Lionel Keith Murphy (30 August 1922 – 21 October 1986) was an Australian politician, barrister, and judge. He was a Senator for New South Wales from 1962 to 1975, serving as Attorney-General in the Whitlam government, and then sat on the High Court from 1975 until his death in 1986.
Murphy was born in Sydney, and attended Sydney Boys High School before matriculating at the University of Sydney. He initially graduated with a degree in chemistry, but then went on to Sydney Law School and eventually became a barrister. He specialised in labour and industrial law, and took silk in 1960. Murphy was elected to the Senate at the 1961 federal election, as a member of the Labor Party. He became Leader of the Opposition in the Senate in 1967.
Following Labor's victory at the 1972 federal election, Gough Whitlam appointed Murphy as Attorney-General and Minister for Customs & Excise. He oversaw a number of reforms, establishing the Family Court of Australia, the Law Reform Commission, and the Australian Institute of Criminology, and developing the Family Law Act 1975, which fully established no-fault divorce. He also authorised the 1973 Murphy raids on ASIO. In 1975, following the death of Douglas Menzies, Murphy was appointed to the High Court. He is the most recent politician to be appointed to the court.
On the court, Murphy was known for his radicalism and judicial activism. However, his final years were marred by persistent allegations of corruption. He was convicted of perverting the course of justice in 1985, but had the conviction overturned on appeal and was acquitted at a second trial. In 1986, a commission was established to determine whether he was fit to remain on the court, but it was abandoned when Murphy announced that he was suffering from terminal cancer.
Early life and education
Murphy was the youngest of five sons, and sixth of seven children of William, a native of County Tipperary, and Lily Murphy. He was born and grew up in Sydney. Though the Murphy household was Irish Catholic, albeit estranged from the Church, Murphy became a humanist and rationalist.
He was educated at government schools in Sydney's Eastern Suburbs, including Kensington Public School in Kensington, where he was dux after repeating his final year in 1935, in nearby Moore Park, graduating with A levels in English, Mathematics, and Chemistry and B levels in Physics and French. In 1943, he commenced working in the chemical industry, thereby coming under the authority of the wartime Manpower Directorate.
Murphy was highly involved in the behind-the-scenes machinations and parliamentary debates around the appointment of DLP Senator Vince Gair as Ambassador to Ireland in 1974 (see Gair Affair), which preceded Whitlam's calling of a double dissolution election for May 1974.
Murphy's most important legislative achievement was the Family Law Act 1975, which completely overhauled Australia's law on divorce and other family law matters. It established the principle of "no-fault divorce", in the face of opposition from the Roman Catholic Church and many other individuals and organisations. This act also established the Family Court of Australia.
Civil Celebrants
thumb|left|291x291px|Lois D'Arcy was the first independent civil marriage celebrant ever appointed — by Attorney-General Lionel Murphy. Her appointment is dated 19 July 1973.Murphy used an existing provision of the Marriage Act 1961 (Section 39C) to establish the Civil Marriage Celebrant programme. Using this provision he appointed about a hundred Civil Celebrants and urged them to provide marriage ceremonies of dignity, meaning and substance for non-church people. It was an initiative opposed by the Australian Labor Party, the public servants of his department and his personal staff.
<blockquote>The civil celebrant program is almost entirely the result of one man’s vision. Murphy himself told me the story of how he was opposed by his own staff, the public service, his fellow Members of Parliament s and officials of the Labour Party. He defied all, and, on July 19, 1973, in the dead of night typed the first appointment himself, found the envelope and stamp, walked to a post box and posted it himself. Lois D’Arcy, carries the honour of being appointed the first genuinely independent civil celebrant in Australia, and actually in all the world.</blockquote>
Although it was a radical move at the time, the programme proved to be very successful. In 2015, 74.9 per cent of marrying couples in Australia chose a civil marriage celebrant to officiate. The programme broadened to include secular funerals of substance, namings and other ceremonies which celebrated the landmarks of human existence. Murphy took an enthusiastic interest in this programme - sending telegrams of congratulation to the first several hundred couples married by civil celebrants and would often unexpectedly turn up uninvited to weddings performed by celebrants to delight in his achievement.
Human Rights Bill
As Attorney-General, Murphy drew up a Human Rights Bill (which lapsed with the double dissolution of 1974) giving as among the reasons: "in criminal law, our protections against detention for interrogation and unreasonable search and seizure, for access to counsel and to ensure the segregation of different categories of prisoners are inadequate. Australian laws on the powers of the police, the rights of an accused person and the state of the penal system generally are unsatisfactory. Our privacy laws are vague and ineffective. There are few effective constraints on the gathering of information, or its disclosure, or surveillance, against unwanted publicity by government, the media or commercial organisations". Murphy also introduced important legislation substantially abolishing appeals to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, removing censorship, providing freedom of access to government information, reforming corporations and trade practices law, protecting the environment, abolishing the death penalty and outlawing racial and other discrimination.
thumb|right|300px|Atmospheric nuclear explosion in the Pacific. Murphy took the French Government to the [[International Court of Justice over nuclear tests at Mururoa.]]
