Who We Are
The judge who said yes – Peter Johnstone, retired NSW Chief Magistrate
In his humble way, Peter Johnstone will tell you that much of his stellar career is down to “being in the right place at the right time”. However, it's more likely that his many successes, including in his roles as a Managing Partner, President of the Children’s Court and NSW Chief Magistrate, are due to his exceptional legal mind, impressive leadership skills and restorative justice advocacy.
Three final – and formative – school years
Over the past 50-odd years, Peter has achieved many firsts. At school, he was the first person to win The Armidale School’s Merit Award three times. Along with his best mate Peter Williams, he was in the first year of the Wyndham Scheme, which added an extra year of secondary education in 1967, which meant his class was the senior class twice (thanks to the introduction of the HSC model). He was the first senior boy to be ‘sent down’ to the junior school after the headmaster told the two Peters “You are the leaders of the year, but you are leading it in the wrong direction and need to be separated”. This unjust moment cemented Peter’s anti-establishment streak and his lifelong belief that school principals lack judgement – which is why none of them ever served on a jury in his courtroom!
After finishing the HSC, Peter deferred his tertiary education for a year and joined his family in Argentina where his father, a veterinarian, was working with a UN agricultural programme to support Patagonian sheep farmers. He spent his gap year doing another final year of school, this time becoming the first foreign student to obtain a Bachillerato (see Peter's Bachillerato, left). “Because I was an outsider in that Argentinian school, I became independent and resilient. I think I’ve carried those attributes through life and they have given me the skills to deal with difficult situations, form relationships with a wide range of people, and care for people who are disadvantaged or ‘on the outside’,” Peter said.
The Ashurst (Blake Dawson Waldron) years
With a strong sense of justice – and an avid dislike of maths and science – Peter decided to study law. After graduating from Sydney University, he joined Ashurst's predecessor firm Dawson Waldron as an articled clerk. At the firm, Peter forged many lifelong friendships with people, including his best man, Hugh Keller, his son’s godfather John Kench, and two of the lawyers he did his articles with – Michael McGrowdie and David Somervaille.
Peter became a partner at the age of 27 during a period of rapid expansion at the firm. He built a strong litigation practice, which included acting in many industrial and occupational health and safety disputes for Australian Iron and Steel.
A few years later, Peter participated in what was jokingly referred to as the ‘junior partner junket’ and went to London for a six-month secondment with Bowring, a Lloyd’s professional indemnity broker. This secondment marked the start of his commercial insurance practice, which boomed after the Australian Government passed the Insurance Contracts Act 1984 (Cth). In the wake of the new legislation, Peter redrafted policies for insurance companies, including GIO, and captive insurers like BHP Haematite Insurances.
Peter enjoyed many other practice highlights, including convincing the Federal Airports Corporation to run with a principal-controlled policy on its third runway project and providing a five-minute piece of advice on flooding near Gosford, which resulted in his client quickly settling all claims (unlike their competitors) and subsequently capturing 90% of the market.
His successes were noticed. One day in 1990, the firm’s Managing Partner told Peter that the staff partner hadn’t turned up to work and there were 15 new graduates waiting to be inducted, “So you start as our new Staff Partner today”. Becoming Staff Partner was the perfect launching pad for Peter’s management career as it meant he could focus on individuals and help shape the culture. “In some ways, we were less commercial than our competitors because our culture was one of respect and tolerance, and the partnership worked cohesively as a team. But it worked so well that we were profiled as a future law business model in a 1994 article in The American Lawyer called “It’s Already Tomorrow in Australia”, which also highlighted our technical innovations and the support we were giving to younger lawyers like Elizabeth Broderick AO.”
Two years later, Peter became the Sydney Managing Partner and held that role initially for two years and then, after returning to full-time practice for 15 months, for another three years. During that time he also co-founded the BDW Risk Management Consulting Group.
In 1997, Peter was appointed as an acting judge of the District Court of NSW, a role he combined with his Managing Partner duties. When the Chief Judge asked him to stay on in a permanent judicial role, Peter declined because he thought he was too young to join the bench full time and he still had ambitions at the firm.
