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The Albanese government faces renewed pressure to act on its stalled promise to create a federal judicial watchdog, after serious allegations about the conduct of serving judge Alexander “Sandy” Street were not acted on for a decade.
This masthead reported on Saturday how Federal Circuit Court Chief Judge Will Alstergren had commissioned an inquiry by a retired senior judge into Street over allegations a law enforcement taskforce uncovered in 2016.
Legal experts said the revelations highlighted both the need for a Commonwealth judicial complaints commission to oversee federal judicial officers and federal Labor’s failure to fulfil its pledge in 2022 to introduce one.
The investigation concerns interactions Street allegedly had with his ex-wife and the unorthodox business dealings of her freight company Send it Pink Pty Ltd shortly after Street was appointed to the Federal Circuit and Family Court of Australia bench.
The company was founded by Street’s ex-wife and her then-boyfriend. The latter devised the plan that initially drew the attention of police and which involved the sale of millions of dollars worth of Penfolds Grange red wine to senior officers aboard a People’s Liberation Army Navy surveillance ship, the Yuan Wang.
Send it Pink was also involved in a messy legal dispute over a debt. While there is no allegation that Street, his ex-wife or her then boyfriend engaged in any unlawful behaviour, police were concerned that Street’s involvement in his ex-wife’s affairs may have conflicted with his duty as a judge to avoid dealings that risked bringing himself or his court into disrepute.
This masthead also confirmed that in 2017 the Australian Federal Police failed to alert the then attorney-general, George Brandis, or the chief judge of the Federal Circuit Court about these concerns after they were initially uncovered by the Polaris police waterfront taskforce and compiled into a secret report.
The federal police only informed Alstergren about the report, which referred to Street’s alleged conduct, after a recent investigation by this masthead, with Alstergren immediately commissioning an inquiry.
Under Australia’s existing federal judicial misconduct regime — and in the absence of the judicial commission promised by Labor — complaints about judges must be made either to the attorney-general or to the chief justice of the relevant court.
In contrast to their federal counterparts, complaints about judges in state courts are mostly overseen by state judicial watchdogs.
The pre-eminent legal expert on the issue of judicial oversight, the director of the Judiciary Project at Gilbert and Tobin Centre of Public Law, UNSW Professor Gabrielle Appleby, said the scandal provided fresh impetus for the federal government to act on its 2022 “in principle” commitment to establish a federal judicial commission.
“There have been repeated recommendations and growing support for reform over many years, including most recently from the Australian Law Reform Commission’s 2022 report into judicial impartiality,” she said.
“In a survey of lawyers, the ALRC found that a federal judicial commission was the most important reform that could be achieved to maintain public confidence in judicial impartiality.”
Appleby said that despite its initial support for a commission, Labor’s “interest in this reform has stalled”.
“The absence of reform becomes more visible whenever serious allegations involving federal judicial officers arise,” she said.
Appleby also said the revelations about how the Street allegations were handled served only to “expose the weaknesses of the current system because they create immediate questions about transparency, process, accountability and public confidence”.
“One of the central arguments for a judicial commission is that it creates an established institutional mechanism before a crisis emerges. Without that, pressure falls onto courts, governments, parliament and the media to respond in an ad hoc way,” she said.
Attorney-General Michelle Rowland’s spokesperson acknowledged that while Labor had given in-principle support to establishing a federal judicial commission in 2022, it was “continuing to give careful consideration” to doing so.
In response to a petition in 2025, the then attorney-general, Mark Dreyfus, told a parliamentary committee that a taskforce in his department was created to “undertake scoping work and consult on the merits and design of a commission”.
“The design and timing of the establishment of a federal judicial commission continues to be under consideration by the government,” he said.
The Law Council of Australia first called for a federal judicial watchdog in 2006, while Appleby said a standing federal judicial commission would provide a credible, independent institutional process for dealing with allegations about judicial conduct in a way that protects both public confidence and judicial independence.
Legal academic Dr Jessica Kerr, a lecturer at the University of Western Australia, said Australia was a “clear outlier internationally” because of “the lack of a federal complaints commission”.
Kerr said New Zealand had introduced an independent statutory commissioner to investigate allegations of judicial misconduct two decades ago.
“There is ample experience at subnational level and considerable scholarly work to support the proposal at federal level, and it is difficult to see any objections that would outweigh the benefits,” she said.
Kerr also queried whether the AFP may have more expeditiously referred the allegations about Street for review if an independent complaints body had existed.
She also said the current investigative process used by the federal court system – hiring a retired judge to probe the decade-old concerns about Street – was “extremely non-transparent, more so than would be likely under an independent commission mode”.
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