Page 1707 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 29 May 1990
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What is the case for this Assembly applying another new moral test, as Mr Berry puts it? Mr Wood referred to a number of cases in which politicians had stepped down or had otherwise been removed. Without exception, to my knowledge, those incidents came within the accepted code outlined by my colleague the Chief Minister. But does Mr Duby's offence carry with it a moral stigma such that we and the community might find it too much for us to share his company as a Minister? Hardly, I suggest, Mr Speaker.
Apart from ministerial company, there is another profession which has set high standards on the pain of exclusion, and that other group or company of persons, apart from us politicians, is the Bar, the senior Bar, the barristers.
Mr Moore: Not Mr Duby's bar.
MR COLLAERY: I trust that Mr Moore's comment about the bar will go on the record; he might need it one day. In the High Court Mr Justice Kitto said of a senior barrister who was convicted of a drink-driving offence which involved a very serious accident and injury to someone:
The conviction is of an offence the seriousness of which no one could doubt. But the reason for regarding it as serious is not, I think, a reason which goes to the propriety of the barrister's continuing a member of his profession ... it does not warrant any conclusion as to the man's general behaviour or inherent qualities. True, it is a conviction of a felony; but the fact that as a matter of technical classification it bears so ugly a name -
we note, Mr Speaker, that Mr Connolly constantly calls it a criminal offence -
ugly because the most infamous crimes are comprehended by it, ought to be disregarded, lest judgment be coloured and attention diverted from the true nature of the conviction.
This is a driving conviction. He continued:
It is not a conviction of a premeditated crime. It does not indicate a tendency to vice or violence, or any lack of probity. It has neither connexion with nor significance for any professional function.
Mr Moore: What year, Mr Collaery? Are you game to say what year?
MR COLLAERY: Mr Speaker, the rabbit keeps bobbing up, and I am trying to concentrate. If you say that those values expressed by one of Australia's great High Court judges in 1957 is not appropriate - - -
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