High Court in crisis

The High Court of Australia is under seige following complaints of gagging by the press and calls from the Law Reform Commission and the head of the Judicial Conference of Australia, Justice Ronald Sackville, to allow criticism of the judiciary.

Writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, Richard Ackland reports that Justice Sackville was of the view that "[i]f the High Court endorses the current trend of authority, the courts will be open to the charge that they have awarded themselves an immunity that is difficult to justify and is likely to prove counterproductive to the values they have repeatedly espoused."

With an exclusively male bench, the High Court has become so anachronistic and out of touch with Australians as to be rapidly losing the confidence of the nation.

At cause is the doctrine that Common and Statute law considers women and men as equals, whereas, in the absence of separate jurisdictions women and men are treated as exactly the same in a covert men's jurisdiction.

Common and Statute law cannot rationally be applied to either women or men without distinguishing between women and men, remaining applicable by reason exclusively to a fictitous mixed-up man/woman entity.

It is an essential principle of law that an accused or defendant is tried by peers.

Women and men are not each other's peers because each thinks differently and neither has life experience of the other to utilise in judicial determination.

The assertion that women are peers of men is simply a cowardly male strategy to deprive women of their own intelligence in order to maintain their suppression.

It is disturbing enough that the High Court denies justice to women. That this Court also asserts that criticism of its blatantly sexist and offensive ideology attracts indefinite imprisonment for contempt condemns this Court to irrelevance.

This is a rich men's Court doing rich men's business to the exclusion of everyone else in the nation.

Australian citizens have a right to expect more from a Court that would do justice to a terrorist tribunal.

Neither can the appointment of a female judge to a covert male jurisdiction, as with that of Justice Mary Gaudron, since retired, in Australia, and the appointment of two women to the nine member bench of the Supreme Court of the United States of America, guarantee the equitable delivery of justice to women.

The Constitutions of both the United States and Australia establish courts and it is with constitutional reform, in the United States by way of further amendment and in Australia with the formulation of a republic, that will provide equity before the law to all citizens with women's and men's legislatures presided over by an executive of elders accompanied by courts of women's and men's jurisdiction.

September 8, 2005

 

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