James Frederick Staples

James Frederick Staples (2 June 192927 April 2016), better known as Jim Staples, or as Justice Staples in legal contexts, was an Australian judicial officer. He served as a deputy president of the Australian Conciliation and Arbitration Commission from 1975 until its dissolution in 1989.

Early life Staples was born in Sydney, New South Wales (NSW) on 2 June 1929, on the brink of the Great Depression. His father, a former First World War serviceman, died in 1933, forcing his mother to take up factory work to earn a living, and causing Staples to spend part of his childhood living with extended family away from his mother and two younger brothers.

Communist Party involvement During his time at Sydney University, the young and idealistic Staples became a member of the Australian Communist Party. When the Australian Communist Party leadership refused to accept the veracity of the speech, Staples arranged to have 500 copies of it reprinted on a Gestetner owned by the NSW Deckhand's Union, complete with a cover designed by local artist Rod Shaw. For this action, Staples was soon after expelled from the party.

Barrister Staples was admitted to the New South Wales Bar on 29 July 1960, and established his own law practice. Later in the 1960s he became a founding member NSW Council for Civil Liberties (CCL), which included prominent members of the NSW legal profession such as Maurice Byers and Neville Wran. Staples took on numerous briefs assigned to him by the CCL, many of them , advocating for freedoms in areas of human rights.

In 1971, Staples defended the two doctors who were accused in R v Wald, a District Court case which effectively legalised abortion in NSW. In constructing his argument for the case, Staples recalled the legal history of abortion back to the 16th century to argue for the lawfulness of the procedure.

While the Nagle Royal Commission into the state of the NSW prison system was being held from 1976 to 1978, Staples was chairing the prison reform committee of the CCL, in which role he amassed a collection of statutory declarations from prisoners detailing warden brutality.

Conciliation and Arbitration Commission After having served as counsel to the national wage case during the Whitlam government, Here he joined fellow CCL member Michael Kirby, who had been appointed the previous December. Despite the subsequent successful resolution of the case by Staples, employer organisations accused him of partiality. The president of the commission, John Moore, reassigned Staples from the maritime panel of industries to an alternate panel, However, McClelland took no action on this before the Whitlam government was ended by a constitutional crisis in November 1975.

Overseas study tour Under the subsequent Fraser government, Staples was dispatched on an overseas study tour during 1977 and 1978, ostensibly to investigate matters of human rights and civil liberties, but with the conspicuous side-effect that he was for nearly two years temporarily removed from his substantive duties at the commission. Staples produced several reports during this period, including an investigation of Canadian human rights law.

Return to Australia and withdrawal of assignments Staples returned to Australia and his duties on the commission in 1979. which was subsequently overturned on appeal by the full bench of the commission amid union strikes in protest in February 1980. The next month, following critical comments made by Staples from the bench concerning the unwillingness of Telecom (then a commission of the Commonwealth) to negotiate with a union, the Fraser government arranged for Staples to be offered an appointment to the Australian Law Reform Commission in an apparent attempt to remove him from the arena of industrial relations. Staples declined the offer.

Instead, Staples made a defiant speech at a conference in Adelaide in which he defended his original ruling in the Storemen and Packers Union case and criticised its overturning by the full bench. This criticism concerned his fellow deputy presidents on the commission, who wrote to Moore expressing this view. Following receipt of this letter, and new appointments to the commission, Moore withdrew all of Staples' panel assignments in May 1980, leaving him to sit on the full bench as invited on a case-by-case basis only. However, when Staples sought the support of the NSW Bar Association to challenge Moore's decision, an extraordinary general meeting of the association resolved not to take any action.

Controversy Leading up to 1 March 1989, the Hawke government was accused in the press and in legal circles of subverting judicial independence by annulling Staples' security of tenure. For his part, Staples gave a vigorous rebuttal and a broader defence of his actions on the commission at a National Press Club address a few weeks later on 23 March.

A joint select committee of parliament was instigated to investigate the tenure of appointments to Commonwealth tribunals. It first met in April 1989, and reported in November 1989, having dedicated a chapter of its report to the Staples matter. It found that Staples had been 'at all times prepared to carry out the duties of his office but was prevented from doing so by decisions of the President of the day', and expressed surprise that a resolution to the issue had not been arrived at between Staples and the president during the prior decade.

Aftermath Although a High Court challenge had been mooted in the press, Staples ultimately chose not to challenge his loss of office in court, and the controversy subsided.

Retirement In his retirement, Staples became a director of Civil Liberties Australia, building upon his longstanding membership of the NSW Council for Civil Liberties.

Personal life In 1966, Staples married Margot Staples (née Ungley), a potter who served as president the Potter's Society of Australia. They lived together in Longueville on the North Shore of Sydney.

Staples also lived in Bywong, a rural community not far from Canberra, and Gloucester, in the hinterland of the Mid North Coast of NSW, where he died on 27 April 2016.