CONDOLENCES

Mr LEESER (Berowra) (18:45): It's a great honour to rise to speak and pay tribute to the Hon. Mary Gaudron KC, a former justice of the High Court, a trailblazing Australian lawyer, the first woman to be appointed to the High Court and somebody who I want to add my personal tribute to, having been an associate on the High Court, which she served on—in my case, an associate to her colleague the Hon.

Ian Callinan AC, KC. I want to acknowledge my friend the member for Fenner, who worked a couple of years before I did, for Justice Kirby, on the same court and will no doubt provide some of his own reflections on Mary Gaudron. I want to say the names of some country towns here: Wingham, Casino, Gympie, Newcastle and Moree.

They're five Australian country towns, and five of the seven justices on the Gleeson court, on which I was privileged to be an associate, grew up in country Australia. Mary Gaudron grew up in Moree, and her story is a great Australian story—a girl from a modest background who, by dint of her intellect and her application and her burning sense of justice, rose to be a leader in her profession and ultimately a trailblazing lawyer: the first and, to this point, only woman to be Solicitor-General of New South Wales; the youngest person ever to be appointed to a federal court in our history; and the first woman to be appointed a justice of the High Court.

She was a remarkable trailblazer, and I think it says something good about Australia, but it also says something particularly about the legal profession that then, as now and as it has been historically, it has been a way in which people from modest circumstances, through application and intellect, can rise. That was certainly the case with Mary Gaudron. Mary Gaudron's career was remarkable.

Inspired by Dr HV Evatt, who was visiting her town and presented her with a copy of the Constitution during the 1951 Communist Party dissolution referendum, she went from being a recipient of a document from a great Australian lawyer to being somebody who ultimately interpreted the law. She attended St Ursula's College in Armidale before going on to Sydney university, where as a part-time student she became the first female part-time student to win the university medal.

Winning the university medal and coming first in your year at law school is always an extraordinary achievement, but when you think she was at law school with such great intellects as her later colleague former justice Bill Gummow, who is no slouch, particularly as an intellect and particularly in equity, it shows the level of intellect and intellectual attainment that Justice Gaudron brought.

She was somebody who had a burning passion for equality. She was briefed by the Whitlam government. Clyde Cameron had met her before they came to government, and she was briefed by him to present the government's case in the equal pay case.

Some of the work that she did on maternity leave and equal pay she regarded as some of her most important work. At only 31, she was appointed Deputy President of the Conciliation and Arbitration Commission as a judge. She later became Solicitor-General of New South Wales, and in 1987 the Hawke government appointed her to the High Court.

I want to make some observations for myself about the sort of judge she was. Firstly, as a former solicitor-general, she was always tough on governments and particularly tough on the Commonwealth; although I think on federal versus state debates the record will show that her sympathies lay with the Commonwealth over the states in the main. She was particularly tough on governments that weren't there arguing for a full throated position.

Secondly, she was unsympathetic to government agencies that cried poor. That was not something that she was particularly interested in. Thirdly, she was very forceful.

When she put an argument, she put it in a forceful manner and she wanted to hear the proposition tested. She didn't do it to pick on counsel; she did it because she was interested in the argument and interested in the law. My memory of her is of being great company and great dinner company in particular.

I had the privilege of not only having dinner with her several times as an associate. Subsequently, when she retired, I would visit her even in her home with my friend and former flatmate Haroon Hassan, who was her associate, and would have a few champagnes with her. It was always great company.

She was not a partisan figure, but I think it was clear that she had strong Labor values. The Labor Party had appointed her to her various offices, she spoke at the funeral of Justice Lionel Murphy, and she was a bit taken aback that I wanted to leave the legal profession to work for Tony Abbott when he was a minister in the Howard government. That was probably a bit far for her!

She loved stirring the possum. She loved having a debate. She had a wonderful sense of humour.

