Swearing-in Ceremony of The Honourable Murray Herbet Tobias AM RFD as a Judge of the Supreme Court of New South Wales and a Judge of Appeal
THE SUPREME COURT
OF NEW SOUTH WALES
BANCO COURT
SPIGELMAN CJ
AND THE JUDGES OF THE SUPREME COURT
Monday 28 April 2003
SWEARING-IN CEREMONY OF
THE HONOURABLE MURRAY HERBERT TOBIAS AM RFD
AS A JUDGE OF THE SUPREME COURT OF NEW SOUTH WALES AND
A JUDGE OF APPEAL
1 TOBIAS JA: Chief Justice, I have the honour to announce that I have been appointed a Judge of this Court and a Judge of Appeal. I present to you my Commissions.
2 SPIGELMAN CJ: Thank you, Justice Tobias. Please be seated while the Commissions are read. Principal Registrar, would you please read the Commissions?
(Commissions read)
Justice Tobias, I ask you now to rise and take the oaths of office, first the oath of allegiance and then the judicial oaths.
(Oaths of Office taken)
Principal Registrar, I hand to you the oaths so that they may be filed in the Court archives, and also the Bible so that it may have the customary inscription inserted in it in order that it may then be presented to Justice Tobias as a memento of the occasion.
3 On behalf of all the Judges of this Court, and on my own behalf, I congratulate you on your appointment and wish you a warm welcome to the Court. You have, for over two decades, been one of the leaders of the bar and it is a great privilege to have you join us as a colleague.
4 MR B W WALKER SC PRESIDENT NEW SOUTH WALES BAR ASSOCIATION: May it please the court. There are those of us who suspect that your Honour has left it as long as you have left it in order that this courtroom be distinguished in the following manner this morning. There must be solicitors who instructed your Honour as an up-and-coming junior who are now enjoying retirement from being senior partners. There are almost certainly juniors who learned at your Honour's metaphorical knee and are now scaling the heights of being silk. Worse still, there are juniors who learned probably at the knees of juniors who learned at your knees who are on the Bench you now grace.
5 And it certainly is an atypical piece of ostentation on the part of your Honour to have resisted the temptation, which I know your Honour has felt so keenly for so many years, to become a judge that you have left it so long so as to assemble such a dazzling array of people who have been junior to you, tutored by you, mentored by you to assemble in this courtroom to celebrate this occasion. The Attorney General is to be congratulated, the public has our felicitations.
6 But for our part, speaking on the part of the Bar and of the Bar Association, there is a tinge, just a tinge, of regret at the passing of your Honour from the ranks of the very senior Bar.
7 There is more than a tinge of regret, however, when we consider your Honour's characteristics as an advocate and how it may translate to the Bench. There is much more than a tinge of regret. There is for my part some trepidation as to whether I ought properly to use this opportunity as one of the perquisites of my position. Namely I get in first with the flattery so that your Honour will forever think that it was my original and that nobody who repeats it will ever get the same kudos.
8 Your Honour as a barrister is renowned for your vigour. If a point was bad, as your junior, you would know about it in no uncertain terms, fortunately in chambers. If the point was bad, or even possibly thought to be bad, as your opponent, one would know it by the barely suppressed groan to the left and by the rhetorical roar when you eventually rose to rebut it. Alas, sometimes your Honour would take the advantage of an objection, sometimes to something that most people would not believe to be an objection, in order that you could rebut error sooner rather than later.
9 But your Honour's vigour came from an attachment to the doing of justice which you did with zeal, with enthusiasm and without embarrassment for the enunciation and practice of values of the most fundamental kind at the Bar. With all the seriousness we can muster may we say that we expect with enormous confidence that you will exhibit precisely the same approach without embarrassment but with vigour as a judge.
