The Removal of Justice Staples and the Silent Forces of Industrial Relations

Abstract

On 1 March 1989 the Australian Conciliation and Arbitration Commission was abolished and replaced by the Australian Industrial Relations Commission. All of the members of the old commission were appointed to the same office in the new except one, Justice Staples, a deputy president since 1975. Despite requests, no reasons were given to Justice Staples for his non-appointment in 1989 to the new commission. In Parliament, Prime Minister R. J. Hawke eventually explained it as based on the failure of successive presidents to assign Justice Staples duties. This paper places the events of Justice Staples's career in the Arbitration Commission in the context of the history of the commission and its predecessors. It outlines the controversy involving Justice Staples and how it first arose, and then traces the steps leading to his purported removal from office. The responses of the Australian legal profession, the judiciary, the media, the industrial relations community and parliamentarians are traced. Although the prime minister has declared that the concerns expressed in the legal profession are 'contrived nonsense', the author suggests that important conventions have been breached and that significant principles of universal application are involved in what happened to Justice Staples.