Freehills’ Steven Penglis, Female-to-Male Transsexuals & The Hung Federal Election

We can’t be sure because we’re a comparatively new entrant in this space, but we expect that scarcely in Australia’s history has a law firm have so unequivocally declared its policital partisanship as has Freehills in recent times.

Freehills keeps watch

The AFR reported yesterday:

The Liberal party has underscored the importance of the cliffhanger election result by engaging high-profile senior Freehills partner Steven Penglis to oversee the count… He said his role… was simply to “keep watch over proceedingsa’ for the Liberal Party.

A Freehills partner retained to ensure the vote-counters don’t smuggle any Liberal votes in their, err … budgies!

But the allegiances between Freehills and the Liberal Party appear to run much deeper than “watch-dog” Steven Penglis’ estimated $5000 per-day role:

• The winner of the inner-Melbourne seat of Higgins (recently vacated by Peter Costello) is a former Freehills solicitor by the name of Kelly O’Dwyer;
• Senator Michaelia Cash, elected to Parliament in 2007, is also a Freehills alumni;
• Gregory Stephen Pearce is a current member of the NSW legislative council and he too cut his teeth in the working world at Freehills; and
• Matthew Mason-Cox, elected to the NSW Legislative Council in 2006, is yet another Liberal Party member who started his career at Freehills.

We stopped looking after the fifth page of Google under the search terms “Freehills and the Liberal Party”, but no doubt there are several other current members of Parliament who once worked at Freehills, not to mention many more who are retired or were not re-elected that also worked at the firm and who also bear allegiance to the Liberal Party.

So we’ve got a whole bunch of ex-Freehills Liberals sitting in office and a current Freehills partner zealously advancing the interests of his current client, being the Liberal Party whose interest is to claim an election victory and govern Australia.  But with lucrative Federal government jobs like “advisor to the Federal Government on the NBN project” recently up for grabs, isn’t it a huge risk to apparently declare political allegiances when the matter of who will next govern the country is still very much open to question?

Which brings us back to Mr Penglis; the man overseeing the election for the benefit of the Liberals. A cursory Google search revealed that this isn’t the first “election” he has involved himself in. Late last year, Mr Penglis represented two female-to-male transsexuals who wanted to gain legal recognition as males despite electing not to undergo gender reassignment surgery:

The pair will take their appeal to court in February after the Gender Reassignment Board of WA refused to acknowledge their sex change because they still had female reproductive organs and could potentially bear children.

It seems straightforward enough to the team here at FS: if you’re physiologically a female (evidenced by your sexual organs), then notwithstanding your subjective beliefs and motivations, you will be declared by the Gender Reassignment Board as a female. But Mr Penglis and his clients begged to differ. With absolutely no pun intended, Mr Penglis told The Australian at the time:

They’re desperate to have what they consider their true gender recognised … it’s a real issue and the bottom line is, the board has effectively said no female can be reassigned a male without the requirement to go through a hysterectomy.

Although we’re unsure of the result of this case, presumably Liberal Party boffins considered Penglis something of an election expert following his distillation of the “bottom line” in this case. But tt is less clear whether if faced with a Liberal loss in this hotly contested WA seat, Mr Penglis will simply argue that Mr Abbott should be declared the winner because “he believes he is a winner”.

Do you have a “hung” or “bottom line” election?

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