10 Where all this vigour comes from may be speculated, and if your Honour will forgive me the facetiousness which is possible still in Sydney, it couldn't possibly have come from the school career wearing a kilt. On the other hand, mucking around in boats may have had something to do with it. Others have speculated that perhaps it is the plain velour qualification of having studied law at the University of Sydney. That couldn't possibly explain it. Perhaps a BCL at Oxford. Perhaps that is the explanation. But when one looks at the pattern of your career it is clear that something stemmed from far earlier in your life and I will leave it, I suspect, to your Honour to make the appropriate acknowledgments there because it is clear from the earliest time that your Honour has taken an approach to the administration of justice in which the independent Bar and the judiciary which the independent Bar exists to assist, and the independence of the judiciary which springs from the intention of that Bar in a mutual relation has informed your own career from the beginning.
11 The Bar Association particularly wishes to advance to your Honour its best wishes and congratulations because of a history which is so well-known that it is in danger of being overlooked. Your Honour was a member of the elected Bar Council from 1976 with some breaks until you became president in 1993.
12 It is no accident that the principle parts of the current statute regulating our profession in this state springs from a Bill introduced in 1993. For some years, as my distinguished predecessor to my left, Mr Coombs QC, will attest, there had been storm clouds gathering of a kind which could have simply been a deluge. However, your Honour turned it into more of a life-giving irrigation by the skill, the politics and, above all, the principle by which you sought to guide enthusiastic legislators and even more enthusiastic extra-legislative reformers into ensuring that there was retrieved from some of the earlier proposals, maintained throughout all proposals and finally enshrined in the statute, which has been adjusted thereafter very little, the possibility for the continuing values of an independent Bar to exist in a new, relatively savage, consumerist-oriented time where what is called competition principles were thought to break for the first time upon the unsuspecting heads of the independent practising Bar.
13 As president of the Bar Association at the time, as those of us who tried to help you at the time remember, you were assailed on all sides. This was an argument for which there were more than two sides to every point. There was, for a start, the extremists on both sides as well as those moderates who were prepared to listen on both sides and there were, I suspect, the large mass who had open minds about what the eventual outcome ought to be, let alone what it might be.
14 Your Honour, as we all recall, tackled that very testing time with tact, with diplomacy, but above all with direct speech. At the very worst time when the statute was first being drafted, your Honour eschewed the temptation to tell everybody that things would be all right. I think you commenced your presidency by assuring the Bar that it had no friends in any place of power. The first presidential column you ever wrote had as its second sentence, "The temptation to say something popular”. That was mere rhetoric on your Honour’s part, you have never been tempted to say that, but you said that that would not be particularly productive and you went on to say things which were not then at all popular but which have since become greatly esteemed for their prescience and, above all, for their principle. In particular you started by expression from the top of the Bar the type of self-criticism of which you have always been so capable yourself in your own practice.
15 At the same time as your Honour was engaged in that risky political undertaking you were also engaged in helping in the public interest to regulate more pleasurable risk undertakings as a member of the New South Wales Casino Control Authority. But even there, as your Honour will recall, from 1994/1995 there was the controversy of the inquiry that your Honour chaired into the question of the regulation, the licences, as some have called it the licence to print money, and everything that comes in its train in relation to that then new legal industry in New South Wales.
16 Going back in time, whether there was a causal connection or not there was a coincidence between your marriage and your joining the navy. But in this case it was not fleeing to sea in order to avoid pleasurable company, it was in order to devote your legal talents to the doing of military justice, which I understand is not an oxymoron as well. You rose to the giddy heights of captain and, as a Defence Force Magistrate, presided over a number of most important inquiries essential for the good order and efficient operation of that most important armed service.
17 It was not surprising to any of us, except for the interval after which it followed, that on Australia Day 1998 you became honoured with Membership of the Order of Australia for service to the profession, particularly through both the Bar Associations, the Australian Bar Association as well as the New South Wales Bar Association, and to military law. The reference to the Australian Bar Association was no mere matter of form for your Honour was one of the pioneers in what might be called the second, perhaps third, wave of movement by which incrementally and still by no means completely the Bars in this country are realistically coming to form one Bar, one part of the national profession.
