On 25 April 2016 my good friend Michael Gordon Roberts reached the statutory age of senility for service as a Commissioner of the Fair Work Commission as mandated by s 629(1)(a) of the Fair Work Act 2009 (Cth).
I first met Michael when I was a fresher at the University of Sydney when he was completing his Arts degree. We shared an interest in politics and became life-long friends. [...] Continue Reading…
Here is my column , called Last Word published in the Winter edition of Thomson Reuters’ Workplace Review
Schmahkritik, (n) (German), 20th century; abusive criticism.
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As this edition of Workplace Review goes to press we are coming to the end of a very long election campaign. Election campaigns have long since been a competition of ideas or plans for the future of the nation. Slogans or three- to four-word tag lines repeated ad nauseam have become the major parties’ lingua franca of campaigning. Please don’t expect elections to reveal novel, well thought-out policies. Such, need to be the stuff discussed over cheese and cheap wine and by twenty dollars-an-hour focus groups before an unveiling. Modern electioneering is devoid of new ideas and reduced to beauty parades, controlled meetings a la North Korea, gaffes, “gotcha” moments and, alas, schmahkritik.
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To view and article I wrote which was published in The Australian newspaper on the 29th January.
Last year I served as a member of the Bar Council of New South Wales . The Bar Council performs a great deal of important and useful work representing the interests of barristers and also concerns itself with many Bar related disciplinary and regulatory functions. In recent years and last year I criticised some aspects of the Bar’s leadership as intruding into overtly political matters and departing from its guild-like function in furthering the financial and professional lives of its members. Some of this behaviour appears to be pontification by Philosopher Kings and Queens and at worst a form of social engineering.
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Here is a paper I delivered at the Law Society of New South Wales Seminar on the 18th February 2015.
ADVERSE ACTION—A RISING REMEDY UNDER THE FAIR WORK ACT [...] Continue Reading…
An important issue currently before the NSW BAR. This article is an edited version of a paper I delivered at the Annual Conference of Australians for Constitutional Monarchy at the Four Seasons Hotel, Sydney on 28 November 2014. It appears in the Workplace Review Journal called and the paper is called “The restoration of QC and the opportunity for choice”
Workplace Review is available online and in hard copy from the Thomson Reuters website. [...] Continue Reading…
