Kenneth Hayne

Kenneth Hayne joined the bench in 1992 when he was appointed as a judge of the Supreme Court of Victoria. From 7 June 1995 he sat on the Court of Appeal of the Supreme Court of Victoria, which is the highest court in the Australian State of Victoria.

Hayne was appointed as a Justice of the High Court in September 1997. He retired in 2015 upon reaching the mandatory retirement age of 70, in accordance with Section 72 of the Australian Constitution. He was replaced on the High Court by his wife, Federal Court judge Michelle Gordon.[1]

Hayne has been described as being a part of a 'core' of judges during his time on the High Court, usually forming the majority, and often writing joint reasons with Justice William Gummow.[2] One notable exception was Hayne's dissent in Thomas v Mowbray, where he joined Justice Michael Kirby in holding the Commonwealth's regime of interim control orders applied in respect of suspected terrorists to be unconstitutional. Another, more recent, example is Kuczborski v Queensland [2014] HCA 46 in which Hayne J was the sole dissenter.

In December 2017 Hayne was appointed to head the Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry.[3][4] The inquiry received continual media coverage and the report was delivered on 1 February 2019.[5]

In July 2019 (published in early August), in his first public statement since the Commission, Hayne diagnosed an increasing demand for royal commissions as a symptom that "[t]rust in all sorts of institutions, governmental and private, has been damaged or destroyed". In his view, the public sees Australia's “opaque” decision-making processes as “skewed, if not captured” by powerful vested interests, while leaders are “unable to conduct reasoned debates about policy matters” but instead resort to the “language of war” and seek to “portray opposing views as presenting existential threats to society as we now know it”. He noted, in particular, political reactions to the Uluru Statement from the Heart.[6][7][8]

In August 2020, Hayne called upon all sides in politics to end "dialogue of the deaf", as in hyper-partisan conflict over climate change and over the Indigenous voice to parliament proposed in the Uluru Statement. He hoped that the Covid-19 pandemic would encourage governmental institutions to trust the public more with the truth, so that in response the public might have greater trust in them.[9]