18 Meantime, though it is hard to believe, your Honour was able to conduct a practice, as the Chief Justice has already said, at the very highest of levels. It is impossible not to introduce a slightly personal note. I, like many of those present here, were privileged to be your Honour's junior and, unlike many of those present here, were not so privileged but were very challenged to have been your Honour's opponent. Each of them was a stimulating position. In both of them we all learned. We will frankly miss your presence in such cases.
19 It is impossible, particularly bearing in mind the resources of computer research nowadays, to single out cases from your Honour's practice. That is, if your Honour's name is entered into authoritative reports restricting oneself only to Commonwealth Law Reports and the New South Wales Law Reports and the Local Government Reports of Australia, one comes up with case after case after case that not only settled the outcome of fortunes or governmental policy at the time they were decided, they also informed and added to the development principle in the areas. The areas, as everyone knows, include not only those for which your Honour is justly famous, in particular the judicial review of administrative action and government action in relation to planning and development, but also heavy commercial law of the most far ranging kind.
20 But two in particular stick out as having been decided some time ago, your Honour being victorious, that, no doubt, being more than a mere coincidence, and of application in the position you are about to take up. In Heron v McGregor, decided as long ago as 1986, your Honour successfully contended that even the pressing public interest of disciplinary action against professionals, like all other operations of the rule of law, would finally give way to the paramount dictates of fairness and justice in the administration of a disciplinary system. The authority is a good one, the principle was age-old, the application was timely. A reminder of it is also timely.
21 And finally, joining a bench immediately after Justice Ipp in seniority, it is of course important to point out that San Sebastian v The Minister in which you appeared successfully for the Council of the City of Sydney, was decided as long going as volume 162 CLR. I am not sure whether your erstwhile floor brother Justice McHugh would regard 162 CLR as still on the compulsory reading list or not, but it suffices to say that in San Sebastian matters were held, accepting your Honour's arguments, in relation to the possibility of a duty of care with respect to governmental and quasi governmental actions of a kind which remain extremely current in the kind of doctrine which your Honour will be administering very shortly.
22 The one thing that I have not mentioned yet, which everybody who has spoken about this speech wants me to mention, is to name all those persons - they said it couldn't be a very long list and it won't take a long time - who were older than your Honour when first appointed to this bench. I would like to be able to say I don't have time for such a long list, but that wouldn't be true. What I can say with my fellows is that for such an old appointee, the public, the court and the profession are extremely lucky that we have such a youthful appointee. May it please the court.
23 MR R BENJAMIN PRESIDENT LAW SOCIETY OF NEW SOUTH WALES: May it please the court. Your Honour, as representative of the eighteen thousand-odd solicitors who practice in New South Wales, the Law Society and personally, it is my pleasure to congratulate you and your family on your appointment as both a justice of the Supreme Court of New South Wales and a justice of appeal of that court.
24 On 5 February 2003 you made a number of observations at the swearing in of Justice Nicholas, including:
"After November 1995 when my term as President of the Bar Association came to a very timely end, and being very conscious of the fact that there is nothing quite so 'ex' as the ex-president of anything - and in this regard the Bar Association is no exception - never in my wildest dreams did I contemplate the possibility of again standing before this Court to welcome a new judge on behalf of the Bar."
25 It is now quite clear that your wildest dreams have been answered and you will now no longer have to stand here addressing the court from this side of the bar table.
26 Further, your address of 5 February has assisted me somewhat in my research.
27 You were born in 1939, some two years prior to the birth of Justice Nicholas, and you are not apparently embarrassed to disclose your age or that of others. You were educated at Scots College and, unlike some, you had no ambition to sell tractors or to march around in Kings School military uniforms.
