Swearing-in Ceremony of the Honourable Ian Vitaly Gzell as a Judge of the Supreme Court of New South Wales
IN THE SUPREME COURT
OF NEW SOUTH WALES
BANCO COURT
SPIGELMAN CJ
AND JUDGES OF
THE SUPREME COURT
Monday 4 February 2002
1 GZELL J: Chief Justice, I have the honour to announce that I have been appointed a Judge of the Supreme Court. I present to you my Commission.
2 SPIGELMAN CJ: Thank you, Justice Gzell. Please be seated whilst the Commission is read. Principal Registrar, would you please read the Commission.
(Commission read)
Justice Gzell, I ask you to rise and take the oaths of office; first the oath of allegiance and then the judicial oath.
(Oaths of office taken)
3 Principal Registrar, I hand to you the oaths to be placed amongst the Court's archives. Sheriff, I hand to you the Bible so that it may have the customary inscription inserted into it in order that it may then be presented to Justice Gzell as a memento of the occasion.
4 Your Honour, on behalf of all of the Judges of the Court and on my own behalf, I welcome you as a Judge of this Court. Your Honour is returning to a general practice of the law. In recent years, as you will presently hear, you have specialised in revenue law, as has been determined by the inexorable laws of supply and demand. From herein we promise you a more wide and varied diet. I look forward to many years of cooperation and service with you.
5 MR B WALKER SC, PRESIDENT NEW SOUTH WALES BAR ASSOCIATION: May it please the Court. Your Honour comes to this Court after a career as a barrister and as a member of the legal community and, indeed, as a member of the wider community which is exemplary in its service and which is daunting in the combination of high individual achievement and devotion to the common good.
6 Those are indeed broad words of praise and occasions like these have been known from time to time to attract some hyperbole, but in your Honour's case, the barest objective description of the post you have achieved, the jobs you have discharged, and the achievements as a legal scholar, advocate and advisor, makes for once the hyperbole quite absent.
7 Your Honour comes to us from Queensland, something which - it seems to be true of Queenslanders - is never forgotten, either by them or by those around them. You are but one of a distinguished band who have enriched the New South Wales Bar and the Australian Bar by moving from Brisbane to Sydney as your principal place of practice. Indeed, you are one of an extremely distinguished band in our own inner band of that kind. Whether this could be seen as a takeover, an improvement of the Sydney Bar, or as simply a huge detriment to the Brisbane Bar can be left to others to debate. Suffice it to say it has been our allied advantage to everyone in Sydney, as well as to the Australian Bar generally that your Honour took up practice in Sydney.
8 Of course, one of the things first to note about your Honour's achievements individually as a barrister is to describe your practice as having once been located in Brisbane and later located in Sydney would be quite misleading. For a start, of course, no Brisbane-based barrister who enjoys the sugar circuit was long in Brisbane during that circuit. But much more importantly, your Honour is again an exemplar of the nationalised profession - thank God they still call it private enterprise - but nationalised in the sense that your Honour practised everywhere, and everywhere in your Honour's practice did not mean simply within the Commonwealth of Australia. Your Honour's admissions were often ad hoc, but sufficiently repeated to become an enterprise, on anybody's view of that word, and included Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Singapore, New Zealand, and the Solomon Islands. And in Fiji, continuing the long intercourse between Queensland and those islands with respect to sugar, you were involved in the famous Sugar Industry Inquiry.
9 Your Honour began as a journalist with a great skill in Commercial Law. In so far as the Commonwealth Law Reports are a mark of a barrister's achievements, it can be seen that as early as 1973, when your Honour was admitted only in 1965, your Honour was being led in the High Court - alas with not complete success - by one F G Brennan QC. A mere two years later, still as a junior, just before your appointment as silk in Queensland, you had one against one K A Aiken QC. These are names which, to some in this room, may be mere names of history, albeit glorious, but an indication of your Honour's experience and the depth of your Honour's success.
10 Success at the Revenue Bar for your Honour has been so enormous that it remains the case that the cachet of a Gzell opinion is the cachet enjoyed by only a few persons and only in a few areas of the law in Australia today. Thiel's case in 1990 stands as a memorial to your Honour's determination and skill in winning, finally in the High Court, a case about a most fundamental concept of double taxation treaties to which this country is a party.
11 To praise your Honour as a barrister is to perhaps talk merely of the prerequisite to your Honour's appointment to this Court. Your Honour has done so much else which has been of benefit to the profession and the wider community.
12 Your Honour's service in Queensland to the Queensland Bar Association included high office as Treasurer and Secretary during the sixties and seventies. Your Honour's service to the organised Bar in Brisbane included, of course, that most important element of most organisations, housing, and your Honour was secretary of Barristers' Chambers in Queensland again during the sixties and seventies. But importantly, your Honour brought to bear those skills when you came to Sydney to the great advantage of the New South Wales Bar. Your Honour became, not only a director of the Barristers' Superannuation in New South Wales, but also a director of Counsel's Chambers of which you have now been chairman since 1999.
13 May I speak personally of the great assistance that your Honour has given the Bar Association in matters which concern both Counsel's Chambers and the Bar Association together.
14 Your Honour has been as well a director of the International Dispute Centre, a mark of your Honour's extra-curial interest in the process of dispute resolution and the practice of law.
15 Quite apart from that, in the scholarly part of the law, through the Business Law Section of the Law Counsel, through the Commercial Law Association, but most particularly through the Taxation Institute of Australia, your Honour has given service of a kind which is really unparalleled in one person. Your Honour has, in all of those fields, reached the highest of positions and led from the front - both in representation and scholarship terms.
16 It seems extraordinary that there is yet another section of community significance to add after this litany, but your Honour has, as your licensure from the Trinity College of London would indicate, an abiding interest in music. Your Honour's service to the community organisation for the financial and moral support of music in this country is extraordinary: the Queensland Philharmonic Orchestra, the Queensland Symphony Orchestra, the National Council of Opera Australia, regional arts organisations, have all been benefited from your Honour's leadership over a sustained period of years which makes a mere barrister gasp at the idea that you have done chamber work and appeared in leading cases at the same time.
17 Finally, perhaps last but certainly not least, your Honour has never ignored your local surroundings and you have, perhaps not with the greatest success, against the planning might of New South Wales in the form of the State Government, led the residents of the Centennial Park vicinity and it is rumoured that the Astor is about to come in for - I hesitate to say some curry - probably some other form of cuisine is what your Honour has in mind for the Astor.
18 Your Honour, you come to this bench with all the best wishes, admiration and congratulations from the Bar. We are sure you will discharge of this bench your duties with the same flair, with the same diligence, and the same excellence as you have displayed elsewhere.
19 May it please the Court.
20
MS K CULL PRESIDENT LAW SOCIETY OF NEW SOUTH WALES: May it please the Court. On behalf of the solicitors of New South Wales, it is my great pleasure to congratulate your Honour on your appointment as a Judge of the Supreme Court.
21 I adopt all that the President of the Bar Association has said in relation to your Honour's distinguished career during your thirty-six years at the bar and your eminence in the field of International Taxation Law.
22 I too wish to acknowledge your Honour's significant contribution and ongoing commitment as chair and executive member of numerous professional contractual bodies at state, national and international levels.
23 Amongst those solicitors who have instructed you, I am told your Honour is held in the highest regard, not only for your specialised but also your comprehensive general knowledge of the law. I understand your detailed opinions are distinguished by their thoroughness and accompanied by enthusiasm, interest and affability.
24 It is clear your Honour will not only maintain but enhance the intellectual rigour of this bench for the benefit of the members of our community.
25 On behalf of the solicitors of this State, may I again congratulate your Honour and wish you many satisfying years on the bench.
26 May it please the Court.
27 GZELL J: Thank you, Mr Walker and Ms Cull for your very kind remarks. I have really had a charmed life at the bar, both in Queensland initially, and in this State over the last eleven years. I cannot imagine any other profession giving the same rewards and satisfaction as does the law.
28 When I was a student at Queensland University, Walter Campbell QC, as he then was, allowed me and another law student to study in his chambers at night. He had an extensive law library and this privilege was such a wonderful thing for a young, would-be lawyer and typical of the generosity of the man.
