Ms ROXON (10:28 PM) —I would like to take this opportunity tonight to honour a great Australian woman who retires from public life next Monday. I was an associate to Justice Mary Gaudron nearly 10 years ago, and she had an enormous impact on my life and is no doubt part of the reason I am here today. As a lawyer, an advocate and a High Court judge, Justice Gaudron has been at the forefront and the pinnacle of our legal profession. She brought to her job as a lawyer not just a brain but a heart and hands as well. She was someone who not only used her mighty intelligence but also added compassion to her approach to the job. She brought to it her practical life experience which, I might say, can sometimes seem lost or irrelevant amongst so many other judges and lawyers of a similar age, background, race and gender.

Mary Gaudron never sought—or got—special treatment. In her normal down-to-earth manner, she dismissed the praise she received for being the first woman to do so many things. This was not just modesty, but reflects a genuine desire on her part to see women take a truly equal place with men in all walks of Australian life. Rather than being proud of her achievements on behalf of women, her speeches in particular have shown some frustration at the `first woman' syndrome. It is a frustration that other women before her had been held back and dissatisfaction that being first did not necessarily mean that women would pour through the now open doors behind her. This is, sadly, clearly so, as her departure will leave the court again without a single woman judge. I fear for our country when the first woman High Court judge might be our last for some time.

Labor made only 14 appointments to the High Court, and we can have some pride that the Hawke Labor government recognised Mary Gaudron's capacity and appointed her in 1987. Of the coalition's 30 appointments, the best that can be said is that they have certainly been consistent.

But more about Mary Gaudron. I, like many others, have been at the receiving end of the judge's rather penetrating questions. It seemed that months of research could often be demolished with a single succinct question, often a totally practical one that simply no-one else had bothered to ask. I remember a very distressing special leave application in a rape case where an appeal was sought on the basis that a confession should not have been admissible. As part of reviewing the documents, I had viewed the videotape of the interview, which I must say was very ugly and quite confronting. I can remember in my naivety asking whether the rules governing police interviews were really necessary or whether this person was truly deserving of such protection. I got a stormy response along the lines of: `Do you really think that police or governments go around breaching the civil rights of nice middle-class ladies with white gloves on just so those who pretend to be civil libertarians will feel comfortable in defending their principles?' I must say that that quite appropriate put-down has haunted me ever since. It was typical of a woman who persistently sought to uphold the rights of the disadvantaged, the dispossessed and the discriminated against, especially in her famous contribution with Justice Deane in the Mabo case.

Sometimes her questions were more curious. I remember at my job interview being asked if I carried a gun and if I drank. The correct answers were `No' and `Yes'. It seemed that the only thing she trusted less than a staff member with a gun was one that was a teetotaller—although some of her best associates even snuck through on that count.

I have great affection for the fact that, unlike the other judges at the farewell to all associates, she did not have a near heart failure when I advised that I was going off to work for a union rather than to the bar, to Oxford, to Harvard or to some other `suitable' legal position. Instead, she recalled to me her time on the Commonwealth Arbitration Court, where a witness apologised to her for being awkward in giving his evidence as he was wearing false teeth that were not his own, having left his at home by mistake. The witness's trusty union official had kindly lent him his own set in a true sign of working-class solidarity.

Mary Gaudron gave me a farewell gift which I still have—a silver hippopotamus—with the instructions, as I set off to my union job, that I would need a thick hide where I was going. She did not know that I would end up here, but the hippopotamus still sits in my office in Footscray with its message just as relevant.

Mary Gaudron deserves to be honoured for her contribution to the law and to Australian society. It would have been a fitting tribute to her for her to leave the court on her retirement with more women on the bench than when she was appointed, but, sadly, there are fewer. That will be a fight that those of us who follow her will have to continue in her honour.