afield, your Honour has sat on matters covering the full gamut of IP law, involving a variety of scientific and technical areas, patent and design cases ranging from pharmaceuticals to mining equipment, enzymes in food preparation, blind control mechanisms, truck lights and vacuum cleaners. In this Court, your Honour demonstrated remarkable understanding in managing a hot tub of five professors of organic chemistry discussing, and I quote, "a typical Friedel-Crafts Acylation using aluminium chloride in a carbon disulphide solvent." Not the most relaxing hot tub, by the sounds of it.
There have, however, been occasional moments in which your Honour has demonstrated a degree of what might be called unworldliness. In one IP case, your Honour was puzzled by the reference to burritos: "What is it? Something you eat? I thought it was an animal of some kind. Am I confusing it with some other little animal that runs around?" Junior counsel for the applicant observed that the word is also Spanish for "little donkey". "Yes, that's it, donkeys. That's the word I had in mind." Finally, it was explained to your Honour that it is a generic name for a wrap, inside of which you have spicy chicken and things like that – and beans, Mexican stuff. Similarly, in a consumer law case concerning designer jeans, your Honour expressed complete surprise that anyone would pay extra for jeans bearing particular brands.
As the Chief Justice has mentioned, a major contribution on the Court has been your Honour's chairmanship of the Electronic Court File and Electronic Trials Committee. Since 1 July 2014 launch, no new paper court files have been created. As at a few weeks ago, the court had 39,000 digital court files, consisting of nearly 340,000 documents. The court is also moving towards digital trials. On behalf of the profession as a whole, the Bar thanks your Honour for the meaningful and close liaison with both branches of the profession in the digital revolution, a key factor in the success of that project.
You practised at the bar for more than 31 years, eighteen-and-a-half of those as Queen's Counsel. You were a courageous and effective leader of the Bar through the most difficult times, when our very existence as an independent Bar was under real threat. Your Honour has been an outstanding judge of this Court for nearly 11 years, cut short only by the statute. On behalf of the Victorian Bar, I wish your Honour, your wife, Merryl, and your family joy in your retirement from this Court. May it please the Court.
ALLSOP CJ: Thank you.
MS B. WILSON: May it please the Court, I appear on behalf of the Law Institute of Victoria and the solicitors of this state to farewell your Honour, Justice Christopher Jessup after a distinguished career as a member of the Federal Court of Australia.
Your Honour has had a number of court associates in almost 11 years on this bench who have thrived in harmonious chambers. They have benefited enormously from experience, professionally and personally, guided by your Honour's love and respect for the law and exemplary work ethic. Each has learnt very much from a highly principled judge that the law is about the principles without the personal and also the dignity of being courteous and respectful and to eschew ego. Some first impressions left lasting ones. One prospective associate recalls attending chambers for an interview with your Honour and being struck by a formidable presence across the desk. Your Honour, in fact, reminded the applicant of Professor Albus Dumbledore, the benevolent headmaster of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry in the Harry Potter books, but minus the flowing grey hair and beard. One must quickly and reassuringly add that it is a much more reassuring image than visualising Lord Voldemort.
With great respect, it is difficult to add more to your Honour's record, which this morning speakers have justly acclaimed. I hope, however, some brief contributions might complement this ceremony. Leading industrial relations and employment consultant, John Cooper, once a solicitor of the former Moule, Hamilton and Derham, where your Honour served articles, recalls countless hours seeping into many long nights and weekends, working with your Honour as a barrister. During this exhaustive preparation, Mr Cooper remembers your Honour's meticulous methods for long-term, highly strategic battles, often against the same litigants, and attending sites, factories or picket lines to witness and absorb. Similarly, Justice Michael McDonald of the Supreme Court of Victoria, tells of times as your Honour's junior, observing brilliant, persuasive advocacy in the High Court, or those left with no escape when your Honour zeroed in.
On the bench, your Honour developed an inevitable, much rounded perspective of the law. No longer an advocate arguing a particular disposition, but a judge with a deeper, more substantial engagement to find the correct answer. With a deep respect for tradition, your Honour ensured the court was run formally and appropriately, where some unrobed lawyers received a corrective dressing down for being so. A non-interventionalist, your Honour's familiar poker face could also turn, so to speak, a running flush with unprepared parties or those exposed by close scrutiny of filling timelines. On such occasions and all others, your Honour was never impolite, no matter the tone of who stood at the bar table.
Your Honour's enjoyment of cricket mirrors the everyday interest of the proverbial man in the street. Emerging from chambers for an updated score, pleased with more Victorians picked in the test team and Boxing Day at the MCG. Just two days ago, in this very courtroom and about this time, your Honour delivered two final judgments before, on the first stroke after midnight that begins Easter Day, the constitution will draw statutory stumps. Ironically, a solicitor for the applicant in both matters apologised for being unrobed and sought leave to appear so, to which your Honour reassured him that it was perfectly satisfactory. It took 30 minutes to make the necessary declarations and orders before your Honour's reasons were published. Executive assistant Jessica Aldridge then turned and looked up to see your Honour's eyebrows jump to signal her to adjourn the court. Unsurprisingly, there was nothing said to mark the moment, let alone any fuss. Your Honour will be long-revered and missed. May it please the Court.
