Dyson Heydon, a clever troglodyte, handed the spotlight by the Addams family ... Extraordinary powers to explore anything and anyone ... Recalling some of Dyse's finest historical and literary flourishes
Protecting "honest workers"
Looking like characters from the cast of the Addams Family, PM Abbott, Uncle Otto Abetz and Soapy (Passing Strange) Brandis "QC" unveiled their royal commission to put the boot into unions, unionists and anything or anyone loosely connected thereto - particularly leading lights in the ALP.
They passed the job to Dyson Heydon, who does a good stand-up impersonation of Count Dracula.
The terms of reference are a bottomless lake without borders and Dyse will be required to bring his famous exactitude to something that is entirely free range.
Terms of reference are here.
The daddy of them all is reference eight. To inquire into:
"The participation of any persons, associations or organisations other than registered employee associations or their officers in conduct of the type described in paragraphs 1,2,3,4,5,6 or 7."
Lay translation: "The participation of anybody in anything."
According to The Australian newspaper the appointment of Dyse is designed to save money because in 1989 he, and his old dancing partner Roddy Meagher, completed a report on union corruption, recommending that trade unions be kept under the watchful eye of the corporate regulator.
It's an exciting concept, specially since ASIC regulates companies so superbly.
This news story may be entirely correct, but no one we spoke to seems to remember a report from these industrial law authorities, let alone locate a copy of their investigations.
Any help would be useful?
Fat Roger Gyles in 1992 conducted a Royal Commission into Productivity in the Building Industry.
The terms of reference for the new Dyse Commission are structured so that Julia Gillard and Craig Thompson can be ordered to appear and subjected to water-boarding.
This Royal Commission with its endless powers and Santamaria impregnated DNA will keep the legal trade fully employed for this year and beyond. Bravo.
It might also save us the trouble of trying to read another five million impenetrable words on the topic of Julia Gillard and the AWU slush fund from Hedley Thomas in The Daily Rupert.
The ALRC recommendations on the Royal Commissions Act have been safely ignored, or forgotten.
There a handy list of Commonwealth Royal Commissions, reaching back to 1902, here.
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It's a suitable moment to rekindle our fondness for Dyse. We've missed him since his constitutional senility put him in the shadows.
Everyone mentions his job application speech at The Quadrant dinner in 2002 - right-up Little Johnnie Howard's alley.
However, what is forgotten is that between the date of the speech and the date of its publication in Quadrant, Dyse had been appointed to the High Court.
What appeared in the print version of the ghastly mag was a bowdlerised version of the original fume about judicial activism.
You can see the cuts here.
The excised nasty bits mostly concerned swipes at former chief justice Sir A. Mason.
A tired joke that did the rounds years earlier about Margaret Thatcher and her Cabinet was also removed:
"When the young and vigorous Gummow J was appointed in 1995 to replace Mason CJ, on his first day the other judges held a lunch for him. The waiter asked him what he would like. 'Sirloin steak,' he said. The waiter said: 'What about the vegetables?' He replied: 'They can order for themselves'."
Ho, ho. The cadavers at the dinner rattled in merriment.
Dyse also had cracks at Chief Justice Nicholson of the Family Court ("introducing him to the press release was like introducing King Henry V111 to the idea of matrimony"); Kirby (quoting Meagher, "it is quite beyond the ability of Mr Justice Kirby to improve on the reasons of Mr Justice Sully"); Sir William Deane (he liked flattery); Wilcox, Fitzgerald and Einfeld (too much speaking off the bench).
Sadly, readers of the magazine were deprived of these gems.
Observers and commentators have uniformly remarked that Heydon is his own man.
"A brilliant lawyer with a strong streak of independence," said Prof. George Williams.
The fact that he was prepared to see part of his speech hidden from the broader public suggests that Heydon's strong streak of independence is tempered by calculating political instincts.
As befitting someone to the right of the Duke of Marlborough, Dyse is no fan of legislated human rights or implied constitutional rights.
Here he is in Momcilovic v The Queen (2011):
"The odour of human rights sanctity is sweet and addictive. It is a comforting drug stronger than poppy or mandragora or all the drowsy syrups of the world.
But the effect can only be maintained over time by increasing the strength of the dose. In human rights circles there are no enemies on the left, so to speak."
He also gave, in the same judgment, the Victorian attorney general a frightful lambasting for having the temerity to introduce a Charter of Rights:
" 'Speak for England!' cried out Leo Amery, and the Attorney General for the State of Victoria seems to have decided to speak not just for Victoria, but for all Australia ... [and] Australia's benighted isolation on a lonely island lost in the middle of a foggy sea must be terminated."
In Monis v The Queen (2013):
"Those who drafted the Constitution, those who secured legislative approval of it by each colonial legislature, and the people who approved it by their ballots would each say, if they could examine the authorities on the implied freedom of communication: 'Non haec in foedera veni'."
The terrorism case of Thomas v Mowbray (2007) gave him an opportunity to reawaken the Cold War:
"… it is probably right to say that it was only after the collapse of the Iron Curtain nearly forty years later, that all of the designs of the communist state upon the rest of the world, and the ruthlessness with which it was prepared to pursue them, were fully realized and acknowledged."
Dyse also gave the Soviets a tickle-up in South Australia v Totani (2010):
"Perhaps the present state of affairs in South Australia has its dolorous aspects. But life in the Athens of the South now is very different from life in the Athens of the North when delations were common while Tiberius ruled the Roman Empire. And it is very different from life in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in the days when 'the wonderful Georgian' was responsible for administering the bill of rights provisions contained in the 1936 Constitution, and Harold Laski was 'lecturing about the beauties of the Russian system'."
In the Jayant Patel case (2012) he observed:
"Bundaberg is in Queensland. About 70,000 people live there ...
In Queensland, the appellant was seen as a hostis humani generis ... There is an accumulative Cruelty in a number of Men, though none in particular are ill-natured. The angry Buzz of a Multitude is one of the bloodiest Noises in the World."
In Zentai (2012), involving a proposed extradition to Hungary, we got another historical excursion:
"Analysis should not be diverted by reflections upon the zeal with which the victors at the end of the Second World War punished the defeated for war crimes. The victors were animated by the ideals of the Atlantic Charter and of the United Nations. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was about to peep over the eastern horizon. But first, they wanted to have a little hanging."
We also remember his famous panegyric at St Mary's Cathedral for the funeral mass of Roddy Meagher, in which he explained the departed judge was "misunderstood".
"If there is one word that could sum up Roddy it was 'misunderstood' ... Some thought he had an aristocratic air of distain ... in fact he was a sympathetic, generous person of faultless courtesy ... a supremely brilliant and civilised man."
Those who were on the on the end of Meagher's venomous assaults must have missed the faultless courtesy.
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Mason: hit back at Heydon's sneers
There's been a deep pond of "misunderstanding". Just ask the former president of NSWAppeals, Keith Mason, a target of Dyse's swipes.
Mason registered his disapproval of Heydon in his swearing-out speech in the Banco court in 2012.
It was also evident in Mason's 2011 paper: Throwing stones: A cost-benefit analysis of judges being offensive to each other.
"I suggest that most Australian judges will know at once what I am talking about. The High Court and intermediate courts of appeal occasionally adopt personally offensive language when detecting and correcting error below."
Dyse's report card should be marked: Plenty of attitude, needs more finesse.