women's jurisdiction ready for recognition

The nomination by a retiring High Court judge of ten women eligible for appointment as his replacement to the seven member bench signals the readiness of Australia's justice system to recognise a women's jurisdiction alongside the men's jurisdiction already illegitimately in place.

Michael Pelly reports in the Sydney Morning Herald that Justice McHugh said "the need to maintain confidence in the legitimacy and impartiality of the justice system is, to me, an unanswerable argument for having a judiciary in which men and women are equally represented".

Referring, as Richard Ackland indicates in the same edition to the only woman of "44 appointments made to the High Court over the past 100 years", Justice McHugh goes on to suggest that "[t]here is nothing in the work of a High Court justice that cannot be done by a first-class woman lawyer who has the energy to cope with the workload. Mary Gaudron proved that beyond a doubt."

Women have been denied the right to be judged by their peers since the Court's inception under the bizarre justification that male judges have "been strongly in touch with the female side of their natures" in judgements involving women.

Men are not women, they don't think like women and have no life experience of being a woman appropriate to the judgement of women. The attribution to men of a 'female' side is simply an absurd, unsound strategy intended to suppress women, a strategy rendering the High Court of Australia irrelevant to the delivery of justice.

The Australian Constitution's rigorously sexist approach to the provision of a High Court would make a terrorist green with envy.

Relief from the persistent indignity women suffer in the presence of a morally corrupt, insouciant High Court is available with a republic comprising women's and men's legislatures presided over by an executive of elders accompanied by courts of women's and men's jurisdiction.

August 15, 2005