HELEN WINKELMANN

New judge at the top

Growing up in a home with a seriously ill father it was hardly surprising that Helen Winkelmann wanted to be a doctor.

That didn’t happen but plan B, an initially unappealing career as a lawyer, seems to be working out.

Last week Winkelmann, 56, became Dame Helen, and this week she was sworn in as chief justice, the top judge for New Zealand.

Winkelmann was the youngest of four children. Her mother was busy caring for her father, who had multiple sclerosis.

Older siblings each had a role, and the littlest organised.

It must be an understatement when she says, ‘‘the family was in a stressed state’’.

Her mother was not pushy but expected the children to try to get ahead. At Lynfield College, in Auckland, Winkelmann turned out to be academic. Her siblings joked she must have been adopted.

From age 14 she organised a schedule that included working as an usherette in up to three theatres, and at university she added a fourth job, stacking shelves in the uni library.

‘‘We knew we had to look after ourselves, we knew there wasn’t going to be any money, family money.’’

Her mother wanted the children to be selfreliant, and expected them to perform to their potential and do what they could to get ahead.

The family got by on a social welfare benefit before her resourceful mother had it topped up with a war pension by enlisting help to show that her husband had been sent to the Korean War when already showing signs of illness, and that stress had made him deteriorate more quickly.

‘‘It meant a lot to the family at the time,’’ Winkelmann says of the top-up.

She was 18 and at university when her father died. She wanted to be a doctor but left school at the end of the sixth form and it would have been hard to step up to the science papers for medicine without having done seventh form. She ended up on an uninspiring law course.

It was a while before she knew she’d done the right thing. Also taking history gave her a passion that has stayed with her.

By 25 she was a partner in a good-sized firm, its first female partner. Looking back the firm was accommodating but she remembers the odd misstep, like the litigation team dinner at the Northern Club which did not allow women members. The dinner was in a private room so she could attend but had to be escorted whenever she left the room, ‘‘in case I ran amok’’.

Recent complaints that younger female lawyers faced discrimination and bullying resonate from her own early days.

‘‘Every woman of my generation in the law would recognise all of that really, in dealings with clients, in dealings with senior counsel and some the firms they worked in.’’

Senior women, partners, senior counsel, and the judiciary to some extent, had to act when they saw things that were not OK, and keep working at it.

‘‘It can’t all be left to young women who are in the less powerful positions.’’

In 2004 she agreed to become a High Court judge. It came with a rigid time commitment and was not an easy choice to slot alongside family life.

Her husband, a lawyer, had his own demanding career, and babies one and two had been followed by twins who were then five. ‘‘When you’re in court you can’t take phone calls and make the arrangements women are constantly running through their heads and making, I’ve got to do this and I’ve got to do that. What happens if a child’s sick, what if the school rings up?’’

An arrangement was struck that she, and another judge appointed around the same time, would not carry the full load of months spent on ‘‘circuit’’, working in the other courts the Auckland judges covered.

The flexibility was allowed by Dame Sian Elias, the woman Winkelmann succeeds as chief justice. Winkelmann says it’s the type of allowance that has to be made to get diversity, starting at school level to bring people through their education, into the profession, and on to being a judge.

‘‘Judges of today are from a far more diverse group than we’ve had before, but they certainly aren’t as diverse a group as we would hope one day to have.’’

Winkelmann rose to be chief High Court judge and then was appointed to the Court of Appeal. She also heads the Institute of Judicial Studies.

She says judges need education if they are to understand factors like disabilities, gender, ethnicity, culture, sexuality, addictions, mental health, and poverty, and how those impact on people.

Being a judge can mean a hard, high workload, a reasonably inflexible lifestyle, in a sense working in a conflict zone, she says. ‘‘Society is changing very quickly and we have to make changes too within how we administer justice, so we are not locked in a permafrost while the rest of society moves around us.

‘‘And there is this increasing stress, which was not really present for judges of yesteryear, of media scrutiny, and it can be intense at times. No judge sets out to do a bad job. They are all earnestly trying to live up to the full demands, and they are full demands, of the judicial oath.’’

Technological changes complicate the relationship with the media. ‘‘We do keep up, I think we keep up, and when we don’t keep up the media are certainly pretty quick to point out what a bunch of duffers we are.’’

Like many judges she found sentencing a hard part of the job. ‘‘It’s a hard thing to send someone to prison, but of course that’s the appropriate punishment in many cases.’’

But if a judge clearly communicates the process and the reasons for a decision, confronting the issues and the tension, then the decision is more readily accepted, she says.

‘‘Judges do see a lot of heart-wrenching things so it does take a toll.’’

They have to find ways to cope with stress and trauma, even it it is other people’s.

Winkelmann has her own way of dealing with stress, such as waking at 5.30am to exercise. Not keen on shopping, she’s grateful to wear clothes from her sister, Adrienne Winkelmann, a high-end fashion designer who once made her black vinyl hotpants but now does a fine dark suit.

One of the important parts of Winkelmann’s role is to speak up about issues of access to justice but that covers more than just how much it costs to get a case into court, or having the money for a lawyer.

It’s also about having court decisions publicly accessible so people understand their options on issues like pay parity, residential tenancies, and ACC. ‘‘We need to write decisions clearly so the general public understands their rights without having to go to a lawyer. If you know your rights you don’t have to go to a lawyer, you can say, ‘Back off’.’’

Access to civil justice is not straightforward. The court system is set up for people to have a lawyer on civil matters. ‘‘Once you’re in a dispute zone the law becomes a complex thing.’’

And at the top of the legal tree the establishment of the Supreme Court in 2004 itself improved access to justice, especially for family law, environmental and criminal cases that rarely reached the Privy Council in London when it was still the ultimate court.

In her new role Winkelmann heads the Supreme Court, as well as the judges generally, there’s more administration and more variety, but she still enjoys sitting down and writing judgments.

Not enjoyed is public speaking. For all her achievements since being a very shy child, she has yet to become comfortable with it.

‘‘I used to speak extremely quickly so people would look at me for less time, and I had to slow it down.’’

Like her predecessor, Winkelmann intends to accept invitations to speak, to groups in the community and connected to the legal profession, but she might share the job more.

‘‘It doesn’t just have to be the chief justice who speaks for the judiciary, there are many, many experienced judges who have valuable perspectives and are skilled communicators.’’

The varied nature of the new job, with all its challenges, will suit her, she says.

‘‘The challenges will change. And if things aren’t changing they’re going backwards.’’

‘‘It’s a hard thing to send someone to prison, but of course that’s the appropriate punishment in many cases.’’