Framed on the wall of Terry O’Gorman’s office in inner-city Brisbane is a white vest and a cartoon.
The criminal lawyer wore the legal observer’s vest as a law student with an Art Garfunkel-esque mop of curls during the brutal crackdown on those protesting against the now infamous tour of the apartheid-era South African rugby team in the early days of the Joh Bjelke-Petersen regime.
The newspaper cartoon depicts O’Gorman in the pomp of his legal career, red-haired and ruddy, looming over a flustered-looking Bjelke-Petersen in the witness stand during the landmark Fitzgerald inquiry that would bring down the controversial premier 17 years later.
So it is with no small irony that the now snowy-headed O’Gorman retired after five decades of practice – during which he was a standard-bearer in the often murky fight for human rights in the sunshine state – the day after a new conservative premier unveiled his own signature law and order crackdown.
And while the vibrant shade of O’Gorman’s locks might have dimmed with age, his turn of phrase has not. His assessment of David Crisafulli’s new hardline youth crime laws – under which youth offenders who commit serious crimes will face the same penalties as adults, including mandatory life detention for murder – is typically withering.
“This is the first time in Australia, and to my knowledge, the first time in the western world – the first time in countries with systems like us such as the UK and Canada – that we’ve had such a policy,” O’Gorman says. “So it is totally breaking new ground.
“And it, invariably, is going to cause miscarriages of justice.”
In this bill O’Gorman sees the ghost of injustices inflicted by the mandatory life sentences Bjelke-Petersen imposed for drug trafficking. To the ordinary person, O’Gorman says, that term conjured images of jumbo jets filled with methamphetamine and heroin. In reality, drug trafficking applied equally to small-timers pushing drugs to feed a habit.
“I had a client go to jail for life under that legislation,” he says. “My client was a user, addict-seller.”
It is not just the sweeping nature of Crisafulli’s crackdown that draws O’Gorman’s ire, but the fact that it will be “pushed through” parliament without “proper” consideration.
“You’ve got a politically motivated change of legislation that was put up there at the top of the agenda for the LNP to win an election that is now being completed in record time, simply to suit the political convenience of the premier who said it would be done by Christmas,” he says.
Particularly given that Queensland has no upper house to vet bills – another bug bear of O’Gorman’s – parliamentary committees require “proper deliberation” to ensure all voices are heard, submissions made and flaws identified. None of which will be possible under the timeframe given to Crisafulli’s legislation.
“The committee examination of this is going to be a farce and a shambles,” O’Gorman says.
Considering that prediction and his profile, did the 73-year-old lawyer consider delaying his retirement? O’Gorman’s answer to that question should put Crisafulli on notice – he is retiring from the practice of law, not from championing civil rights.
The former president of both the Queensland and Australian civil liberties councils says he will be watching the Liberal National party government “with some considerable trepidation” for a “repeat of the Campbell Newman madness”.
O’Gorman is referring to the anti-association “Vlad” laws the former LNP premier brought in to target bikie gangs “without consultation”. But also his “ridiculous” judicial appointments.
Newman’s pick of Tim Carmody as chief justice in 2014 would later be described as “the most controversial judicial appointment in Australia’s history” and is one the likes of which O’Gorman is adamant must never be repeated.
“It is critical that the appointment of judges remains apolitical, as it currently is,” O’Gorman says. “You only need to look at the US to see why.”
Concerned as he is, does O’Gorman not look forward to a break from a career in which he admits “one struggles to find work-life balance”?
To this, the man raised in a conservative Catholic family among 15 siblings gives a vague response about reading books and riding his bike before launching on a lengthy and impassioned plea for a national criminal cases review commission, a body to fight miscarriages of justice, for which he has long advocated, and one that will remain a pet project in retirement.
But the fight against those injustices is not always glamorous, or popular.
O’Gorman’s final trial, that concluded last week, was a rape case. His client was found not guilty. O’Gorman admits to a feeling of personal satisfaction – had the result been otherwise he believes it would have been a serious miscarriage of justice. Is he sure he’s ready to retire, really?
“There’s more than one of me,” O’Gorman says.
On one hand, this statement is backed by the number of critics of Crisafulli’s youth crime crackdown and a testament to how much has changed in Queensland since the 1970s when the Queensland Council for Civil Liberties was “almost a voice in the wilderness”, speaking out against the lawless methods employed by those imposing order.
But on the other, surely, there is only one Terry O’Gorman.
