Chairman, Australian Broadcasting Corporation
BA(Hons), LLB(Hons)(Sydney)

The Hon James Spigelman addressed graduates from the Faculty of Engineering and Information Technolgy and the Faculty of Law in the Great Hall, University of Technology, Sydney on Monday 30 September 2013, 10.30am.

At the ceremony, the Hon James Spigelman, AC QC received the UTS honorary award, Doctor of Laws (honoris causa).

The Honourable James Spigelman AC QC completed his Arts degree with First Class Honours in Government and Economics at Sydney University in 1967. He then went on to study law and graduated with First Class Honours and the University Medal in 1971.

Throughout his time at Sydney University, James Spigelman was an active member of the student body. He was President of the Student’s Representative Council and the Student Fellow of the University Senate for three years. He also participated in the 1965 Freedom Ride, a project undertaken by students to draw attention to problems faced by indigenous communities in NSW.

James Spigelman was admitted to practice as a solicitor in 1972 when he was Senior Adviser and Principal Private Secretary to Gough Whitlam who was elected Prime Minister in December that year. He served Prime Minister Whitlam until 1975 when he was appointed Secretary of the Department of Media. He was the youngest person to be appointed to the highest level of the Commonwealth Public Service.

James Spigelman was admitted to the NSW Bar in 1976, and commenced practice three years later after serving for several years as a Member of the Australian Law Reform Commission. He had a swift rise at the NSW Bar practicing in constitutional law, administrative law and appellate work. His Honour was appointed Queen’s Counsel in 1986 and frequently appeared for the Commonwealth Government and the NSW Government in major cases and was acting Solicitor-General of NSW in 1997. He was appointed Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of New South Wales on 19 May, 1998, a position he held until 31 May 2011. In 2012, His Honour Justice Spigelman commenced a five year term as the Chairman of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

The Honourable James Spigelman was Chief Justice and Lieutenant Governor of New South Wales 1998-2011. His judgments have been notable in several important areas of law, including commercial, corporate, arbitration and private international law. In his role as Chief Justice he was rightly considered both the intellectual and administrative leader of the judiciary in NSW.

During his term of office he developed close relationships with, and organised or participated in numerous exchanges between the judiciary of Australia and other judiciaries, which included China, India, Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, England and Wales. In 2009 he was appointed by the Government of Antigua to conduct a Commission of Inquiry into allegations of corruption against members of the previous Government.

His Honour Justice Spigelman is the author of Secrecy (1972), Becket and Henry (2004), Statutory Interpretation and Human Rights (2008) and co-author of The Nuclear Barons (1981). A collection of his addresses is published in Speeches of a Chief Justice: James Spigelman 1998-2008 (2008) and Opening Law Term 1999-2010 (2010). He is also the author of some 170 published articles over the period from 1964 to 2012 on a wide range of topics including political and social issues, medieval, Australian, British and Chinese history, together with a wide range of legal topics.

He has served on the Boards and as Chair of a number of cultural and educational institutions including: Chair of the National Library of Australia 2010–2012, Chairman of the Australian Film Finance Corporation 1990 to 1992, Deputy Chairman of the Art Gallery of New South Wales 1983–1998 and as President of the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences 1995–1998. He was also a member of the Council of the National Gallery of Australia (1995-98), a member of the Board of the Brett Whiteley Foundation (1995-98) and, earlier, as a Councillor of the Australian Film and Television School (1975-78).

The Honourable James Spigelman became a Companion of the Order of Australia (AC) in 2000, for services to law and to the community through leadership in bringing about change in attitudes to the administration of justice for a more fair and equitable society, and for the support of the visual arts. In 2001, he was awarded a Centenary Medal and in 2004 received a Doctorate of Laws (honoris causa) from the University of Sydney.

It is a great honour for the University of Technology, Sydney to award The Honourable James Spigelman AC QC an Honorary Degree of Doctor of Laws (honoris causa), in recognition of his outstanding contribution to Australian Law, his achievements in public administration and for his contribution to the public understanding of the role of justice in the contemporary social order.

Speech

Shortly after my appointment as Chief Justice of New South Wales I was invited by Dame Leonie Kramer, then Chancellor of the University of Sydney, and, incidentally, one of my predecessors as Chairman of the ABC, to deliver my first Occasional Address at a graduation ceremony. I replied that I did not want to deliver yet another address to lawyers and would much prefer to address a graduation ceremony for engineers. That is what happened. It is serendipitous that UTS has chosen to combine these two faculties in one graduation ceremony.

When I delivered that address in 2000, I commenced with an observation about the contribution engineering makes to the way we live. I said then that if I had to build a statue to one person who had most improved the Australian way of life, I would have it built of Joe Sutter. Not a household name I realise, but his contribution has been fundamental. Joe Sutter was the chief engineer on the Boeing 747 Project.

Until about the mid-1960s, when I was a student, it was still cheaper to take a boat to Europe and be fed for six weeks, than it was to fly. Indeed, it was the habit of the Prime Minister of my youth, Sir Robert Menzies, to go to London, coincidentally when the Australian cricket team was in England. He would travel by boat, stay for over a month, and return by boat, being away for about four months. Such conduct is inconceivable now. Nor, is it necessary. The transformation occurred for a number of reasons, of which the Boeing 747 was probably the most important. No one has done more than Joe Sutter to link Australia to the world.

The expanded opportunities for travel, available to all Australians, also make it feasible for others to come here. Now, reinforced by the revolution in electronic communications, this has done more than anything else to overcome the intellectual and cultural provincialism with which this nation was afflicted for most of its existence.

