Dyson Heydon: stop the clock, an important problem has just come up

Trade union royal commission watchers know Dyson Heydon as a stickler for procedure.

Trade union royal commission watchers know Dyson Heydon as a stickler for procedure. He adjourns for the mid-morning recess. Lunch is always at or very close to 1pm. Hearings finish at 4pm, much like clockwork. He doesn’t leave his seat otherwise, making a rare exception when a witness requests a bathroom break, and he doesn’t vary his routine without solid reason.

And he rarely minces words. So when he abruptly called for an adjournment “for an important problem that has just arisen”, an important problem it clearly was.

It had begun as a slow morning, with a dry technical conversation between lawyers about the confidentiality of a union insurance scheme. The first interruption came a little after 10am. Then an hour later there was another.

Interrupting an examination by Sarah McNaughton SC, Heydon explained that “another problem has arisen that I must attend to’’.

“If it is convenient, we might take the morning tea adjournment now.”

Yet by the time the story broke mid-morning that the commissioner had agreed to give the Sir Garfield Barwick lecture at an event hosted by the NSW Liberal Party, Heydon had returned to his seat in the hearing room.

There was no hint or mention of the “important problem”.

By 1pm, when Heydon adjourned for lunch, the commission had been decried as biased, and ACTU secretary Dave Oliver was calling for it to be shut down.

By 2pm, when hearings were scheduled to resume, federal Labor MP Tony Burke had claimed that Heydon had disqualified himself and should resign.

After four days of evidence on Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union funds from 2005, the commission wasn’t attracting the front-page headlines that came with big-name witnesses Julia Gillard and Bill Shorten.

Even the allegations in recent days that former CFMEU NSW branch boss Andrew Ferguson had deliberately used charitable programs as a front for a $100,000 donation from construction firm Thiess had failed to lure reporters.

But by now the media room had become more popular as everyone waited to see if Heydon would turn up.

At 2.03pm, he returned to his seat. As question time raged and Twitter fumed, the proceedings continued steadily until 4pm when Heydon adjourned — like clockwork. The hearing will resume at 10am today.