George Henry Brandis QC (born 22 June 1957) is the 36th Attorney-General for Australia and has been a Liberal member of the Australian Senate representing Queensland since May 2000. Brandis has served as Attorney-General in the Abbott Government since 18 September 2013. He also held the post of Minister for the Arts and Sport from 23 January 2007 until the Howard Government lost the 2007 election.
Education and early career
Brandis was born in Sydney. He attended Villanova College and then the University of Queensland where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts, and Bachelor of Laws. Following his graduation he served as Associate to Justice Sheahan of the Queensland Supreme Court. He was then elected a Commonwealth Scholar and obtained a Bachelor of Civil Law from Magdalen College, University of Oxford.
Legal career
Brandis was called to the Queensland Bar in 1985 and quickly developed a large commercial practice with a particular emphasis on trade practices law. He appeared as junior counsel in the High Court of Australia in the equity case Warman v Dwyer. He was also the junior barrister for the plaintiff in the long running Multigroup Distribution Services v TNT Australia litigation in the Federal Court of Australia.
Brandis was appointed a Senior Counsel of the Supreme Court of Queensland in November 2006. In June 2013 the original title of Queen's Counsel was restored by the Queensland Government and Brandis was one of 70 (out of 74) Queensland SCs that chose to become QCs.
He has co-edited two books on liberalism and published academic articles on various legal topics, one of which was cited by the High Court of Australia in the landmark defamation case ABC v O'Neill.
While at the Bar he was a board member of UNICEF Australia for 10 years. He has also been an Associate of the Australian Institute for Ethics and the Professions.
Parliamentary career
Brandis was first chosen by the Parliament of Queensland to fill a casual vacancy following the resignation of Senator Warwick Parer. He was elected to a further six-year term at the 2004 election.
In his period as a senator, he has served as Chairman of the Economics Committee and featured prominently as the Chairman of the Senate's highly publicised Children Overboard Inquiry. In the wake of this inquiry, Brandis gained widespread attention when it was reported that he called Prime Minister John Howard "a lying rodent", a report he denied.
Brandis has also made a number of public speeches, perhaps the most controversial of which was in 2003 when he described the Australian Greens as eco-fascist.
Brandis also attacked the Greens in the Australian Senate where he stated "I intend to continue to call to the attention of the Australian people to the extremely alarming, frightening similarities between the methods employed by contemporary green politics and the methods and the values of the Nazis". Prime Minister John Howard later distanced himself from Brandis's claim that the Greens use Nazi-style fanaticism in Australian politics.
On 23 October 2006, Brandis made headlines when he wanted Good Shepherd Catholic College in Mount Isa to ban from its school library the book "100 Greatest Tyrants" by British author Andrew Langley, which places Sir Robert Menzies, the longest serving Australian Prime Minister, in such company as Mao Zedong, Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein and Augusto Pinochet. The book claims that Menzies was a tyrant (an abuser of political power) and that Menzies' most tyrannical act was when he wanted to ban the Communist Party of Australia. The school principal Mr Durie said "Obviously it's twaddle to suggest Menzies was a tyrant in the same class as Attila the Hun and that crowd", but refused to withdraw the book as it would be a resource for the generation of debate.
During his time in Parliament and before, Senator Brandis has been a strong supporter of the Young LNP and was a former President of the Young Liberal Movement's QLD Division.
Ministerial career
Howard administration
On 23 January 2007, Brandis was appointed Minister for the Arts and Sport, replacing Senator Rod Kemp. He lost his ministerial position on the defeat of the Howard government in the 2007 election.
Shadow ministry
On 6 December 2007 the new Leader of the Parliamentary Liberal Party, Brendan Nelson, appointed Brandis Shadow Attorney-General, a position he continued to hold under the leadership of Malcolm Turnbull.
On 2 June 2008 Brandis, in his capacity as Shadow Attorney-General, referred the Same-Sex Relationships (Equal Treatment in Commonwealth Laws â€" Superannuation) Bill 2008 to a Senate committee for review. The aim of the bill was to remove legislative provisions that discriminated against gay and lesbian citizens, in this case relating to superannuation. Brandis stated that the Opposition believed discrimination of this type should be removed and supported the Labor government's bill against the more conservative elements of his own party. However, he insisted on a review of the proposed legislation prior to enactment. The bill was passed into law with bipartisan support on 9 December 2008.
Brandis consistently opposed proposals for a bill of rights.
In January 2010, Brandis commented on a controversial debate between Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard and federal Opposition Leader Tony Abbott on the topic of advice given to children regarding abstinence. Brandis suggested that as Ms Gillard did not have children, she did not have the understanding to comment on the issue of pre-marital sex.
Abbott administration
Following re-election in 2010 Brandis was appointed Shadow Attorney-General, Shadow Minister for the Arts and Deputy Leader of the Opposition in the Senate in the Abbott shadow ministry.
