Sophie Mirabella set for Supreme Court stoush
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A Supreme Court encounter is brewing between high-flying federal Liberal front-bencher Sophie Mirabella and the children of her close friend, deceased distinguished law professor Colin Howard QC, over the proceeds of Howard’s estate. Mirabella, 42, was a keen student of Howard’s in the late 1980s at Melbourne University, with the duo teaming up as co-anti-republic delegates to the 1998 constitutional convention. Prof Howard was an esteemed legal statesman and constitutional expert who served as an adviser to the Whitlam government during The Dismissal. He died on September 2 after a long battle with Alzheimer’s disease. He was 83. Crikey understands Mirabella had a long and close friendship with Prof Howard over many years after the student and her professor met at Melbourne University, and was granted power of attorney by Howard several years ago. Two weeks ago, Mirabella and current husband Greg placed the following death notice in Melbourne’s Age newspaper.
But Prof Howard’s two children — successful London fund manager Mervyn Howard and the Australian-based Lesley Howard — are preparing to contest Mirabella’s execution of the will to ensure the correct beneficiaries are adequately provided for. The children have engaged David Leggatt of top law firm DLA Piper to oversee their claim. He is expected to argue that Howard was unfit to grant Mirabella power of attorney due to the nature of his debilitating illness. Veteran Melbourne spin doctor and State Library of Victoria board member Steve Kerr has also been engaged by the Howards to represent them in the dispute. Crikey understands that a Supreme Court application by the children relating to the estate is imminent. However, this would require Mirabella to apply for a grant to validate the will under Victorian law, a move which may attract negative publicity. Sophie Mirabella’s office said the matter was private when contacted by Crikey late last week: “This is a private matter and an upsetting time. We buried Colin less than a week ago. No application has yet been made to obtain grant of probate of his will.” In her maiden speech to parliament in 2002, Mirabella named Professor Howard as part of a trio of elder gentlemen who had inspired her with their “intellectual ability and integrity”. “As a relatively young Australian”, said she was “grateful for the hope they had given me.” The pair had previously served together as elected delegates to the 1998 constitutional convention as part of the group Australians for a Constitutional Monarchy. Mirabella quoted Howard’s view of constitutional law approvingly in this fiery 1999 PM interview. In 1995, at the fifth conference of the conservative Samuel Griffith Society at Sydney’s Menzies Hotel, Howard spoke glowingly of his former student, describing the then Sophie Panopoulos’s observations on the effect of a constitutional amendment on the Commonwealth’s external affairs powers as “absolutely spot-on”. In 2006, Panopoulos married former Lieutenant-Colonel Greg Mirabella, with whom she has two young children. She is the federal member for the Victorian rural seat of Indi since 2001 and has since risen to become Tony Abbott’s shadow minister for industry, innovation and science. She has a reputation as a terrier-like parliamentary performer, retaining from her university days a special interest in the voluntary student unionism debate. The respected Howard had a long and storied career as a fearless dispenser of legal advice on the issues of the day. He was general counsel to Commonwealth Attorney General Lionel Murphy until Murphy was appointed as a High Court judge in February 1975. Professor Howard penned a famous Age op-ed on the day after The Dismissal on November 12, 1975 under the headline ‘Power, without any glory at all’. “Australia has always had a powerful, if vaguely defined, belief that it was one of the most democratic countries in the world. There is sadness as well as irony in the fact that we were so convinced of our natural superiority in this respect that we needed the Queen’s representative to show us how wrong we were,” Howard wrote. He had moved to Australia in 1958 from the United Kingdom to take a job lecturing law at the University of Queensland. He served as Hearn Professor of Law at The University of Melbourne for 25 years between 1965 and 1990, took silk in 1996 and retired from practice in 2001. Crikey understands that savvy Sunday Age scribe Michael Bachelard is preparing to write a story on the saga this week, with editor Gay Alcorn keen to splash with the feud on her paper’s front page. |
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23 Comments
Perhaps the most “generous” description of “La Mirrabella” I’ve ever read.
Well done Andrew.
I’m looking for the public interest angle here. After all this breathless piece is your lead story. Has anyone done anything wrong? This is the sort of story a publication like, say, News of the World might publish.
You haven’t hacked anyone’s phone, have you? Gone through anyone’s rubbish bags by any chance? Got someone lurking behind a bush to snap a candid picture of Ms Mirabella as she leaves home, perhaps?
Here’s Michael Bachelard’s story: http://www.theage.com.au/national/power-love-and-money-20110922-1knb7.html ‘Power, love and money’
Well, it’s all out there for Sophie’s family and the rest of us now: http://www.theage.com.au/national/power-love-and-money-20110922-1knb7.html
I particularly like this quote:
”As she (Sophie) said to me the other day, if she wins this election, she is made for life,” Colin wrote to his son Mervyn in 2000.