28 You admit to an aversion to new technologies. This includes, I am told, the computer, although of some consequence with your Honour's appointment it is now that you will be able to avoid the necessity of buying a Macquarie Dictionary, as the thirty-two year old version, owned by Justice Nicholas, and removed by him from chambers in February of this year will again be available to you. I also understand as the world turns that in 1975 one of your readers was one Margaret Beazley with whom you will now join at the Court of Appeal.
29 You have never been short of a word, and I am informed that in what may have been the first integrated development case involving three parties, you were appearing for the developer. Normally in such an appeal it was the local authority who would have opened. However, you relieved them of that responsibility by taking the floor at 10.00 in the morning and not retiring to your seat until 4.00 in the afternoon. "Don't worry, you'll get your turn in a minute", you said to the other counsel. They never did.
30 We have heard that you have made many appearances in the Land and Environment Court. Your enthusiasm for the planning system and a desire to make it work has led to the description of you by some of the solicitors as a "father figure" of that court.
31 Of course you have also appeared widely and in commercial litigation and administrative law. In these jurisdictions you have turned your mind from town planning issues related to furniture and white goods to unravelling the mystery of the French fry.
32 "Be afraid, be very afraid" might have been the advice to any solicitor not fully conversant with their file on entering your chambers. You are said to have a tremendous ability to deal with detail and a prodigious memory. "You know that he has read the brief and every last bit of paper", said one solicitor. "He looks at everything to the nth degree and is a master with the yellow and green highlighter (it seems that some new technologies have been adapted by you). He has a steel trap of a mind and can make a withering disposal of your whole point of view if he disagrees with you". Another recounted how, having sent you a draft letter for review, you responded initially by telling him, "Firstly, you can't add up."
33 This ability to "keep them on their toes" has greatly endeared you to our side of the profession, not least, of course, because you can employ that legal skill and your tremendous command of it and of the evidence in the conflict in which you were briefed.
34 These skills will no doubt hold you in good stead in the Court of Appeal with its heavy workload and the complexity and variety of legal issues that it regularly entertains.
35 In this court some weeks ago comment was made about expert evidence in Makita's case when Justice Dyson Heydon was leaving this court for another. It is your understanding of experts and their evidence where you are said by those who brief you to be most persuasive. I am informed that when you were cross-examining an expert for some period - during which time you never raised your voice, you didn't lose your temper and you did not ever look directly at your subject - you managed to have the expert disavow the entirety of his evidence.
36 In fact, your ability to find and understand the underlying principle or principles upon which the expertise is based and understand the application of that expertise to the facts is, I am told, legendary.
37 While you have been able to present an implacable facade to those you oppose and an ability to tell them why they wouldn't win, you have also been ruthless in the process of self-examination and the uncovering of any flaws in your own case. "On the way to court", said one solicitor, "he would say, 'We are going to lose this one. How can we win this one?'" Apparently this made your briefing solicitor feel like throwing herself under the oncoming traffic. This became something of a hallmark: the pronouncement five minutes before a case was to begin that it was "unwinnable". Those who instructed you say that, "At 9.30 in the morning he'd start to doubt. He was never happy that he had done enough."
38 This desire to do the very best and to work tirelessly in the preparation and presentation of material has meant that you have pressed everyone about you into service. Once you have briefed him, they say, you are on the Tobias Weight Loss Program. One solicitor tells me that after spending twenty minutes on the phone with you he was given a long list of tasks. Within five minutes of hanging up, you would be on the phone again with more. "You can always tell if he is involved because people are running around frantically. 'I can't talk to you now', they say, 'I'm on the Tobias Weight Loss Programme'." Your attention to detail meant that no stone was left unturned.
39 Your wife, Colleen, has been a huge support and a great partner in all your work. I note that it was to her to whom you looked for editorial comment on your speech made in February of this year and she should share in the importance of today.
