ACTU Wants Dyson Heydon Sacked, May Boycott Royal Commission Otherwise

Unions will keep on demanding a shut down for the royal commission as Dyson Heydon has been accused of bias. The royal commissioner said on Thursday that he would not deliver the 2015 Sir Garfield Barwick address as he discovered that the event had been organised by the Liberal Party.

The event has always been organised by Liberal Party members since 2010. It is not clear when Heydon accepted the offer to speak at the ceremony. Labor demanded that the former High Court judge should be terminated. According to Labor, a public perception that he was politically biased should be enough to justify his termination.

Meanwhile, Unions demanded that the royal commission should be shut down. The commission is scheduled to end in December.

The Australian’s industrial correspondent Elizabeth Colman wrote that Heydon, generally a “stickler for procedure,” called for an adjournment all of a sudden as “for an important problem that has just arisen.”

He was first interrupted around 10 a.m. and then an hour later. The second interruption came when an examination was going on by Sarah McNaughton SC. “Another problem has arisen that I must attend to,” Heydon explained, “If it is convenient, we might take the morning tea adjournment now.”

ACTU President Ged Kearney is likely to continue the demand of the commission to get shut down on Friday as well. Heydon is going to preside over a public hearing of the commission from 10 a.m.

According to Prime Minister Tony Abbott, Heydon made an appropriate decision by not speaking at the event. He said that Heydon’s behaviour had always been “absolutely beyond reproach,” Sky News reported.

The ACTU demanded that the Federal Court must dismiss Heydon. Otherwise, it may go for a union boycott of the commission.

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