Listen up: Ruth McColl’s parting advice to men

Ruth McColl, who bowed out of the NSW Court of Appeal on Sunday, is free to speak her mind — and wants men to listen.

Retiring judge Ruth McColl. Picture: John Feder

Ruth McColl officially bowed out of the NSW Court of Appeal on Sunday. After almost 16 years on the bench, she is finally free to speak her mind — and she wants men to listen.

The 68-year-old is glad the ranks of female silks and judges are growing, but believes women also need to be heard.

“Men have to listen to women’s voices as well as merely put them in positions,” she says.

McColl says she finds it striking that Nancy Pelosi could be the third most senior US politician, and yet at 78 be in a room where men spoke over her.

“I’ve seen that in court,” she says. “If I was to say one thing in particular that male barristers have to do, it is listen to the women judges as well as the male.”

She says the difference was ­noticeable when sitting on an ­appeal bench with male judges.

“I know I’m not alone among women judges in thinking that barristers don’t listen to women judges as much as they listen to the men,” she says.

McColl grew up in Sydney’s north; she learnt to swim at Balmoral Beach and went to the public Willoughby Girls High School — where she was narrowly pipped as dux by opera singer Yvonne Kenny.

She enrolled in law by chance, encouraged by an English teacher who thought she should do more than study arts, and in 1999 was elected the first female president of the NSW Bar Association.

Now, she has chosen to step down ahead of her statutory retirement to give herself “an opportunity to smell the roses” instead of working “almost seven days a week”.

Appearing in the Privy Council to defend David Syme and Co, the then publishers of The Age, in a defamation case against West Indies cricket captain Clive Lloyd still counts among her career highlights.

She is closely watching the current defamation law reform process, due to be completed by mid-next year, and says changes are needed to address the rise in social media cases founded on what would have once been seen as trivial, backyard gossip.

Britain’s “serious harm” test, aimed at weeding out trivial cases, is “certainly worthy of consideration”, she says. While a defence of triviality is available in Australia, the problem is “you don’t get to defences until you’ve run the gamut of the trial”.

McColl says she can understand why people “feel seriously aggrieved” by the dreadful things others post online.

“But there should be some real obligation to sit everybody down and say, ‘These are the implications of commencing a legal ­action and this is what it could cost you’,” she says.

“There should be a lot of pressure on mediation very, very early in the piece, trying to get people to walk away from what I’ve described as an electronic ‘backyarder’.”

For now, she needs to unpack 60 or 70 boxes of documents from her chambers. She is also madly training for a three-week bike ride through Italy in May — and has two 100km bike rides planned before then.

As a judge, she tried to exercise every morning before sitting down for the day — and says “one way to stay sane in the legal profession is to keep your exercise levels up”.

After that, she hopes to contribute to society more broadly, possibly on defamation law reform or issues such as tackling indigenous inequality. So listen up.