Salutary lesson

Uncategorized    Thursday, February 21, 2019

UPDATE ... Porter wants Vasta for the Family Court ... Standby as more critical judgments about Sal are in the appeal pipeline ... Two-Wigs' special envoy for case management has trouble managing his own cases ... Not only Stradford & Stradford, now there's Navarro & Navarro ... The terrible legacy of Soapy Brandis 

UPDATE … Porter wants Vasta for the Family Court … Standby as more critical judgments about Sal are in the appeal pipeline … Two-Wigs’ special envoy for case management has trouble managing his own cases … Not only Stradford & Stradford, now there’s Navarro & Navarro … The terrible legacy of Soapy Brandis 

This is part of Porter’s pre-election burst of judicial jobs-for-mates. Thursday’s (Feb. 21) appointments and reappoitments to the AAT showed the process at its most audacious and grotesque. 

Former Family Court and FCC CJ John Pascoe who, as far as we know, has never written a judgment, gets a plum posting as a full-time deputy president (total remuneration just shy of $500,000 pa) and he is accompanied by a raft of political hacks and fellow travellers. 

The Law Council of Australia is unimpressed.  

Former CEO of the FCC Dr Stewart Fenwick also found a birth as a full-time senior member of the AAT ($385,000 pa). 

It appears Vasta’s woeful judicial record is no hinderance to his advancement even though more ghastly findings about his handiwork are in the appeal pipeline. 

Indeed, one more from the appeal division was delivered on Thursday (Feb. 21) in Navarro & Navarro, where many of Vasta’s orders were set aside in a parenting case. 

Justices Ann Ainslie-Wallace, Murray Aldridge and Michael Kent found, once again, that Vasta had denied the appellant procedural fairness and natural justice. 

The transcript was riddled with Vasta’s interruptions, argumentative behaviour, pejorative comments, demeaning remarks directed at the appellant’s counsel, bullying and threats of punishment. 

His appointment of Salvatore Vasta, who took his seat on the Federal Circuit Court on January 1, 2015, is a case in point. 

Defrocked Qld Supreme Court judge Angelo Vasta is his father and his brother is Liberal-National MP Ross Vasta. Angelo was in thick with some of the Bjelke-Petersen crowd, including the crooked chief constable “Sir” Terry Lewis. 

Sal was his father’s associate before Vasta snr, was removed from the court by the parliament after findings of tax irregularities, strange goings on at a family company that manufactured toilet paper, unusual dealings with a lease on a Gold Coast apartment, and cheques relating to overseas travel. 

The young Vasta then became a prosecutor, like his father, and from there, Gorgeous George plucked him out to go to the Circus Court, which has tested his grip on family law. 

Funnily enough, the then president of the Queensland bar, Bill Pincus, was not happy about Angelo’s appointment to the Supreme Court, saying that crown prosecutors tended to lack experience in civil work. 

Now Brandis’ political feather-bedding and misjudgment have come home to roost with a couple of Sal Vasta’s FCC decisions getting a good drubbing from the Family Court appeal division. 

Most recently, there has been a decision by Justices Peter Murphy, Stephen Strickland and Michael Kent in Stradford & Stradford, where without jurisdiction or procedural fairness he sentenced a father in a property dispute to gaol for contempt. 

It turned out that the former prosecutor is blissfully ignorant of the law of contempt. 

“So I hope you brought your toothbrush,” he said to the self-represented litigant in response to an apparent failure to comply with orders to produce a complete set of financial documents.

Mr Stradford was sentenced to serve a minimum of five month in prison with a maximum term of 12 months. He spent six days in maximum security under suicide watch before obtaining a stay of the orders, pending the appeal. 

The appeal judges found that Sal acted as both prosecutor and judge, he failed to apply the law in relation to alleged contempts of the court and indulged in a gross miscarriage of justice. 

It was “difficult to envisage a more profound or disturbing example of pre-judgment,” they said. Without checking, Salvatore has incorrectly assumed that Judge Leanne Turner had already found Mr Stradford guilty of contempt and that all that needed to be done was to slot him. 

Mrs Stradford, pleaded with Vasta not to send her former husband to gaol as they had two small children, aged five and nine. Instead, His Honour told the parties to go outside and agree on what amounts of money were owing “or one of you will go to gaol”.  

In May last year, we had the melancholy duty to report that Justices Murphy and Kent, along with Justice Stephen Thackray, found that Vasta had failed to bring an impartial mind to proceedings involving a loan taken out by one of the parties and whether the loan was a device to reduce the net property available for distribution. 

Sal spent much of the hearing cross-examining from the bench with trademark dollops of sarcasm, impugning a witnesses’ credit, procedural unfairness (again), and multiple questions that would have been disallowed if counsel had asked them. 

The appeal division said that the case had to start again with someone other than Sal. 

In October last year Justinian reported that Three Wigs Willy (or is he now down to two wigs?) thought so highly of Judge Vasta’s skills that he appointed him to a new fangled role – “national case management judge”. 

There are strange stories about other Brandis’ appointees, including a distressing episode where allegedly one of his FCC appointees told the parties to “go outside and sort it out” – whereupon the husband stepped into the corridor and promptly hit his estranged wife.  

Attorney General Porter still struggles to come to grips with “reforms” to the family court he has inherited from Brandis. 

His latest tweak is for the appeal division to stay with the fused Family Court and Federal Circuit Court and not go to a new family law appellate division of the Federal Court. 

Still, the legislation remains stuck in the senate. 

Meanwhile in London, the High Commissioner was glad-handing his way through an important gala event …