Silk fever is building. This is the spring season’s festival of silk, an annual ritual where barristers seek special indulgences in the form of appointment as senior counsel or Queen’s counsel.

It’s as important to barristers – that thin slice of the legal profession specialising in advocacy and advice and who wear a special costume from the Queen Anne era – as sacrifices were to the Mayans.

NSW has just unveiled 18 new senior counsel, out of a list of 102 applicants. Three of the new ones are women.

Queensland has Queen’s counsel, courtesy of the monarchist attorney general Jarrod Bleijie, and a fresh crop of silk gowns will be announced by Melbourne Cup week. The traditional bows ceremony is held at a hugely popular event known as the exchange of Christmas insults.

In Victoria, the fresh crop will be made public on the last Tuesday of November. Somehow the Victorian government was persuaded by the local bar council early this year to allow those appointed to upgrade their senior council scrolls to letters patent - ie Queen’s council.

Unsurprisingly, George Brandis has signed-onto the monarchical tendency and from now on the Commonwealth will be appointing QCs.

With Queensland, Victoria and the Commonwealth opting for the royalist bar bauble there has been agitation, to varying degrees, to do the same in most of the other states and territories.

It’s a significant mish mash and in its own revealing way shows a nation of 23 million people without a cohesively organised legal profession. Even stranger, it exposes that Australian tendency to desperate insecurity, which can only be cured by blessings and baubles from the motherland.

From 1993 onwards, the states and territories began phasing out the appointment of QCs and replacing them with SCs. After all, this is what they were – even in the fanciest flight of imagination, they were not counsel to the Queen at all.

Now the rush is on to re-establish the royalist flourish. In the legal business it’s about status, self-esteem and money and it accompanies the reemergence of Dames and Sirs in Tony Abbott’s firmament of the steadfast £10 Pom.

One of the unsettling aspects of the appointment of SCs and QCs is that they are heralded by the various associations of barristers as the finest fleece in the flock, who can deliver guaranteed brilliance. It leaves you wondering about the other 80% of barristers who are not badged in this way. What has happened to their skills and brilliance? The whole thing does seem a mighty unfair piece of workplace discrimination.

There are some barristers who are at the top of their game, with busy practices and able to charge fat fees, yet have not taken silk. Maybe they haven’t applied, maybe they are outside the club and the unspoken system of nods and winks.

In a free enterprise economy, as advocated by governments throughout the land, it does seem odd for the market to be distorted by glorified badges of excellence awarded under special club rules that don’t adequately explain the grounds for exclusion.

Yet, here we are: stuck with a 400-year-old Elizabethan ornamentation.

The NSW bar council has commissioned reports into whether the royalist gong should be restored and has decided against. In the premier state, to convert from SCs to QCs would require an amendment to the Legal Profession Act, which currently prohibits official schemes for recognition of seniority and status.

The NSW attorney general, Brad Hazzard, has said his “instinctive response is that debate has been had. It’s over. Let’s move forward”. So, it does seem that a small but vocal faction of barristers will just have endure life without monarchical adornments.

This has brought on a subterranean attack from within the Victorian bar, that the NSW system of silk appointments lacks impartiality, because the elevations are made by a committee of wise elders from within the guild.

In response, it is pointed out that Queen’s counsel are in reality government appointees, because they have to be approved by the executive council. For the government to be ticking off the silk list smudges the gloss on the bars’ marketing position - that is is entirely independent.

One of the cases mounted in favour of QCs is that the top English barristers with letters patent tattooed on their foreheads are stealing the plum work in Hong Kong and Singapore, because litigating merchants and financiers like the idea of having someone blessed by Her Maj on their team.

Leading Sydney SC Bret Walker has gone on the record to say that the argument to restore QCs has “nothing to do with the public interest”. He thinks that the argument that QCs could win more work than SCs in Asia, “attributes to those unnamed, and probably fictitious foreign personages, a kind of snobbery that might be rather closer to home”.

There, it’s out in the open – snobbery. Another Sydney SC, Bruce McClintock, put it bluntly - the Queen’s counsel title is, “dishonest ... In what sense are QCs ... counsel of, to or for Elizabeth II”?



This gallivanting back to the distant bosom, 15,000km away, does not bespeak well of a supposedly independent, progressive, modern, sovereign nation at the foot of Asia. In fact, it is positively cringeworthy.