Jane Needham

Thank you very much for the invitation to speak. I was very touched to receive it, as much as I was proud to receive the Alumni Excellence Award last year. It means a lot when your university recognises and acknowledges who you are, and that, I think, is what’s happened with you graduates this morning. Congratulations to all of you on this important day. Each of you has achieved something wonderful, something that should make you, your families and your friends justly proud. You’ve worked hard, and you have succeeded.

Receiving your degree today in this formal environment underlines and acknowledges your success. For those of you, like me, who did exams in this magnificent hall, I think it’s just that you now have something fun to do in here. I’d particularly like to pay tribute to the support of your family and loved ones. Like many things in life, successful study is not something that can be achieved alone.

When I was asked to give this opening address, I was reminded of the UTS values: discover, engage, empower, deliver, sustain. As you’ve heard, I’m also a graduate of UTS, like some of you in the undergraduate law program. In fact, I commenced my studies when UTS was the NSW Institute of Technology, always pronounced ‘niswit’, and thus I regard myself as one of UTS’s eldest babies. While I don’t specifically recall those values as being a formal part of the UTS charter in the late 1980s, they certainly resonate for me in a practical way around my time at UTS and the way in which my work in the law developed thereafter, and I’d like to say a few things about how my education here reflected in the work I’ve done over the last 26 or so years.

UTS was a journey of discovery for me. When I commenced my studies of law, I was fairly convinced that I did not want to be a lawyer. I was working in the courts at the time, and I felt that some understanding of what I was doing on a daily basis would be in order. I also had a flatmate who was studying law, and she suggested we could probably go home together on the train each evening. But if, as I expected, I did not enjoy it, I would return to my first love, which was Medieval English and linguistics. I’m still a lawyer. The beauty of the UTS program at the time was that it was then the only part-time degree course in NSW, and thus allowed its students to work full-time if they so wished, and to undertake the studies at night, which is very good training for when you are a lawyer.

Accordingly, a lot of students were people like me, who had studied elsewhere, or had taken different paths after school, rather than going straight into law, and who had found later in life that the study of law is what would engage them. The Law School’s mixing of full-time academic staff with lecturers who were engaged with the practice of law made for vibrant learning, as well as providing useful contacts once we graduates emerged, blinking slightly in the sunshine of being fully fledged legal practitioners. And one of the things I did when I started at the bar was come back, as one of those lecturers who was practising law – it was a useful way of combining my early practice at the bar with actually earning some income. The mandatory units of practical subjects that we studied at UTS, unlike other universities at the time, meant that we had at least a basic understanding of evidence, pleadings, drawing affidavits and the like. At the very least, we could identify a court document when we saw one, and that was a start.

The empowerment of that knowledge has been demonstrated by the number of my fellow UTS graduates I meet and continue to meet in daily life, and the Pro-Chancellor mentioned some of the benefits of the alumni body having so many people, 200,000 I think, who have now graduated from this university. I’ve met UTS graduates as practitioners, as court officials, judges, and others who’ve gone on to other courses using their law degree as a basis for their later learning. For each of us, however, our time at UTS gave us the knowledge and the tools to succeed at whatever we did. Those of you who returned to study after completing an undergraduate degree, and there are many of you, including those sitting behind me, have my wholehearted admiration at going back and doing it again.

As you’ve heard, I was the President of the NSW Bar Association from 2014-2015, and my abilities there to direct the course of the association, or at least to lead and guide it were focused, were rooted very much in my experiences at UTS. During that time, I focused my attention on issues of diversity and equality, and I worked hard to try and achieve better recognition of the benefits of flexible work. When I had my first child, after 12 years at the bar, I took parental leave and then worked part-time.

While I was on leave, an article was published in the Bar news, which noted that the accepted definition of part-time work at the Bar was working less than 60 hours a week, 6-7 days a week. This struck me as rather unfair. It also detailed some negative perceptions of part-time work, and some interviewees in the article advocated that you do your best to hide the fact that you may only be working 40-50 hours a week or even less. This approach seemed counterproductive to me, because by hiding the fact that people worked part-time, we would be unable to create opportunities for people to choose that path if that were the best fit for them and their personal and professional lives. So when I came back from that leave, I decided to be upfront about the way I was choosing to practice. I applied to be appointed Senior Counsel while working part time, and as you’ve heard, I was the first person to be appointed Silk from part-time practice, and later, when I was on the Bar Council, I sought that a provision be inserted into the guidelines to acknowledge that part-time or flexible practice was no barrier. And as you’ve heard, there’s been two more after me, which has been very gratifying.

During my time as President, I was able to oversee work on providing guaranteed childcare places to members of the Bar at a city childcare centre, the development of guidelines, which enabled chambers to have a framework for those who wished to practice part-time, a recognition from the courts that extending court hours without notice to practitioners would have a negative impact on those with family or carer responsibilities, and developing an equitable briefing policy to deal in part with the gender pay gap, so evident at the Bar. The seeds for these issues of fairness and equality and diversity were planted during my days at UTS, when I studied along with many women who, like probably some of you, were studying and working along with being a parent.

Some of our lecturers too were working part-time while their children were young, and I remember thinking how hard it was to manage exams with full-time work, part-time study and a cat, when one of my classmates had a baby halfway through the term and still finished the course with a distinction. I had grown up in a world where very few mothers worked outside the home at all, including even my own mother, who was a graduate of the University of Sydney Law School, and a successful solicitor before she had children. The education and professionalism of the women I met at UTS inspired me to try to deliver better outcomes for women at the Bar.

I should acknowledge at this point that the student, or should I say now, graduate body here this evening is not entirely composed of lawyers. Information technology postgraduates, and graduates, I’m in awe of your achievements, despite not knowing not very much of what it entailed – a first impression only solidified by the reading out of the PhD and Masters by Research topics. It would be trite to say that technological developments have profoundly changed the world. My children cannot believe, for example, that when I was a child we had to wait until a certain time to view a favourite television program, and we had to sit in a particular room to watch it, or that in taking photographs, we couldn’t see the photograph immediately, run it through a filter and add some bunny ears. I can’t believe either than my nine-year-olds are capable of programming a robot to recognise different colours, and to bark annoyingly at all times, randomly, during the night.

But technology is vital for sustaining not only a practice in law, but any kind of professional learnings and outcomes. I’ve just returned from running a case in Fiji in the High Court, and the documentation for the entire four-day hearing was contained in a cloud folder – I see that someone’s done some work on cloud technology; might be handy – and anything I needed in court, rather than getting someone to go to the library and find something, I could do with a wi-fi hotspot, and Lexus Nexus. And the thought of being able to travel to another country with a complex trust dispute in my handbag would have been unthinkable when I was here at UTS –  the most advanced technology was someone who had a dictaphone and used to record the lectures, and we thought that was pretty special. So that, to me, is as bewildering – would have been as bewildering as black and white television is to a child today. The judge in the Fiji case did castigate someone in court for using a mobile phone as being disrespectful, so I was lucky I also had a hard copy, so I didn’t have to whip out the phone, but the fact remains that now you or I can work anywhere we choose, and that, I think, is a beautiful thing.

Today you will leave the university with a formal recognition of your talent, your hard work, and your determination, and that too is a beautiful thing. Congratulations on your boldness and your bravery in getting this far, and I wish you all the best for your bright and shining futures in law, in information technology, or wherever it is that your talents may take you. Congratulations, and thank you.