A year later, Peter took a big step towards fulfilling his ambitions by becoming the Melbourne Managing Partner. “I’ve always been a change agent because I like to leave a place in a better place than I found it. I think that’s why my time in Melbourne, and getting the office back to parity with Sydney, was such a highlight for me,” he said. “At the end of my first week in Melbourne, the finance manager gave me a summary of the office’s performance for the week. I asked her why the Melbourne office was using four times the amount of paper per head than Sydney. After some investigation, we uncovered that the office manager and his paper-supplying brother-in-law had been defrauding the firm for ten years. We stopped the fraud, as well as a pre-dawn attempt at destroying the evidence and eventually secured a $1m insurance payout. That was a pretty good effort for my first week.”
Peter returned to Sydney in 2001 and months later became Acting National Chief Operating Partner, while the firm searched for a new CEO. In the years that followed, he also took on many sector leadership roles, including with the NSW Law Society, the Australasian Institute of Judicial Administration and the Australian Insurance Law Association.
Joining the establishment (while maintaining a healthy anti-establishment streak)
In May 2006, Peter became a full-time judge of the District Court. Two years later, the Chief Judge talked Peter into organising the District Court and County Court Biannual Conference – at the last minute. After that, Peter’s ‘ninja’ management skills – as described by Brett McGrath, President of the Law Society of New South Wales, in his judicial farewell speech for Peter – got attention. Ultimately, this contributed to the Chief Judge asking Peter to take over the Children’s Court in 2012. Peter’s response was, “Why me? I can’t even discipline my own children!” Ultimately, Peter’s ability to get things done and his focus on the root causes of offending behaviour, rather than just on discipline, explained the 'why’ perfectly.
During his time at the Children’s Court, Peter again had many firsts. He developed the court’s four pillars – prevention, early intervention, diversion and rehabilitation – which led to a restorative justice approach. In turn, this resulted in a more than 50% drop in the number of children in youth detention and the closure of three of the nine youth detention centres.
Arguably, his most significant ‘first’ at the Children’s Court was establishing the Youth Koori Court, which has the same powers as the Children’s Court but uses a different process to better involve young people from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities and their families in the court process. “When I started in the Children’s Court the statistics horrified me. Of the children in court – whether in the criminal or the care and protection division – 40% were Indigenous children. That highlighted a big problem we needed to address, given they represented only 3% of the total population,” said Peter.
As Brett McGrath noted in his farewell speech, no president of the Children’s Court had ever said yes to a proposal like the Youth Koori Court. Possibly, that was because none of the previous presidents of the Children’s Court had Peter’s willingness to challenge the establishment on the status quo. “We started the Youth Koori Court without funding or a change in legislation because I knew the Government would come in behind its evidence-based restorative practices if it was successful. Twenty children born to the young people who went through that system are now growing up in stable, loving homes. That’s the best testament there is to the success of the Youth Koori Court.”
After leading the Children’s Court for nine years, Peter deferred his plans for retirement when the Attorney General of NSW asked him to become the Chief Magistrate in 2021. In that role, beyond dealing with many pandemic-related challenges, Peter continued to address the overrepresentation of Indigenous peoples in the justice system by introducing initiatives such as a First Nations Committee and Circle Sentencing. He also introduced other groundbreaking initiatives, including an expansion of the early referral into treatment programme and the Family Violence Committee.
In July 2024, Peter retired from the bench. At his farewell, Brett McGrath deftly summed up Peter’s positive impact on the system, “These are not the changes of a person concerned with privilege. These change the gigantic operation and direction that this roiling system takes to better the administration of justice.”
(Alumni lunch at Macleay Bistro. From left to right: John Kench, Richard Fisher, Peter Johnstone, Peter Stapleton, David Somervaille, Bill Conley, Meredith Beattie, Richard Fawcett, Hugh Keller, Alan Cameron.)
