I hope you will allow me, just for this week, to mention an essentially personal matter. On 19 March, I celebrated my diamond jubilee, sixty years as a barrister. On that day in 1964, I signed the Victorian Bar roll and became a barrister. It was so simple. I went to the Bar office which had a staff of two, took an oath to behave myself, signed the roll and then started learning the craft, or ‘reading’ as we called it, with my new master, Ninian Stephen, while I drummed up some work. The Bar had no say in approving my master. We were supposed to pay him or her,  50 guineas for the practical tutelage we received, as decimal currency did not come in until 1966, but when the time came to pay and I had scratched my 50 guineas together, he would not take it, on the charmingly old-fashioned grounds that he did not need it, I probably could not afford it and it would give him a bigger tax problem. So I presented him with a bottle of Martell Cordon Bleu which he clearly appreciated much more.

I then had my first brief which was an undefended divorce case heard by the redoubtable Mr Justice Barry, the only judge who would hear divorces. I put my lady in the witness box and asked for her address, whereupon she promptly fainted. I instantly realised that if this was the withering power of my examination-in-chief, no witness would be able to withstand my powerful cross-examination. Barry J, however, did not join in the universal wonder at my forensic skills; he simply growled, ‘Get on with it !’ But my brilliant career had started. Now, sixty years later, I am the Father of the Bar, its longest serving and most decrepit member.

We did a lot of pro bono work, but we never trumpeted how altruistic we were, and we did not need the endless committees and rules that regulate it today. We certainly did not wallow in cringe-making self-praise,  patting each other on the back and awarding ourselves the pretentious honours that are de rigueur today. We did it because it came naturally and was the inherently decent thing to do.

The Bar, when I first graced its portals, was a guild. It looked after barristers and served the public. But that was a different era. Above all, the Bar was not then the hothouse of social engineering that it has become.

In fact, there are three ways in which the Bar has changed in the last sixty years and none of them have been improvements.

First, the Bar at that time was open to all comers, no matter from what humble origins they had sprung. It was the ultimate in equal opportunity. It was a powerhouse of free enterprise, where effort and application won the day. It was intensely competitive. Today it is an exclusive clique and a closed shop, more restricted than any trade union. It is beset with barriers to entry, restrictive trade practices and anti-competitive behaviour. Qualified women and men, even if already lawfully qualified to practise as lawyers, are now not allowed simply to sign the Bar Roll as I did in 1964 and start to practise as a barrister. The Bar has had the impertinence to impose a further law course on applicants and an entrance exam where only candidates who obtain a 75 per cent mark are passed. But that only qualifies you to start a further two-month course of training. Then, the aspiring barrister must serve a further nine months with an ‘approved mentor’. The final insult is an interview with a latter-day Committee of Public Safety who decides if you are woke enough to be allowed into this exclusive club. Truly, it is now harder to become a barrister in Victoria than to become an approved candidate for election to the Russian parliament.

Secondly, in those far-off days, the Bar was apolitical, and for good reason. It embraced all parties, communists, right-wing eccentrics, and every shade in between. It had one function: to be neutral and serve the people through the law. But last year, it abandoned that principle and shamefully took a partisan political stand in support on the racist Aboriginal Voice – and lost! So, the Bar has now become a political organisation and alienated itself from 60 per cent of the voting public.

Thirdly, the Bar has become a social-reform institution. It is very big on climate change, the ‘planetary crisis’ and the ‘sixth mass extinction crisis’. Only last week came its latest flurry into the dreamy world of social engineering and progressive causes. It decreed that even after admission to the Bar, after overcoming all the barriers to entry, barristers must undergo more intrusion into essentially private and personal matters under the deceitful guise of ‘continuing education’. It has decreed that all barristers must undergo re-education and indoctrination in ‘equality and wellbeing’, the weasel words for all alleged social reforms as seen by those who impose them. Training courses will cover ‘anti-discrimination, harassment and bullying’. They are to be mandatory and undertaken annually, with schoolboy points for pass and failure. It will home in on the ‘poor mental health’ of ‘the perpetrator’. So much for the presumption of innocence! It will aim at ‘inappropriate behaviour (that) may arise from a lack of awareness or understanding of matters in respect of cultural or gender diversity’, and ‘fostering self-awareness (and) empathy’. It will outlaw a vast array of ‘inappropriate behaviour’, defined of course solely by those who make the rules.  We all know what those creepy expressions mean, simply that the Bar is now another ginger group for social engineering.

So, I should have unqualified joy in celebrating my diamond jubilee at the Victorian Bar. I regret that this celebration is tinged with profound regret at what it has become: closed, beset by rules, anti-competitive and lost in a sea of political correctness.