40 Your Honour now seeks to complete a full productive life by service to the community from the Bench. You continue your dedication to public good and you do so with the warmest best wishes from the solicitors of this State. It may be apposite to consider your Honour's own words, spoken when you were the President of the Bar Association, at the time of the retirement from the bench of Chief Justice Anthony Mason. On that occasion you said:
"...When listening to the other speakers and sitting in my place, I suddenly appreciated that this would be the first time, when I have in the past or will in the future have the opportunity of putting submissions to this Court which will be received with universal acclaim, with no questions or criticisms, without the necessity of a reserve judgment but of immediate order that the plaintiff win."
41 Your Honour, that time seems to have come again. We wish you every success in your term of office.
42 As the court pleases.
43 TOBIAS JA: Chief Justice, your Honours, Mr Walker, Mr Benjamin, my wife and family, members of the profession, ladies and gentlemen.
44 I have always dreaded the moment, if ever appointed to this Court, of entering this vast courtroom and seeing nothing but rows and rows of empty seats. In fact when I voiced this concern to may family, my wife and children graciously offered to stand in Phillip Street and sell tickets. However, I advised them that they would need not only to give the tickets away but also to offer a lucky door prize! Needless to say, by your attendance here today, you do me great honour and mere words cannot express my deep gratitude (and relief) that you have taken time from your other commitments to relieve me of my worst fears. I am particularly grateful that Chief Justice Gleeson and other justices of the High Court, justices of the Federal Court, Chief Judge Pearlman and judges of the Land and Environment Court before whom I spent so much of my career have honoured me with their presence today.
45 Mr Walker and Mr Benjamin, I thank you most sincerely for your very kind, generous and exaggerated remarks. I suppose an occasion such as this is the only time when a judge is prepared to tolerate, perhaps even encourage, remarks from the advocates which he or she knows are full of factual errors and flawed reasoning. Needless to say, you have both been most gracious in your comments and I greatly appreciate the sincerity with which you have expressed them.
46 I am very conscious of my faults with respect to speeches of this kind. Only two months ago I stood before this Court to welcome Justice Nicholas on behalf of the Bar. I am aware that that speech was criticised as too long. Indeed, Justice Bryson was heard to remark with his usual droll but incisive wit that the only thing I omitted was his Honour's dental records. I can assure Justice Bryson that, notwithstanding some difficulty in extracting them, I am now in a position to remedy that omission which he so kindly identified.
47 It is both traditional and appropriate on occasions such as this to publicly acknowledge the support and generosity of those who have contributed to the appointee's career as a barrister. There are many to whom I owe a great debt of gratitude in this regard but time to mention but a few. First and foremost, are my late parents. I was fortunate enough to grow up in a close, loving and supporting family. My decision to enter the law was influenced, although not overtly, by the fact that my late father was a highly respected solicitor of this Court. Indeed, he was a solicitor for fifty-eight years: from 12 March 1937 when he was admitted to 12 March 1995 when he surrendered his practising certificate in his eighty-sixth year. He had always said that he would not retire until he had, health permitting, reached the top of the list of solicitors in the Law Almanac. He was constantly frustrated in this objective by the late Vincent Pike, a solicitor of great wisdom and longevity. Eventually, my father decided he could no longer outstay Vincent so he called it a day.
48 My father was a great role model for myself and my brother Robert, also a solicitor. He was wise, worldly, gentle and generous with his time to all who sought his counsel. He had a penetrating grasp of legal principle. He eschewed the modern tendency of some solicitors to indulge in lengthy and inevitably expensive correspondence during the course of litigation containing extensive allegations and counter allegations and sometimes worse. His idea of responding to such a letter was to do so in two sentences:
"Thank you for your letter of such-and-such a date. Our client respectfully denies the allegations and contentions contained therein. Yours faithfully."
49 The prospect of traversing for page after page unnecessary and inevitably irrelevant allegations at his client's expense was anathema to him. Whatever knowledge of legal principle, ethical standards and common sense that I might exhibit is very much due to his influence. My only regret is that my parents, and particularly my father, are not here to witness this ceremony.
