Forty nine years ago ...

Move over Roddy Meagher, Michael Kirby is snapping at your heels ... From 1962 comes this attack in Honi Soit ... The brutality of student politicians ... From Justinian's bulging archive ... Déjà Vu

The University of Sydney newspaper Honi Soit of July 24, 1962 revealed early on in his career the extent of Michael Kirby's friskiness and ambitions.

Even then, as president of the Students Representative Council, Kirby was a shameless political thruster.

He launched in the paper a tirade against the relaxed style of Roddy Meagher, later to join him on the NSW Court of Appeal.

The article makes it brutally clear that Kirbs was out to knife Roddy and take over his job as the students' representative on the university senate:

Kirby as president of the Sydney Uni SRC, introducing Viscount de L'Isle

"On at least four occasions in the past year the Student Senator has failed in his duty to represent on the Senate the interests of the undergraduates of this university.

It is the embarrassing and regrettable but nevertheless necessary duty of the SRC to draw attention to the fact the present incumbent of the office, Mr R.P. Meagher, has attended only one meeting of the SRC in the past 12 months.

It is precisely because of his isolation from the views and interests of students that there has arisen unprecedented lack of liaison between the Senate and the students, for example on such issues as quotas for Asian students in medicine, the revision of the arts bylaws, the orientation week ultimatum, and more recently the hurried and seemingly arbitrary introducing of quotas on all overseas students in 1963.

On all of these, and in other matters, the students of the university through the SRC had a vital interest, but Mr Meagher took absolutely no steps to apprise himself of student feelings or interests.

Possibly he considers himself to be not answerable or even responsible to the students. If this is his view, it is erroneous and he should be quickly made to realise it.

What is the solution?

Obviously the long range solution is that the president of the SRC for the time being should be present at part at least of Senate meetings as an observer and perhaps eventually as a full member.

If this had been so, as I recently pointed out to the Chancellor and Vice Chancellor, the mutual misunderstanding over orientation week would not have occurred.

In the short term, the solution is more simple: either the present Student Senator should improve radically his acquaintance with student views, interests and grievances by, inter alia, regular attendance at meetings of the SRC and regular conferrings [sic] with its executive, or he should resign his position to make way for a representative who has both the time and interest to do what Mr Meagher will not do, and which his office, by its very definition, demands.

One thing at least is certain, namely that the present mistrust and misunderstanding on both sides are exacerbated by the ignorance of the Student Senator ..."

No wonder years later HH Mr Justice Meagher was to describe a judgment of Kirby's as an, "elaborate and distinctly xenophobic rodomontade".