Photograph: The Sydney Morning Herald/Fairfax Media via Getty Images
The vast dump of documents concerning allegations against the former high court judge Lionel Murphy yield no findings of fact, no conclusions, no opinions, no substantive report.
Still, there are interesting, even hair-raising, morsels lurking in the thousands of pages that the presiding officers of the Senate and the House of Representatives have released a year after the expiry of the 30-year statutory embargo.
The parliamentary commission of inquiry came into being in May 1986 and was wound up three months later when Murphy was on the brink of death from terminal cancer.
There were three investigating judges, Sir George Lush (who also inquired into the conduct of Queensland judge Angelo Vasta), Sir Richard Blackburn and Andrew Wells. Their mission was to investigate in secret and report to parliament whether Murphy’s conduct amounted to “proved misbehaviour” under the constitution.
As soon as the parlous state of Murphy’s health was known the then Labor attorney general Lionel Bowen introduced a bill to repeal the Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry Act. It was as though the impending death of the judge determined the outcome of the allegations – for at least three decades.
By this stage Murphy had been investigated by two Senate committees and had been the defendant in two criminal trials in which it was alleged he had attempted to pervert the course of justice.
His old friend, solicitor Morgan Ryan, had been charged with a conspiracy in relation to what was described as a “Korean immigration racket”. According to the evidence, Murphy had approached a number of judicial officers with the intention of getting them to determine the Ryan case on other than its merits – the chief magistrate Clarrie Briese, Judge Paul Flannery of the district court, and later he tried to get former Senator Jim McClelland to approach another judge, Jim Staunton.
At the first trial Murphy was cross-examined and was convicted. His appeal was upheld and a new trial ordered. This time he was acquitted after giving an unsworn statement to the court that was not subject to cross-examination.
There have been various theories in legal circles as to why he was anxious not to be cross examined. One idea is that the crown had an expanded brief of allegations such that Murphy’s credit would seriously be damaged. By giving what is called a “dock statement”, the prosecution could not attack his credit.
What has never been answered is why Murphy would want to risk the destruction of his career by importuning judges and magistrates to look after his “little mate”. Surely, this folly can’t all be attributed to the bond of Irish mateship with a person described by Professor Rod Tiffen as a “solicitor cum-Mr-Fix-It to organised crime”. It was after Murphy’s acquittal that some of those allegations persisted to such an extend that the Hawke government was forced to establish the commission of inquiry under the three wise judges.
As it happens most of assertions against the high court judge, the documentation for which has taken so long to emerge, are not a surprise to those who have tried to follow the twists and turns of the Murphy saga.
There was the allegation that he tried to bribe a commonwealth police officer who was involved in the Greek social security conspiracy case with the promise of promotion in exchange for inside information about the progress of the prosecution.
He allegedly agreed to a scheme for crime figure Abe Saffron to intimidate solicitor Danny Sankey who had brought a case against former Whitlam government ministers, including Murphy, claiming that they had conspired to mislead the governor general over raising loans from the Middle East, known as the Khemlani affair.
He sought to find out whether federal police officers involved in the prosecution of Ryan over Korean immigrants were bribable. He also arranged for the release for deportation of Ramon Sala, a drug dealing client of Ryan, and gave him back his passport for good measure. The commission’s investigators said at that stage evidence of impropriety by the then attorney general in the Sala matter “is somewhat lacking”.
There were claims that Murphy had tried to lobby premier Neville Wran on behalf of Saffron to secure the lease of Luna Park and for a contract to revamp Central Railway in Sydney.
The Ryan-Saffron-Murphy connection was one of great intrigue and speculation. Murphy was seen at various Saffron haunts, including Lodge 44 in Edgecliff and the Venus Room. Saffron reputedly supplied women to the judge for sexual favours.
About half the 40 or so allegations that received a preliminary examination by the commission investigators were rejected, while the remainder were unresolved at the time the inquiry was wound-up. Any one of them, if proved, would have been conduct sufficient to disqualify Murphy as a high court judge, let alone a judge of any court.