I repeated my advocacy of the erection of the statue for Joe Sutter on other occasions. On one such, a former Australian Foreign Minister, Andrew Peacock, then a representative of Boeing in East Asia, was present. A few weeks later I received a letter which said: “Hi, my name is Joe Sutter. I live in retirement in Seattle. I hear you are saying nice things about me. If you are ever in town, please look me up". I think he wants that statue.

It could not have been known to those who invited me to attend today that I have a special interest in engineering. It was, in fact, that interest that drove me to seek appointment as President of the Powerhouse Museum, a neighbour of this university, a position I enjoyed very much. The ABC, where I now occupy an office, is not so much a neighbour of UTS, as surrounded by it.

I should explain the origins of my interest in engineering and of my conviction of its central significance in our lives. In the late 1970s, I spent about three years researching and co-authoring a book on the history of nuclear energy. The book commenced with a brief introduction to the physicists. Thereafter, the story of nuclear energy, whether in bombs, submarines or electricity power plants, was a story of the engineers. I came to admire the capacity of this discipline to address and overcome even the most apparently intractable problems.

At the time, I gained considerable insight from the writings of an American civil engineer whose first book of essays bore the intriguing title The Existential Pleasures of Engineering. He used the word “existential" to refer to an essence of the human spirit which we are always trying to understand and to satisfy. He said in words, that for today's purpose I am happy to apply to both engineers and lawyers, “Engineers do find their work thrilling in a deep down, elemental way that we think of when the word existential is used today. They feel fulfilled. They feel a part of the flow of history. They love their work and believe it is inherently good."

I certainly hope that this possibility becomes reality for all of you. There is every reason, from the inherent nature of both your professions, why it should. Lawyers play a vital role in continuing our social infrastructure, just as engineers do for our physical infrastructure. Contributing to these essential aspects of our society should be a profoundly satisfying experience.

There is one characteristic that is common to the work both disciplines do. Your most important contributions are simply taken for granted by the community at large.

In the case of engineers, everyone assumes that things will work properly. The Boeing 747, for example, is a triumph of engineering. I realise that whenever anything goes wrong there is a media feeding frenzy, as happened once when a wheel undercarriage on the Qantas 747 collapsed. No one remembers the multiple millions, quite probably billions, of safe air miles that this working horse of the skies has performed.

Similarly, when we flick a switch, we expect electricity to be immediately available. When we use a telephone, we expect immediate connection to anywhere in the world. When we turn a tap, we expect clean water to flow.

Few Australians appreciate, or even think about, the extraordinary amount of embedded knowledge and skill that enables those phenomena to occur. In every day to day task of the practice of engineering, each of you will make a contribution to that sense of security and serenity of mind for all Australians that arises from the trust they can, without a second thought, give to all their interactions within the physical world created by engineers. Everyone knows that sometimes things go wrong. However, life is so much better when the working assumption is that they will not.

An identical phenomenon arises in legal practice. Ours is a nation in which the rule of law operates seamlessly. The contrast with other nations is telling.

Justice is like oxygen. There is no reason to even notice it when you have it in abundance, as we do. However, as you restrict the flow it becomes more and more important until a point arises when it matters more than almost everything else. As with engineers, the day-to-day operations of our legal system affirm the sense of personal security and serenity of mind in our community.

Again, this is taken for granted. That may be unfair. However, it should be accepted as a compliment. The work is taken for granted because it can be. This is a mark of success. It is obvious that lawyers use the product of engineers. The reverse is not so well understood.

No one would have built the electricity generating plants, the dams, the roads or anything else, nor would anyone pay for the costs involved in operating these essential pieces of infrastructure, if there had not been, and is not, a high level of certainty about both the existence and the enforcement of the contractual and/or statutory rights and obligations embedded in a network of exchanges in which many different parties buy and sell a wide range of services and goods. There are other ways in which such services could be provided, but not in a way that preserves a wide sphere of personal freedom or operates efficiently and without corruption.

Only certain kinds of society, governmental structure and legal system have been able to sustain a market economy. Such an economy cannot operate unless individuals and corporations believe that they can transact business with a high degree of assurance that promises will be kept and debts paid.

Further, the sense of personal security and the existence of social order is determined in large measure by the extent to which people can arrange their personal affairs and their relationships with associates, friends, family and neighbours on the assumption that basic standards of propriety are met, and reasonable expectations are satisfied. Lawyers perform a critical role in the creation of such security and the promotion of social order by the administration of the law, including at the outset of any relationship, where the lawyer performs a function similar to that of preventive medicine.

The services that lawyers perform both with respect to economic transactions and with respect to the maintenance of freedoms and of a sense of fairness in our society, constitute a vital contribution to the economic prosperity, as well as to the social welfare, of the nation. Neither an advanced economy, nor a complex society, can operate without lawyers. Nor, is either feasible without engineers.

You will all graduate into a professional community the ethos of which goes well beyond any particular employment. The social contributions to which I have referred are at the heart of the distinction between a profession and a job. While accepting the necessity of paid employment, it is the vocation of service inherent in any profession, reflected in codes of professional ethics, that will give you the strength to resist the opportunities to compromise standards of performance to which many of you may on occasions be subjected in the course of your careers. As you face the trials and tribulations ahead, you must always remember the support that you will always receive from the broader professional community that you now join. Your professional reputation will be as much a mark of your success as your income. I myself have spent about half my professional career on the public payroll. I do not regret the lost income. Treat your professional reputation as your major capital asset. Protect it accordingly. Unlike other assets it does not depreciate rather, treated properly, it appreciates over time.

I congratulate each of you on your graduation and wish you the best in your future career.