Bret Walker


Bret William Walker is an Australian barrister.

Family

Walker is the son of an Anglican minister. He is married to Sarah Pritchard and together they have one daughter and live in Sydney.

Education

Walker was educated at Concord West Public School and The King's School, Parramatta. He graduated with degrees in arts and law from the University of Sydney.

Career

Walker was admitted to the New South Wales bar in 1979 and was appointed senior counsel in 1993. He was president of the New South Wales Bar Association from November 2001 to November 2003, having been vice-president from 1996 to 2001.
Walker is a member of the Council of Law Reporting for New South Wales, and has been editor of the NSW Law Reports since 2006. He is a patron of the State Library of New South Wales as a foundation senior fellow and has been a member of the NSW Health Clinical Ethics Advisory Panel since 2003. He was governor of the Law Foundation of NSW from 1996 to 2007, and Special Commissioner of Inquiry for the NSW government into Sydney Ferries in 2007. He was a foundation member and has been director of the Australian Academy of Law since 2007.
He was one of the leading legal counsel representing tobacco companies in their fight against the Australian government's plain packaging legislation.
In April 2011, Walker was appointed as the Independent National Security Legislation Monitor. In 2015, Walker said that a proposed change to Australia's citizenship laws to give the Minister for Immigration the power to strip citizenship from people who support terrorism was unconstitutional. He said this was a misquote of the INSLM 2014 report by Prime Minister Tony Abbott. In a 2015 interview with Lateline, Walker noted the Australian "habit of seeing a problem and passing a law about it".
In 2019, Walker successfully acted in the appeal to the High Court of Australia of Cardinal George Pell whose child sex abuse convictions were overturned on 7 April 2020.
In April 2020 Walker was appointed to a Special Commission of Inquiry to "… investigate all matters and agencies involved with the Ruby Princess' departure and its return to Circular Quay on March 19".