Interested citizens began making allegations to the inquiry, including one from a Family Team member of the ACT House of Assembly claiming that as Minister for Customs, Murphy had instructed officials to ignore the importation of pornography into the country.
He was supposed to have a Swiss bank account and stacks of Swiss shares. Amazingly, the commission had information about a break-in at the home of Junie Morosi, a friend of Murphy and a lover of the treasurer in the Whitlam government, Dr Jim Cairns.
A statement about the break-in was supplied by a party whose identity in the documents has been redacted. The report from commission lawyer Andrew Phelan reads like a chapter from Boys’ Own Annual:
He said that in the early 70s he was hired by Alan Felton to break in to a townhouse occupied by Junie Morosi at Gladesville. He described Felton as a member of a committee of persons including WC Wentworth and Ivor Greenwood, a group which he later described as being anxious to get information on Lionel Murphy. The purpose of the break-in was to obtain documents providing details of Lionel Murphy’s activities overseas and his relationship and business dealings with Junie Morosi ...
Greenwood and Wentworth were prominent Liberal politicians, Greenwood being the shadow attorney general at the time Murphy was AG in the Senate.
There was an agent and locksmith called Richard Wigglesworth who broke in but came back to Felton empty handed. He and Felton went back for a second attempt to find incriminating documents but ran away when police cars started driving up the street, but it appears Wigglesworth was apprehended.
The redacted identity was furious at the botched job and drove around to the office of prominent bookmaker Bill Waterhouse and told him what had happened. Waterhouse rang Morgan Ryan’s number from where Murphy came on the phone with the assurance that everything would be fixed.
According to this statement Waterhouse also rang the premier Sir Robin Askin, and after a conversation said, “He’ll fix it. He’ll contact Murray Farquhar [then the chief magistrate]”.
Oddly, Wigglesworth was represented at the police station by Bruce Miles, a close colleague of Ryan.
This was Sydney in the 1970s.
Murphy was also conducting his own private investigations. There was a signed statement from a gentleman called Rodney Groux, who had been on the staff of an ALP minister, John Brown.
Groux had a meeting with Murphy at the Woden Shopping Plaza outside premises called “Meat City”. They arranged another meeting at Murphy’s Red Hill home, where the judge produced a photocopy of dairies he said belonged to Clarrie Briese. Murphy claimed to have got the diaries from another former Labor colleague, Mick Young.
Murphy claimed that he was the victim of a conspiracy hatched by the DPP Ian Tempy, barrister Ian Callinan who prosecuted him at his first trial, and members of the Liberal party.
He wanted Groux to investigate whether Briese had paid Mutual Pools $20,000 cash for the construction of a pool at his home. He also wanted to know about Briese’s reputation, his share transactions and his relationships with the media. He introduced Groux to Neville Wran, who is reported to have said he would do his best to help in any way he could.
The parliamentary commission of inquiry has not solved the riddle of Lionel Murphy. We’re left with a lot of unproved allegations and an acquittal on the most serious charge to face an Australian judge.
The terrible irony is that Murphy did not need to twist judicial arms on behalf of his little mate. Ryan was convicted of conspiracy in 1983, sentenced to be of good behaviour for five years and fined $400.
The court of criminal appeal overturned the conviction because of a misdirection by Judge Flannery. A new trial was ordered but in January 1987 the commonwealth DPP no billed the prosecution.
Murphy also had another legacy. He was arguably the most active and reforming attorney general that Australia has seen. In a hostile Senate he got through landmark reforms, including the Trade Practices Act, the Family Law Act, Corporations and Securities legislation, the Freedom of Information Act, the Racial Discrimination Act, and made a bold attempt to pass a Human Rights Bill.
He created the Australian Law Reform Commission, the Office of the Commonwealth Ombudsman, the environmental law division of the attorney general’s department, the Institute of Criminology and the Criminology Research Council.
Murphy was a brilliant, charismatic, flawed whirlwind whose great reforming energy remains with us, along with the unresolved litany of alleged constitutional misbehaviour.
- Richard Ackland is a Guardian Australia columnist