29 In my final years as a student, I succeeded the Honourable Hulme J of this Court as associate to the late, the Honourable Sir Charles Wanstall, who later became Chief Justice of Queensland. That experience was invaluable, not only for the direction and nurture from Sir Charles and the exposure to Court procedure, but also for the valuable contacts I thought I had made amongst the solicitors instructing counsel appearing before Sir Charles. My hope was that they would brief me when I went to the Bar. Alas, this was not so. In my first six months at the bar, I earned in guineas and then in dollars the princely sum of $746.32, significantly less than the associate salary for the previous six months.
30 Walter Campbell was the President of the Queensland Bar Association when I took up chambers and he soon had me appointed as the honorary treasurer, a position which I held for a number of years. Throughout his time on the bench as Chief Justice of Queensland, as Queensland Governor, and in his retirement, the Honourable Sir Walter Campbell has maintained his spirit of friendship and generosity from which I, and others, have continued to benefit.
31 The Honourable Peter Connelly QC was a leading member of the Queensland Bar when I was admitted to practice. He later became a Supreme Court Judge and is currently a Judge of Appeal for Kiribati. In my first brief as his junior, we had an argument about some aspect of the evidence and I can remember saying to Sylvia, my wife, I had ruined my chances of ever working with him again. On the contrary, the next morning the State Crown offered me a retainer as his junior in prospective litigation, and there commenced a long relationship, both professional and social. He presented me with a red bag after a long and difficult case and I later joined the chambers of which he was head. Peter encouraged intellectual toughness. He does not brook fools. He was a significant influence in my development as a barrister. I am fortunate to enjoy his continued friendship.
32 The friendships that one does develop at the Bar are of this lasting type. I am delighted to see in Court this morning the Honourable David Jackson QC. He and I went through Queensland University together and he encouraged me to come to Sydney. There are many present and past members of the Fifth Floor Selborne Chambers in Court this morning. They welcomed me to their floor with open arms, for which I will always be grateful. Many other people have sent me messages of congratulation. I hope I can live up to their expectations of me.
33 I do not have any wise saws to share with you from my practice at the Bar except this. When I went to the Bar it was a gentlemanly profession. It became a gentlemanly and gentlewomanly profession. There was a trust between practitioner and practitioner, and between practitioners and the bench which greatly aided the administration of our legal system. I think it is very important for Bar Associations and Law Societies to work vigilantly to ensure the continued practice of the law under high ethical standards.
34 Mention has been made of my involvement in the arts. The administration of the arts, like other non-profit organisations, relies upon volunteers acting on boards of directors and committees of management. These people are overjoyed to have a lawyer with them because our training tends to enable us to see a logical solution to a problem. The gratitude of fellow workers in these organisations leads to immense personal reward to the lawyer. I would encourage practitioners to become involved in such organisations. If you do however, you must devote considerable care and attention to the task because your fellow directors or committee members will expect you to lead them in the discharge of their duties.
35 It will take me a while to adjust to my new office. I was in my new chambers last week with an IT person connecting up a computer and he said, "Well, Judge, you can't..." and I immediately turned round to find out which Judge he was addressing.
36 As many of you know, my practice in recent times has been highly specialised and has only occasionally taken me to the Supreme Court. I will be relying heavily upon counsel to educate me in the ways of the Equity Division.
37 My family understand the gratitude that I have for them in their support of my career. Sylvia and I are delighted that two of our daughters could be present with us this morning. (At least one of them is here; another is stuck in traffic I am told, but will join us for morning tea, I am sure.)
38 My mother, Lorna, is down from Queensland to be present at this ceremony. She is the most excited of us all. And she will, not before time she might say, now be able to return to her friends and acquaintances in that northern State and say, "My son, the Judge, says...".
39 Thank you, Chief Justice, for welcoming me to your Court. Thank you, Mr Walker, for your remarks and for your remarks, Ms Cull, on behalf of the solicitors.
40 To my former colleagues at the Bar, to the solicitors present, and to you, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your attendance at this ceremony this morning.
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