From the President old

Letter to Editor of The Courier Mail –
Overseas Conference Travel by Judges

The article in the Courier Mail on 20 November 2009 headlined “Queensland judges spend $400,000 on European conference” was most unfair to its target, the judges, and was evidently written in the knowledge that propriety prevents them from responding in a way that the article deserves.

Overseas conference travel by judges undertaken pursuant to their jurisprudential allowance is a salary sacrifice. It is quite erroneous to characterise this expenditure as that of “taxpayers’ money”.

Your article, identifying individual members of the judiciary, was unfair to hard working men and women who chose to expend part of their salary package, approved by Parliament, to attend a legal conference.

To describe the internationally lauded 2009 Australian Bar Association conference as “controversial” and to say the “judges fled the state” was an unfortunate attempt to sensationalize, by pejorative language, a complete non-story.

While proper scrutiny and full transparency are to be applauded (after all most courts conduct their affairs in public), your attempt to inflame public sentiment against the judiciary in this fashion serves only to discourage the improvement of the judicial services provided to the community by such continuing judicial education.

The Bar Association of Queensland fully supports judges who choose to exercise their lawful entitlement to spend that part of their salary in pursuit of advancing professional development by attending law conferences whether overseas or in Australia, as Parliament intended to encourage when it granted those allowances.

Richard Douglas S.C.
President