Dyson Heydon, the retired judge appointed to head the royal commission on union governance, is as removed from working class as you can get: educated at Shore, St Paul's College, Sydney University, a university medal in history from the same, a masters from Oxford, the youngest professor ever at Sydney University law school, a member of the Sydney bar and then appointments to the NSW Court of Appeal and the High Court.
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Described by colleagues as possessing an extremely sharp but academic intellect, Heydon made a name for himself as a black letter lawyer, a conservative in both the legal and political sense.
In his later years on the High Court, he often found himself out of step with the rest of his brethren, dissenting nearly half the time. He was the only judge who thought Julia Gillard's Malaysia solution for asylum seekers should be allowed to stand. Ditto South Australia's bikie laws.
If there is a common theme to Heydon's views, it is a deep antipathy to broad concepts of human rights overriding legislation. As he put it in Momcilovic v The Queen: ''The odour of human rights sanctity is sweet and addictive. It is a comforting drug stronger than poppy or mandragora or all the drowsy syrups of the world.''
But there is unlikely to be much poetry in the royal commission. It's variously been characterised by Prime Minister Tony Abbott as ''a spotlight on the union movement'', and ''a witch-hunt'' by the ACTU.
The biggest challenge for Heydon will be wrangling an inquiry with such sprawling terms of reference, spawned from disparate incidents involving unions.
Five unions have been named: the Health Services Union, the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union (notably its construction division), the Australian Workers Union, the Electrical Trade Union, and the Transport Workers Union. There is a direction to look at union corruption on one hand and ''at entities'' outside the union structure, aka slush funds, on the other. There is no time frame for events that can be reviewed, so presumably ancient wrongs could see the light of day.
Gillard's alleged involvement in the establishment of a slush fund for her then boyfriend, Bruce Wilson, an official of the AWU in 1991, will feature alongside events such as how Craig Thomson came to use HSU funds to pay for prostitutes between 2005 to 2007 and alleged bribes to CFMEU officials.
As he opened the inquiry on Wednesday, Heydon was at pains to reassure the assembled lawyers, unionists and the public this was not about hostility to unions, nor about reducing them to insignificance. But others may well have that in mind.