Furthermore, Murphy established a systematic legal aid service for all courts, set up the Australian Law Reform Commission with Michael Kirby as its inaugural chairman and set up the Australian Institute of Criminology.
Murphy took the French Government to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to protest against its nuclear tests in the Pacific. The French government conducted 41 atmospheric nuclear tests at Mururoa after 1966 and formally ceased atmospheric nuclear testing in 1974 as a result of public pressure facilitated by Murphy's ICJ case.
Judicial career
thumb|right|300px|High Court of Australia. Murphy served as a High Court justice from 1975 to 1986.
In February 1975, Whitlam appointed Murphy to a vacancy on the High Court of Australia. He was the first serving Labor politician appointed to the Court since Herbert Evatt in 1931 and the appointment was bitterly criticised. He resigned from the Senate on 9 February 1975 to take up the appointment. Murphy was the last High Court justice to have served as a Member of Parliament, and the last politician appointed to the High Court. Additionally, Murphy was one of only eight justices of the High Court to have served in the Parliament of Australia prior to his appointment to the Court, along with Edmund Barton, Richard O'Connor, Isaac Isaacs, Henry Higgins, Edward McTiernan, John Latham and Garfield Barwick.
Although it did not become a constitutional requirement until 1977, it had been long-standing convention that a Senate casual vacancy be filled by a person from the same political party. However, on 27 February 1975, the Premier of New South Wales, Tom Lewis, controversially appointed Cleaver Bunton, a person with no political affiliations, to replace Murphy in the Senate, beginning the chain of events which led to the 1975 Australian constitutional crisis. These events provided the impetus for the 1977 constitutional change that ensures such an appointment cannot be repeated, although a State Government can still achieve a similar result by declining to fill a Senate vacancy. Soon after his appointment to the bench, Murphy visited Justice Menzies' old chambers in Taylor Square, which would now be his. Staring at the volumes of British law reports on the shelves behind his desk, he said, "I want all of these to go". He replaced them with decisions from the Supreme Court of the United States.
Court cases and death
In the summer of 1983/84, during the term of the first Hawke government, both The National Times and The Age published transcripts of telephone conversations illegally recorded from 1979 to 1981 by the New South Wales Police. Although not then authenticated, they were allegedly between Murphy and Sydney lawyer Morgan Ryan, who in 1982 faced charges of forgery and conspiracy.
In July 1985, Murphy was initially convicted on one of two charges of attempting to pervert the course of justice, over new allegations made by Clarrie Briese, the Chief Magistrate of New South Wales, that Murphy had attempted to influence a court case against Morgan Ryan, whom Murphy referred to as "my little mate". After his acquittal, Murphy said, "Thank heavens for the jury system!".
Due to the seriousness of the allegations, Attorney-General Lionel Bowen, acting on what he said was his belief that the Justices of the High Court were minded to take some independent action to assess Justice Murphy's fitness to return to the Court, introduced legislation for a Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry, consisting of three retired judges, to examine "whether any conduct of the Honourable Lionel Keith Murphy has been such as to amount, in its opinion, to proved misbehaviour within the meaning of section 72 of the Constitution". (Section 72 specifies that a High Court judge may be removed only by the Governor-General and both houses of Parliament "on the ground of proved misbehaviour or incapacity".) The terms of this inquiry specifically excluded the issues for which Murphy had already been tried and acquitted. The Speaker of the House of Representatives and the President of the Senate were given control of the commission's documents. Murphy returned to the Court for one week of sittings. He died on 21 October 1986.
In 2021, the ABC investigative series Exposed: The Ghost Train Fire aired an allegation, for which they provided no evidence, that Murphy and NSW Premier Neville Wran had conspired with organised crime figure Abe Saffron to help Saffron's relatives obtain the Luna Park lease after the 1979 Sydney Ghost Train fire, which caused the deaths of six children and an adult.
Judicial quotes
- Australian Aboriginal history:
- Freedom of religion:
- Freedom of speech:
- Trial by jury:
thumb|right|150px|Gordon Dam in [[South West Tasmania World Heritage Area.]]
Preservation of the world's natural heritage:
- Constitutional prohibition of slavery:
- Constitutional prohibition on civil conscription for medical or dental services:
- Common heritage of humanity:
- Theory of class struggle:
- Right to vote:
- Privilege against self-incrimination:
- Legal professional privilege:
- Acquisition of property on just terms: