Adjournment applications and applications to amend out of time in civil proceedings just got more difficult. I have a feeling that the first time I said anything in court after I came to the Bar was an expression, to the Supreme Court’s Master Efthim, of how melancholy I felt about regrettably having little choice but to — ahem — respectfully submit that in all the circumstances, the only fair thing to do was to adjourn the following day’s trial of a commercial matter. Queensland v J L Holdings Pty Ltd (1997) 189 CLR 146 was what got me my first victory as counsel, even if I did join the elite club (or possibly even achieve a unique status in the history of the Victorian Bar) of suffering an order for solicitor-client costs against my client on my first appearance. It was an excellent introduction to my new reality of having to be the frontman in other people’s cases on short notice.
I knew Queensland’s Case (I could not resist) did not say exactly what many people lazily believed it to say. But the plurality (Justices Dawson, Gaudron and McHugh) did say:
‘Justice is the paramount consideration in determining an application such as the one in question. Save in so far as costs may be awarded against the party seeking the amendment, such an application is not the occasion for the punishment of a party for its mistake or for its delay in making the application. Case management, involving as it does the efficiency of the procedures of the court, was in this case a relevant consideration. But it should not have been allowed to prevail over the injustice of shutting the applicants out from raising an arguable defence, thus precluding the determination of an issue between the parties.‘
I knew it could not last. In fact my reaction to Justice Kiefel’s appointment to the Highkers was to note to myself that her Honour was the no-nonsense trial judge who had refused the adjournment in Queensland’s Case only to be rolled on appeal. I figured she would be plotting her revenge against that rare indignity. Sure enough, in Aon Risk Services Australia Limited v Australian National University [2009] HCA 27 a plurality of Justices Gummow, Hayne, Crennan, Kiefel and Bell today shredded Queensland’s Case, excoriated four ACT Supreme Court judges‘ toleration of a radical amendment at trial which caused it to go off for months, threw a grenade full of speed and a bucketfull of steroids into litigation, especially commercial litigation, and implicitly gave Justice Finkelstein permission to look towards a uranium enriched rocket docket. Justice Heydon and Chief Justice French were so excited about the need for speed that they weighed in with separate concurring decisions. This is the penultimate, swingeing, paragraph in the decision (from Justice Heydon’s reasons):
‘The presentation and adjudication of the case in the courts below do cause it to merit a place in the precedent books. The reasons for placing it there turn on the numerous examples it affords of how litigation should not be conducted or dealt with. The proceedings reveal a strange alliance. A party which has a duty to assist the court in achieving certain objectives fails to do so. A court which has a duty to achieve those objectives does not achieve them. The torpid languor of one hand washes the drowsy procrastination of the other. Are these phenomena indications of something chronic in the modern state of litigation? Or are they merely acute and atypical breakdowns in an otherwise functional system? Are they signs of a trend, or do they reveal only an anomaly? One hopes for one set of answers. One fears that, in reality, there must be another.’