STATEMENTS ON SIGNIFICANT MATTERS
Mrs McINTOSH (Lindsay) (09:23): I rise on behalf of the coalition and on behalf of the shadow attorney-general, Senator the Hon. Michaelia Cash, to honour the life and service of the Hon. William Montague Charles Gummow AC, Justice of the High Court of Australia from 1995 to 2012, who died in September at the age of 83.
I acknowledge the Attorney-General's tribute and those of the Governor-General, the High Court and legal communities here and in Hong Kong. When the nation farewells one of its great jurists, this parliament rightly speaks with one voice. Bill Gummow was born in Sydney in 1942.
He studied arts and law at the University of Sydney, where his fellow students included other future High Court justices, including the late Mary Gaudron. He was admitted as a solicitor in 1966 and joined Allen Allen & Hemsley. His ability was obvious early.
He became a partner in his 20s, only a few years after finishing his articles. In 1976 he went to the New South Wales Bar Association. He built a practice in equity, trade practices, intellectual property and federal constitutional law.
He took silk in 1986, and, that same year, he was appointed to the Federal Court of Australia. In April 1995 he was elevated to the High Court. He served there for 17 years until the Constitution required him to retire on turning 70 in October 2012.
Those are the milestones. They don't fully capture the man or what he contributed. Justice Gummow was, above all, a lawyer's lawyer.
The High Court described him as deeply learned, rigorously analytical and highly collegiate, and each of those words was earned. He saw the law as a whole. He understood statute, equity and the federal Constitution as parts of one system, and he insisted that each be understood through its history.
He did not treat the law as a set of policy preferences waiting for a judge to adopt them. He saw it as an inheritance to be understood properly before it could be applied faithfully. He was also, more than most, a builder of consensus.
On the court of seven strong minded individuals, he was consistently the judge most likely to be found in the majority. His name appears again and again in joint judgements. That's why it is so hard to single out 'his' cases—because, so often, his work was done alongside his colleagues.
There are few finer tributes to a judge on a collegiate court. His time on the court covered many of the most consequential questions of our constitutional life. He sat on the court which settled the implied freedom of political communication.
He was part of the majority in Kable, and, over the following years, he did the most work on what chapter III of the Constitution means for the separation of judicial power and the integrity of the courts. His appointment came under a Labor government, and he served through the terms of governments of both persuasions. That is how it should be.
He was a judge of the law, not of the times, and his standing across the political spectrum reflected that. His influence went well beyond the bench. For more than six decades, apart from his years on the High Court, Bill Gummow taught at the University of Sydney.
He wrote, as the minister said, Equity: Doctrines and Remedies, first published in 1975 and known to every Australian law student and practitioner. It served him well, and it helped revive equity in this country and gave it a distinctly Australian character. He also co-authored successive editions of Jacobs' Law of Trusts in Australia, delivered the Clarendon Lectures at Oxford in 1999 and, with the Hon.
Susan Crennan, co-edited a new edition of Sir Owen Dixon's papers. It is hard to think of a more fitting collaboration. He liked to say that the point of teaching undergraduates was to make sure they would understand legal principle properly by the time some of them became judges 30 years later.
Today there are judges, barristers, solicitors and, yes, parliamentarians who learned equity from him. That may be his most lasting legacy. Retirement from the High Court did not mean retirement from service.
He took up professional appointments at the Australian National University and the University of Sydney, and, from 2013, he sat as a non-permanent judge of the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal, and he held that appointment until his death. He kept writing; as recently as 2023 and 2024, he published widely cited papers on the nature of legal reasoning. In his last years, he faced serious health challenges, and he met them with the same lack of complaint that marked his whole life.
Only weeks before his death, he spent a full day at a conference in equity at the University of Sydney, then attended a lecture that evening in the Banco Court, climbing that court's forbidding stairs with his walking frame. At the time of his death, he was due to teach students the following week, and, characteristically, he left behind no reserved judgements.
His work was done. Justice Mark Leeming of the New South Wales Court of Appeal described him as a man of courage and intellectual integrity and a very fine Australian. That is a judgement this House can wholeheartedly endorse.
On behalf of the coalition and of Senator Cash, I extend our deepest sympathies to his family and to his friends, former colleagues and students. Australia has lost one of its finest legal minds. His work will outlast us all.
May he rest in peace.