ALLSOP CJ: Thank you. Justice Jessup.
JESSUP J: Mr Andrews, Mr Alstergren, Ms McLeod, Ms Batrouney, Ms Wilson, thank you for those helpful submissions. Your application, which I take it, is unopposed, is granted. As I was listening to your submissions this morning, I did note a few matters that perhaps ought to be raised with counsel, particularly on questions of fact. I needn't to have any concern, because there is one future member of the Bar over here who has been attempting to make an objection for some time, but without any success, which was quite common in my Court.
There are only two things that call for a response in the submissions that have been made this morning. The first is the suggestion that the bell will toll at midnight tonight. That's not quite right. The bell actually tolls on midnight on Saturday, as it is on Sunday that I have my 70th birthday. But you won't see me after this morning's proceeding, and for any Christians who are present, I should assure you that on this occasion there will be no rising on the third day.
The other observation I have to make relates to the submission that Peter Gray and I share two passions in equal order: a passion for access to justice and a passion for the Geelong Football Club. That's not quite right, but I won't tell you which is the more important.
It has been a great honour to serve as a member of this Court, a Court which did not exist when I commenced practice at the Bar about 42 years ago. In the 10 years preceding the establishment of the Court, in the regulation of industrial relations in Australia, the Rule of Law had travelled a difficult and at times uneven road. It was, in my estimation, in no small measure the result of the respect which this Court promptly attracted to itself in its early years that this situation was turned around. The incorporation of responsibility for the enforcement of federal workplace laws into a Court with increasingly active Commercial and Public Law jurisdictions has, of course, made a significant contribution to the successful reorientation of our Industrial Law framework in contemporary times. I am proud to have been a member of the Court at this point in history, and to have had judicial colleagues with the energy and the erudition necessary to rise to the challenges involved.
I'm bound to say that from my own perspective, my time on the Court has been all too brief. On one way of looking at it, that is a selfish observation, but it has some objective basis in the terms in which one finds oneself addressed in casual conversation by members of the profession and others. My time on the Court could be divided into two parts. In the first part, people always seemed to treat me as a recent appointment. It was at least five years before they desisted from making such probing inquiries as, "How are you finding life on the Court?" Then, almost overnight, the interrogatory became, "How much longer do you have to go?" For those of you who are interested, the answer is three days, but it is a mercy that the administrators in the system have not listed me for duty tomorrow or Saturday.
During the brief time to which I have referred, I have been assisted by two executive assistants to whom I owe much: Melanie McGrath, as she was then, and, more recently, and until the bell tolls, Jessica Aldridge, herself an institution within the Victorian Registry. I shall not burden these brief observations with an elaboration of the contribution which executive assistants make to the organisation of work within a Judge's docket, but you may take it as a given that they make the system work. I owe a lot to the contributions of Melanie and Jess and thank them for making life in chambers the agreeable experience that it was.
I will not mention my associates by name, but I acknowledge the energetic and conscientious contributions of all of them. If my judgments were more or less free of blunders and bloopers, it was their doing. It makes me particularly proud to see a number of them establishing themselves at the Bar, and they may rest assured that their progress henceforth will be monitored by a discerning but sympathetic eye.
It is also a matter of considerable pride for me to see past Presidents of the Victorian Bar holding the presidencies of both of the national representative bodies within the legal profession. It may be no more than the chance alignment of the relevant planets, but at least for the sake of my interstate colleagues who have been kind enough to sit with me here today, I cannot resist making this observation.
I regard it as a matter of great honour that happenchance caused me to serve on the Bar Council and as its chairman for 12 months in a difficult period. To say the least, they were character-building days, and I shall forever hold dear the associations which were forged then.
It has frequently been said, but there is no more solid truism than that the quality of the work of a court – any court, but I can only speak for this one – depends largely on the hard work, integrity and professionalism of those who appear before it. In the Victorian Registry of the Court, we have been well served by the Bar and those who instruct it. It is only after the experience of hearing a case in which one of the litigants is unrepresented that one fully appreciates what it means to have the so-call assistance of the Bar, a turn of phrase which, I freely admit, I never took really seriously until I happened to be the Judge.
I think I have covered everything and everyone. No, I must finish by acknowledging our major sponsors, without whose support today's proceeding would never have been possible. I refer, of course, to the people of Australia, by whose wisdom and foresight in 1977 a referendum was passed which introduced a refreshing and engaging atmosphere of youthfulness into occasions such as this, relatively speaking, I suppose.
Thank you, Chief Justice.
ALLSOP CJ: The Court will now adjourn.
