A Cab on the Rank

Inspection: Hughes Tom QC: Taxi on the Rang

Hughes, née 1923, is on the one hand Irish-Catholic and on the other English. However, unlike most Irishmen in Australia at that period, this side of Hughes' familiy was prosperous and prosperous, as his great father, who was Lord Mayor of Sydney and Knight in the early 1900s, proves.

In 1963, Hughes was an active participant in the Liberal Democratic Front and won the pre-selection for the Parkes Marginally Seated Office, which focused on the Canterbury area when the Democratic Front wanted a Catholic to sit. and the Menzies administration won the ballot. Upon his arrival in Canberra, Hughes, like most of his peers, was a vocal follower of the unfortunate Vietnam Wars, but turned out to be a very competent secretary when Prime Minster John Gorton named him Attorney General in 1969.

Hughes is one of the most famous pictures from his days as Attorney General. In front of his house in Bellevue Hill he heads for Vietnam protester with a crime racquet in his hands. Ian Macdonald, later NSW secretary of state and object of the ICAC statements on bribery, headed the demonstrators. The Macdonald accused Hughes of bodily harm, but they were fired.

One of Gorton's greatest advocates, Hughes was dismissed as Attorney General when Billy McMahon took over as Prime Minister in 1971. Many of his best-known cases, among them his Lionel Murphy appearance under charge, are reported in a way that is very readily available to the general public.

Mr. Haughes had the repute of being the country's most costly lawyer in the early eighties and nineties. He was always hard but decent in my own matches against the bar opponents named Hugs. Obviously, there was always some resemblance between the bar and the set, and Hughes' court room approach was certainlyatrical.

His private world is openly treated by the writer. At the end of his first matrimony, he found that there was no lack of divorced people in Sydney's eastern suburbs looking for another man, but eventually he joined a very prosperous second one. Lucy Turnbull, who became Mayor of Sydney like her great-grandfather and Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's spouse.

A further member of this powerful familiy was Hughes' sister Robert, who quit Australia in the sixties to gain an internationally renowned career as an arts reviewer and writer. Hughes addressed John Gorton's 2002 commemoration at John Gorton's commemoration Mass and assaulted Malcolm Fraser, who sat in front of the chapel, for his part in Gorton's demise.