High court justice Robert Beech-Jones started his speech at a Townsville resort and casino last month with a joke.
“I was not really sure what to talk about. So I picked up the conference brochure and discovered that I was talking about contemporary issues and the high court, which is not a bad place to start,” he told the North Queensland Law Association Conference.
“I also realised that I was speaking at 9:00am on a Saturday morning after an organised gathering at a local bar. So I decided the best approach was to start you off gently but maybe wake everyone up with something a bit pointier towards the end.”
By the end of his speech, those gathered at the Ville Resort‑Casino were certainly awake.
Beech-Jones spoke of Sir Samuel Griffith, a former Queensland premier and chief justice, who also became the first chief justice of the high court early in the 20th century.
Griffith had been “remade and repackaged”, Beech-Jones told the crowd, and a society which bears his name had turned him “into a warrior in the 21st century culture wars”.
“To use postmodern language, Sir Samuel Griffith has been culturally appropriated; specifically, appropriated for the ideological and political ends of others,” Beech-Jones said.
On Beech-Jones went, saying the Samuel Griffith Society promoted the “ominous” formation of student chapters on universities; that its founding was marked by a borderline “obsession” with the Mabo native title case, including by hosting speakers who had said “Aborigines are a pretty incompetent lot”; and implying that while the research it promoted in relation to the constitution sounded “entirely reasonable and fairly innocuous”, it was anything but.
Beech-Jones then accused the society of attempting a US supreme court-style conservative stacking of the high court.
The judge painted a picture of dark forces gathering, of a Trumpian stalking horse, of the abused legacy of one of Queensland’s most significant figures.
He outlined how the decades-long process of stacking US courts with conservative appointees led to a series of troubling decisions, including striking down restrictions on selling firearms to people aged 18 to 21.
“Only a fool would think this was not the intended outcome of a sustained politicised and political process of stacking courts with supine judges,” he said.
“Ordinarily all this would be none of my business but these methods are being advocated for in Australia. This has made it my business and it has made it your business as custodians of the law; we are all interested in this, whether we like it or not. To adapt a phrase, they have driven into my lane and they have driven into yours.
“If anyone thinks this particular US style of court stacking and judicial decision-making is a good idea, then go and live there. The rule of law appears to be having an interesting time in that country.”
Beech-Jones, who was sharing the stage with the chair of his presentation, the supreme court of Queensland’s chief justice, Helen Bowskill, then finished his speech with a quote from a 2024 piece published by The Australian.
The piece, headlined “The legal profession’s giant lurch to the left”, compared the Samuel Griffith Society to the US Federalist Society, which has been behind the push to stack its judiciary with conservatives, and suggested a “quiet billionaire” could help it succeed.
“Well, there you have it,” said Beech-Jones, who was appointed by the Albanese government in 2023 from the NSW supreme court.
“What would Samuel Griffith … have thought of appealing to billionaires to fund an Australian Federalist Society?
“I do not think that question is very difficult to answer. But perhaps the better question is what do you think?”
‘Just do your job’
It did not take long for Beech-Jones to find out what the protectors of the society thought.
“Just do your job as a judge,” Allan Myers KC, the president of the society, told The Australian. “This assertion [of Griffiths being culturally appropriated] is false and no basis for it is made in the judge’s address.”
Myers said Beech-Jones had been asked to speak at the society’s conference in August, but declined as he did not participate in “political gatherings”.
In an Australian Financial Review opinion piece , the society’s executive director, Mia Schlicht, said: “Beech-Jones, it seems, takes issue with only one side of the culture war. That speaks volumes.
“In attempting to discredit the Samuel Griffith Society, Beech-Jones ultimately made the strongest case for its existence,” Schlicht said.
“He confirmed what the society has argued for more than three decades: that the high court possesses a political dimension, that its members are conscious of it, and that they are uncomfortable when this reality is openly acknowledged.”
While the speech highlighted what Beech-Jones argued were parallels between attempted stacking of the high court and US supreme court, had it illuminated another similarity: that both courts were riven with ideological rivalry?
Coverage of Beech-Jones’ speech quickly highlighted that another high court judge, Simon Steward, gave the keynote address at the society’s 2025 conference.
Other speakers included former high court justices Ian Callinan and Dyson Heydon, as well as former attorney general Christian Porter and former Queensland senator and current state MP Amanda Stoker.
A partisan rift?
In 2022, three researchers from the Australian National University considered how the ideology of judges could affect their decisions.
The researchers measured a judge’s ideology by coding every news article in which they featured in the six months prior to the day they were sworn in.
One of the researchers, Patrick Leslie, told the Guardian this week that research found that, “in general, rightwing governments select rightwing justices, and leftwing governments select leftwing justices” and that those judges then made decisions accordingly.
“You find a very strong pattern over the long run: people who were selected and known to be right- or leftwing judges at the time of their appointment, do go on to behave in that way … they do carry their ideology through to high court cases,” he said.
Leslie said this did not mean that a US-style push to stack the court would work; aside from the obvious differences between the courts, the research found there was “less dissent and more clarity and collegiality among the justices” in high court matters compared with the US supreme court.
Whether Beech-Jones’ speech indicated a rift, however, could prove fascinating.
“This is really intriguing, because if this is something that is going to continue into the future, maybe it will be something that becomes overly partisan,” Leslie said.
“These decisions might come under more scrutiny in the future.”
A former federal court judge, based in Queensland, tells the Guardian that he is concerned that the Samuel Griffith Society is not clear about its political aims when compared to politically aligned groups on the other side of politics like Labor Lawyers.
He says while it was clear the society favoured judicial appointments of “black-letter” lawyers – those who stuck as closely as possible to the constitution – just as Republicans pursued in the US, it would be wrong to consider that jurists with those views were also politically conservative.
The former judge, speaking on condition of anonymity so he could discuss his work freely and who describes himself as on the left of politics, says that while most judges appeared to be appointed on merit some previous federal attorneys general are “clearly just tapping people on the shoulder”.
“There’s always going to be an element of politics – and judicial politics – involved in the appointments, because of the constitutional power the high courts have,” he says.
“God help us, let’s just hope it never gets as political as it is in the United States.”