In 2011 Brandis submitted specific accusations to NSW police commissioner Andrew Scipione that sitting federal M.P. Craig Thomson committed larceny and fraud through misuse of a credit card in the Health Services Union expenses affair which in turn led to public concern about the separation of powers between legislature and the judiciary.
Brandis faced public scrutiny when it was revealed that in 2011 he had billed the taxpayer for attending the wedding ceremony of Sydney radio shock-jock Michael Smith, who had colluded with Brandis to publicise the Craig Thomson media saga.
Racial vilification issue
In early 2013 Brandis gained media publicity for his views on free speech and media regulation. Brandis did not support the Labor government's proposed media reforms in 2013, and was outspoken in support of greater press freedom, particularly for Andrew Bolt who was found to have breached racial vilification laws in commenting on Indigenous Australians of mixed-race descent. Brandis believed section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act (RDA) should be repealed in favour of greater freedom of expression. As Attorney-General in 2014, Brandis furthered his push to amend the RDA, in part to allow media commentators such as Andrew Bolt greater freedom of expression, and to legally ensure that "people do have a right to be bigots". Brandis labelled Bolt’s comments on mixed descent aboriginals, found by the Federal Court to be racial vilification, as ‘quite reasonable’, although the federal court found Bolt violated the RDA and the plaintiffs were awarded an apology and legal costs. Professor Marcia Langton was a vocal public critic of Brandis's proposed repeal of the part of the RDA on which the Bolt case was based.
Brandis proposed draft legislative amendments in March 2014. The proposal met with criticism from the ALP, Liberal MP Ken Wyatt, and an alliance of racial minority representatives including Jewish lobby groups concerned with holocaust denials in the media. His view was ultimately not supported by his Cabinet colleagues.
East Timor spying case
Brandis supported and approved a December 2013 ASIO raid on Bernard Collaery’s Canberra office (a legal representative for East Timor), where all documents and computers were seized by the government, and which Brandis claimed was for national security interests. Shortly after the raid, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that the Australian government was not permitted to use or view any of the raid evidence. Brandis claimed the ICJ ruling was a good outcome for the government. The Timor Gap case involved allegations of ASIS spying during commercial negotiations with the East Timorese over the $40 billion oil and gas reserves of the contested Greater Sunrise fields within the East Timorese exclusive economic zone.
Additionally Brandis approved the ASIO raid and passport cancellation of a former Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) agent, who was a director of technical operations at ASIS and the whistle-blower on the allegations of commercial spying done by Australia on East Timor, which consequently prevented the unnamed former agent from testifying at the ICJ in the Netherlands.
Dealings with the Australian Human Rights Commission
In February 2015, Brandis made headlines when he questioned the independence and impartiality of the President of the Australian Human Rights Commission, Gillian Triggs, following the public release of a report by the Commission into children in detention which was critical of the Government. Brandis said he had lost confidence in Triggs and the Commission because in October 2014 she had given "inconsistent and evasive" evidence to Senate estimates when explaining the timing of her decision to hold the investigation into children in detention which resulted in the report. Brandis said that the "political impartiality" of the Commission had been "fatally compromised" because the Commission had only investigated the issue after the Liberal-National Coalition were elected to power, even though there had been a large number of people in detention under the previous Labor government. This, Brandis claimed, was a "catastrophic error of judgement".
Triggs defended her decision to commence the investigation in early 2014, saying that although the number of detainees had begun to fall while the Coalition were in Government, the length of time in detention had been rising.
Further controversy arose when Triggs told a Senate Estimates hearing that Brandis' departmental secretary had on 3 February 2015 asked her to resign, just prior to the public release of the Commission's report. Triggs said that she was told that she would be offered "other work with the government" if she resigned. Initially the Prime Minister and the Foreign Minister, Julie Bishop, denied that any offer of any other role was made to Triggs. However, Bishop conceded that an international role had been discussed with Triggs in early February, during a meeting in her office with the secretary of the Attorney-General's Department, Chris Moraitis.
Some government sources had suggested that Triggs had wanted to be "looked after" if she quit the Commission. However, Triggs said she "categorically denies any suggestion that the issue of a job offer and resignation came at [her] instigation". Triggs said at the Senate hearing that she considered the offer made to her a "disgraceful proposition".
These events prompted Mark Dreyfus, Labor's Shadow Attorney-General, to refer the matter to the Australian Federal Police. Dreyfus said that an offer by Brandis to an independent statutory officer of an inducement to resign, with the object of affecting the leadership of the Commission to avoid political damage, may constitute corrupt or unlawful conduct. The Australian Senate also took up the matter, passing a motion to censure Brandis on 2 March.
References
External links
- Summary of parliamentary voting for Senator George Brandis at TheyVoteForYou.org.au