Wangaratta was originally settled by gold diggers and was later plagued by bushrangers. Not that anything related to that is in any way relevant to this story - just a bit of historical background about Wang.
David hand you are right, the actual public interest in this story is slight. Though Pia Akerman at The Australian seems to feel it worth reporting, too.
David Hand’s political views are a very long way from mine but I have to agree that I don’t really see the public interest angle here. In fact this really seems like a piece of personal business that should stay that way. Ugly and unpleasant, sure, but not really our business is it?
Agreed DH, HB and SBH. Not really a newsworthy story and definitely not worth the significant airtime that Jon Faine gave it this morning.
Well, some of you may be right about the ‘is this personal business’ but then again, if the article is shown to be true, surely it goes to her integrity and trustworthyness as a person?
That, SusieQ, will be precisely the story, but it’s still at the “he said, she said” stage before it goes to court.
Hard to see how she can come out of it decently.
Well, SusieQ,
The left media have succeeded with you haven’t they, parsing a civil dispute about a will, about which the rest of us know absolutely nothing, into a commentary on the integrity of a Liberal front bencher.
And you all moan about Rupert Murdoch.
And you, David Hand, seem to have worked out my (alleged) political leanings from one post here on Crikey!!!! Isn’t it a funny world.
Perhaps I should have read the Herald Sun this morning - but they have Collingwood footballers on the front page - hardly real news!
This is a private and personal matter. Any slight amount of public interest here does not justify publication. I say this as a strong labor supporter and voter. I have no liking at all for Ms Mirabella’s political views nor her public persona, but she is entitled to privacy in this situation.
I’m not sure, Mr Hand. It’s not just about the will, it’s about the treatment of Prof Howard when he was clearly ailing. He should have been in proper care, not sequestered in a remote farmhouse being visited four times a day (let’s guess at 3 meals and put to bed = 4). And when his children enquired after him, they got an agressive dismissal. Sounds to me like it goes straight to integrity.
I’ll tell you a story - my ailing Alzheimer’s-affected grandmother changed her will weeks before she died, which disinherited her widowed daughter-in-law (my mother) and three grandchildren in favour of her only other child, my aunt. At that point in her life grandmother was so confused she thought I (at 8 years old) was my late father. My aunt, who inherited the lot, never saw us again after grandmother died. People do nasty things for money and this is a woman who told Prof Howard that if she won the election she would be “made for life”.
Might it also not be possible that Prof Howard’s standing would have made this a story whether it involved Mrs Mirabella or Jane Doe?
that’s just bullsh*t David hand (no surprise) more than half the comments here don’t think it’s a story and its all over the mainstream press so get your hand off it
David - it seems we know quite a bit about this will now, thanks to Crikey and The Age.
Susieq - quite agree - if Craig Thomson’s shenanigans are grist for the mill re. his judgement and character, this goes too.
The politics of this is pretty easy. Revenge.
Trawling the sex life of that ex HSU mp bloke.
Then the confected outrage of Murdoch tabloids over satirical sex by a welsh woman under the national flag on the abc tv.
A more subtle agenda may be the fairfax pre emptive counter attack on Australia News chutzpah annexe of the sector (under a presumed coalition government eager to reward its media mate), by going all tabliod itself.
Looks like the ALP, or more likely the friends of, or indeed commercial enemies of said Australia News, are opening the cankerous keg of calumny in return, and it may just see both major parties drown in the proverbial.
And there is precious little public interest in any of this. Even if she is a loathsome ideologue.
A little bird tells me the fed government released its discussion paper on the tort of privacy … last Friday. What a coincidence … not.
err, the other backgrounder to revenge, is the Chris Smith attempted trawl of Big Red’s past private social relations via a Pasquerelli smear sheet. tsk tsk.
err, the other backgrounder to revenge, is the Chris Smith attempted trawl of Big Red’s past private social relations via a Pasquerelli smear sheet. tsk tsk.
with Pasq being based around Castlemaine in Victoria, perhaps in the seat of Indi? Or nearby.
The ABC seems quiet about this story.
David , get your Hand of it , if it had been our PM Gillard , Ltd News would have been running this 24/7. Actually this reminds me of another ex-LNP hopeful trying to rip off her Sugar daddy’s family.
It appears that Sophie may have breached the Electoral Act and that certainly goes to honesty and integrity. In addition, there is possible fraud and deception.
Cuppa ? , they are running a poll on the media prying too much into private affairs ?As soon as i saw that, i thought of Sophie . Every time i see her , for some reason , i think of Sara Palin and lipstick ?
My spies tell me even the dyed-in-the-wool Liberal types are disturbed by these reports down at the Wodonga Golf Club.