Election tweet a misjudgment

As political campaigning goes it could hardly have been more blatant. Yet Queensland Bar Association president Rebecca Treston QC clearly thought she had nothing to hide when she tweeted a photograph of herself, wearing a Labor T-shirt and pressing how-to-vote ­Labor material at Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton at a polling booth in his hard -fought Brisbane seat of Dickson in May. The picture was reproduced on Saturday’s front page. In a separate tweet, Ms Treston wished “good luck’’ to her friends Ali France, who stood against Mr Dutton, and Fiona McLeod SC, who stood for Labor in the Melbourne seat of Higgins.

As Jamie Walker reported, the Bar association’s former president, Christopher Hughes QC, has written to federal Attorney-General Christian Porter dissociating himself from Ms Treston’s actions. His disquiet is understandable. The position should be apolitical because the president of the Bar has a formal role in ­advising the Queensland government on appointing judges. The president also helps draw up the list of ­barristers to be designated as Queen’s Counsel — a prestigious promotion that usually increases barristers’ earnings and can set them on the path to judicial appointment.

Ms Treston’s tweets have heightened tensions over what some in Queensland, such as former Liberal National Party premier Campbell Newman, claim is the politicisation and groupthink of the ­state’s judiciary. Ms Treston, who does not belong to a political party, insists she was acting in a personal capacity. Queensland Attorney-General Yvette D’Ath has declared her “full confidence” in Ms Treston.

Queensland’s judiciary is dominated by Labor appointees because the party has held power in the state for all but five of the past 30 years. That said, Ms Treston’s campaigning was a bad look. It may rebound if she is ever appointed to the bench. As Mr Porter told Walker, senior members of legal associations should be free, and seen to be free, “from any situation which could give rise to a real or perceived conflict of interest with their professional roles”.