50 I was fortunate to be articled to the late John Smithers, senior partner of Smithers, Warren & Lyons (now incorporated into Phillips Fox). He taught me much and I remember my years as an articled clerk as being some of the most enjoyable I have experienced in the profession. The lunchtime cricket matches in the long hall of the eleventh floor of the old Masonic building in Castlereagh Street were great fun and involved a degree of camaraderie amongst the solicitors and articled clerks which, regrettably, no longer exists today. My association with Ken Astridge, Ken Austin, Grahame Ireland and Bill Orme, partners of the firm at the time, I shall always treasure.
51 As you have heard, I came to the Bar in October 1964. Phillip Twigg (now his Honour Judge Twigg) was generous enough to offer me a secretary's desk in the corner of his chambers on third floor Wentworth so I had a place to park my one and only brief. My master solicitor had, on the day of my admission to the Bar, briefed me as second junior to Dennis Mahoney QC (as the former President then was) in the case of Tooth & Co v Lane Cove Council which was a rating case heard by Else-Mitchell J in the Land & Valuation Court.
52 Our opponent was Doug Milne. Given my rank experience, I am sure that I was completely useless to my leaders, a fact which would have been obvious to Milne. So it was indeed a surprise when Doug invited me in January 1965 to join the sixth floor Selborne to occupy the chambers of Reg Marr QC who had just been appointed New South Wales Solicitor-General. So commenced a long and highly productive association (certainly from my point of view) with Milne. Doug was a great barrister in every sense. He was without peer as a lawyer and tactician and was an uncompromising cross-examiner: yet he exhibited and insisted upon the highest ethical standards. It was he who introduced me to what was then known as local government law and practice as he and Trevor Morling really had a monopoly on the work in that area. Cooney v Ku Ring Gai Council had recently been decided by the High Court which expanded the jurisdiction of this Court in its Equity Division to grant injunctions at the suit of a council to restrain breaches of the planning laws whereas, until then, the accepted wisdom was that such injunctions could only be sought in a relator suit on the fiat of the Attorney-General which he rarely granted. Cooney's case resulted in a huge increase in the work of those practising in the area of local government of which I was a fortunate beneficiary. They were fun days I can assure you!
53 My pupil master was John Kearney (as his Honour then was). I was fortunate enough to be able to split my time between he and Milne. He and Bob Henderson were the leaders of the junior equity bar and both were remarkable equity practitioners of the highest order. I learnt much from John and I will always be grateful for the time he always gave me notwithstanding his incredibly busy practice.
54 Two other members of the Bar I wish to mention. The first is the Honourable Trevor Morling QC. I had the good fortune to be his junior, after he took silk, on many occasions. I also remember that my first case on my own in the Land & Valuation Court (Milne who had been briefed in the matter had become jammed and was generous and reckless enough to recommend me to his instructing solicitor as a last minute substitute) was that of Pioneer Concrete v Lane Cove Municipal Council heard before Hardie J. Trevor appeared for the appellant and I for the council. It was an appeal against the refusal of the council to approve a concrete batching plant on the shores of Burns Bay. The major objector was Tuta Laboratories Pty Limited who occupied a site close by and who manufactured blood transfusion equipment which required extremely sterile conditions. A significant issue was the effect of cement dust on their activities. All sorts of professors were called and, despite my feeble efforts in attempting to cross-examine them, I won. Of course, the only reason I did so was because in those days, courtesy of the infamous and now long discarded decision in Coty (Australia) Pty Limited v Sydney City Council, appellants invariably lost and councils invariably won. Regrettably, I can hardly take credit for the victory which ensured.
55 The second person from whose skill and experience I profited was the late the Honourable Ted Lusher QC. He was a tough, unforgiving but fair barrister and a relentless cross-examiner. After all, he had learnt that art from J W Smythe QC, the undisputed master cross-examiner. I was Ted's junior on numerous occasions and it was an eye-opening but highly beneficial experience. I owe him much.
