FOREWORD (page 1)

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THE HON JUSTICE MICHAEL KIRBY AC CMG^∗

About 35 years ago, I prepared a book that looked a little like this one. I had just been appointed to my first judicial post as a Deputy President of the Australian Conciliation and Arbitration Commission. Although I had a substantial practice before that body and other industrial tribunals, there was an awful lot of law, and ‘lore’, about which I was unfamiliar. Naturally, I did not want to reveal my ignorance, once I was sitting on the Bench deciding urgent cases involving the nooks and crannies of federal industrial practice.

Between my appointment and my first case, I worked like fury compiling a kind of index containing brief summaries and cross-references on every conceivable subject that might come before me during a hearing. It was an intensely practical work. It was arranged conceptually and alphabetically. My object was to have beside me an instant guide offering a solution to every problem that would arise for decision.

A couple of months later, I was seconded to chair the newly established Australian Law Reform Commission.¹ Although my compilation had proved useful in the tiny number of industrial cases in which I had sat before taking up my post in law reform, the index was soon set aside as I turned my attention to the different, and equally challenging, problems of law reform. As chance would have it, I never returned to work in the Conciliation and Arbitration Commission. Nevertheless, I have always retained an affection and respect for the contributions of that body, its predecessors and successors, for establishing a ‘fair go’ in Australia’s industrial law and employment standards.²

Always reluctant to see a useful product going to waste, I offered my handiwork, without fee, for publication. Eventually CCH Australia Limited³ published it as the Industrial Index of Australian Labour Law. Because of its practical utility and ready reference system a generation or so of industrial law practitioners used it to find their way around the mysteries of industrial relations law and practice. Recent changes in that law may have destroyed its usefulness completely.⁴ But perhaps it will live to see a revival. However that may be, I was reminded of my youthful endeavour when I read of the way in which Troy Simpson conceived the idea of Win More Cases.

^* Justice of the High Court of Australia.

¹ www.alrc.gov.au

² Michael Kirby, ‘Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration in Australia: A Centenary Reflection’ (2004) 78 Australian Law Journal 785; see also (2004) 17 Australian Journal of Labour Law 229.

³ CCH Australia (2nd ed, 1983).

⁴ Australian Workers’ Union v Commonwealth (‘Work Choices Case’) (2006) 229 CLR 1, 216–220 [519]–[525].