The High Court has dismissed a teenager’s judicial review challenge to the rejection of his appeal against expulsion from a secondary school, finding no reasonable apprehension of bias or denial of fair procedures.
The anonymised applicant had brought a knife to school on two days in September 2018 and later took it to a prearranged fight between other students, intending to use it if someone arrived with a weapon. He admitted what he had done and expressed remorse, according to the judgment.
The school suspended him and its board later decided to expel him. After a statutory appeal, a three-member committee rejected the appeal in a written decision dated 26 February 2019. The applicant then sought judicial review, asking the court to quash that decision.
The challenge focused on the committee chair, who had attended the school as a child between 1958 and 1963, and on the Department’s failure to provide further background information about committee members. The applicant also argued that the chair had prevented his representative from introducing a Facebook page showing the past attendance.
Justice Noonan held that the chair’s attendance at the school more than 50 years earlier, with no involvement since, could not give rise to a reasonable apprehension of bias. The judge said the applicant had no statutory or other right to the requested background information. The court also found that the Facebook page would have shown only the same past attendance, which was irrelevant to the appeal’s outcome.
The judge found that the representative knew of the chair’s past attendance before the resumed appeal hearing but did not raise an objection then, despite extensive correspondence and submissions. The court concluded that the applicant was estopped from raising the objection later. It dismissed the judicial review application; it did not reconsider the school’s original disciplinary decision or rehear the statutory appeal.