56 Finally, there is one other person I would wish to single out and that is Ms Barbara Holborrow, an outspoken former Children's Court magistrate and now a successful author. She was one of the first persons to brief me when I was struggling for work. At that time, she was a clerk in the office of Clem Mitchelmore & Co, solicitors of Burwood. Over a period of years after my admission she generously, albeit unwisely, briefed me in numerous cases of some diversity. I am most grateful for the support she gave me at that time and our continued friendship since.
57 To my colleagues on the sixth floor, to my juniors over the past twenty-two years who have stoically endured my panic attacks and temper tantrums, to those with whom I was privileged to serve on the Bar Council over many years and to all those solicitors who entrusted to me their clients' cases, you all have my deep and abiding gratitude for your support, loyalty and, most importantly, friendship. To my clerks over thirty-eight and a half years, particularly Les O'Brien and more recently Sarah Barnes, thank you for your assistance and loyalty. I am especially grateful to Lucy McCallum for agreeing to our current secretary, Eva Adams, becoming my associate and to Eva for agreeing to undertake that role and continuing to endure my idiosyncrasies.
58 I appreciate that every member of the Bar who is elevated to the bench praises the Bar as an institution and that praise is, despite the views of some journalists to the contrary, well deserved but, regrettably, not well understood. The Bar's role is, of course, that of the primary advocates before the courts and, in particular, the superior courts. In this regard, one of the most, if not the most, essential ingredient in the efficient and effective administration of justice in the courts is the relationship between the Bar and, for that matter, all advocates, and the bench. That relationship is predicated upon complete trust between bar and bench. Without it, the system will inevitably fail.
59 When I visited the United States at the end of 1994 as President of the Bar Association, I met with officers of the American Bar Association at their headquarters in Chicago. They acknowledged that one of the greatest problems with the American system of justice was the breakdown in trust between the attorneys appearing before the courts and the bench as well as between the opposing attorneys themselves and even between attorneys in the same firm competing against each other to make partner. Given the significant workloads of all courts in this State, the maintenance of trust between bar and bench is essential and must be guarded and maintained with constant vigilance. My experience over the last ten years or so is that, to some degree, that trust is starting to break down. Maybe it can be blamed on economic rationalism with its imperative on competition which tends to give rise, regrettably, to the desire, if not the necessity, to win at all costs.
60 However, the most valuable asset any barrister has is his or her integrity and the reputation of being totally intellectually honest with the bench. That requires the jettisoning of arguments and submissions which are likely to fail or which cannot be reasonably advanced. It requires the issues, both factual and legal, to be refined between the parties which, in turn, demands greater cooperation between the legal representatives on both sides of the litigation to ensure that the judge is only required to decide the essential issues. It further requires that the evidence, particularly documentary, tendered to the court is pared back to only that which is truly relevant. How often have we all been guilty of tendering many lever arch folders of documents only to refer to but a few: to the filing of many volumes of appeal books when reference is made to but a small proportion of their contents. If nothing else, think of the trees that have to be destroyed to generate all that waste paper! I am conscious that these remarks have been echoed time and again elsewhere but I believe that they bear repeating on an occasion such as this.
61 Finally, and most importantly, I wish to acknowledge the love and support of my wife, Colleen, and my children, Belinda, Bradley, Luke and Gabrielle, my grandchildren Thomas, Harry and Olivia, my daughter-in-law Deborah and my sons-in-law Christopher and James. My wife is my rock. Her common sense, wisdom, patience, sense of humour and gentleness have been the tempering influence upon my life both within and without the law. To her I am forever indebted. To my children and grandchildren, you also are the light of my life. You have all made me a very proud father and grandfather and you have brought me much joy.
62 I must not go on lest, after the ceremony, I attract the ire of my brother Bryson. So I shall end. Thank you again Mr Walker and Mr Benjamin for your kind and generous remarks. Thank you all for taking the time to honour me with your presence. It is, indeed, a humbling experience and one which I shall always treasure.
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