I want to say something about some of the messages that some of her associates have given me. I know that my friend the member for Fenner is going to mention some of those other things. I want to mention a few of them.

The first of her associates I want to mention is Rick Kalowski. Rick went on to have a glittering career, including as Head of Comedy at the ABC. Rick has been a sort of guardian angel for me in my own career.

I would never have been an associate to Justice Callinan had Rick not suggested to me that I might enjoy doing this and that I should apply, so I'm very grateful to him. When I asked Rick to provide a memory of Mary Gaudron, he said: I loved her. She was perhaps the single most important mentor and teacher to me in my professional life.

And she was modest to the point of occasional oddity. For example, the angriest I ever saw her with me—and there was a solid Top 10 of those—was when I had the audacity to want to fact check with her, details of her own actual life for the section I was asked to write in The Oxford Companion to the High Court of Australia. This is how modest she truly was.

It wasn't just people like Rick that she influenced. There was former attorney-general Nicola Roxon. There were judges of the Court of Appeal of New South Wales, like Richard McHugh.

There are academics. There is former lawyer, Jesuit priest and a good friend of mine father Frank Brennan. A beautiful note was sent to me by Fiona Phillips, who is one of her former associates, that reflects on Mary Gaudron's horror at the antisemitism that we've seen in recent years.

She writes: Mary was the first person to call me in January 2025 when news broke that my street had been firebombed. And later that year, following the Bondi Massacre she got in touch to see how I was "bearing up", signing off her message "Equality for all. Mary G".

I mentioned my friend Haroon Hassan a moment ago. It says something lovely about your year as an associate—and I'm sure that my friend the member for Fenner would feel the same—that you meet these extraordinary judges with extraordinary intellects, you see them debate each other in court, you see them debate each other outside and you see people who can disagree, yet they're not disagreeable and they enjoy each other's company.

Such was the case with the associates too. Haroon had stood for the Australian Democrats in the Senate. He had a Pakistani Muslim background.

His father had been a distinguished academic, and his father and mother introduced me to the beautiful cello of Jacqueline du Pré. Haroon wrote beautifully of Justice Gaudron: What that almost unfathomable record of achievement cannot convey is what it was like to work beside her. She devoured information and could cut to the heart of a complex appeal with a single withering question.

She painstakingly drafted her judgements in longhand, in purple ink from a trusted fountain pen. She edited with a severity reserved for her own prose; no sentence that could not justify itself survived. She was impatient with incompetence and pomposity but unfailingly courteous to those without power, from the most junior counsel to the court attendants and registry staff.

Her jurisprudence rested on a conviction, infused throughout her judgements (and stated more bluntly in chambers), that equality before the law must mean something concrete. Her other associate in my year is the remarkable Lucy Martinez. Lucy like Mary was a girl from a country area, Townsville, who has gone on to have an extraordinarily glittering career as an international arbitrator.

Whenever Justice Gaudron and Justice Callinan would write together, I was always the beneficiary of the extraordinary editing that Lucy did. Her brain was far more powerful than mine. In fact, I saw a tribute that the American legal academic Noah Feldman recently made of Amy Coney Barrett.

I think it is remarkable of Lucy too, and it shows the calibre of people that Justice Gaudron chose. Noah Feldman said of Amy Coney Barrett, and I would say of Lucy Martinez, that she is legally technically a genius and one of the strongest lawyers I've ever encountered. The fact that she could start a practice, having worked as an international arbitrator overseas, and then run that practice from Townsville says something about the great start she got from Mary Gaudron, as did so many others who were privileged to work with her.

Mary Gaudron was at the High Court during the Mason, Brennan and Gleeson years. She was there for all of those big cases, whether it was the Mabo case on native title, the implied freedoms case or cases dealing with chapter III of the Constitution and expanding judicial power. Mary Gaudron played a key role in all of those cases.

She will be remembered as a lion of the law, as a trailblazing female lawyer and as a wonderful and great Australian. May her memory be a blessing.