Lovers of Dyson Heydon’s literary and historical flourishes must feel let down by the final report of the trade union royal commission.

In his numerous speeches and judgments we’re used to Heydon’s diversions into post-war Europe, ancient Rome, communism, the cold war, the Soviet Union, Othello and the Marquis of Halifax. Even the French revolutionary theorist the Abbé Sieyès made an extraordinary appearance in Heydon’s Malaysian declaration judgment (where the Gillard government was trying, unsuccessfully, to cart off asylum seekers to a country not a signatory to the Refugee Convention).

If there are any frolics of this nature in the weighty final report of the trade union royal commission (Turc) they must be well buried. Instead, we get a doorstop’s worth of dry recitation of findings and recommendations that scarcely surprise, let alone entertain.

Possibly the royal commissioner decided to tone things down as a result of the fiasco surrounding his acceptance of an invitation to address a Liberal party dinner and the subsequent application for his recusal for apprehended bias.

He appears to have donned the straightjacket prescribed for him by attorney general George Brandis, who at the height of the Barwick lecture crisis declared: “He has an absolutely stainless reputation to punctilious integrity.”

Not much fun to be had there.

Heydon must have got the message and decided to grope around for someone else in the upstanding reputation department – if not stainless, at least drip-dry. This paragraph appeared at the very top of the final report’s preamble:

[Former High Court chief justice] Sir Harry Gibbs was universally admired for probity. Near the end of his long life, much of which had been devoted to controversies about the meaning of the Constitution, he concluded that it did not matter much for the health of the nation what the Constitution meant, so long as one condition was satisfied. That was the inherent decency of the Australian people continued.

The relevance is mystifying, as is the decision to propel Sir Harry (Bill) Gibbs onto the field of battle, in this context. Gibbs, while a judge in Queensland, conducted a royal commission into allegations that the National Hotel in Brisbane was the centre of a call girl operation sanctioned by the Queensland police.

Literary references in judicial reasons are a way of giving us a peep into what's going on underneath the judicial robes

After ruling great heaps of available information as inadmissible, and accepting an amount of perjured testimony, he could find no evidence of police corruption.

This finding was so disastrous that it is credited with empowering the rotten apples in the Queensland police for another 23 years – until the Fitzgerald royal commission came along.

Why on earth would Heydon launch his work by citing a conservative judge whose name is the kiss of death in the pantheon of royal commissions?

Historical and literary references in judicial reasons are a way of giving us a peep into what is going on underneath the judicial robes. So, a great treatise on trade union debauchery without the drape of artful asides removes the “penumbra of personal values” – to borrow a phrase from the lawyer and academic who writes under the name of Procrustes.

It’s not as though we haven’t been here before, with at least six earlier royal commissions and reports into trade union activities in the last 40 years, mostly commissioned in the Fraser and Howard years. In 1989, Heydon and his old chum the late Roderick Pitt Meagher did a report on the duties and fiduciary obligations of officials in employer and employee industrial organisations.

There’s a common theme to all these inquiries and their findings: greater oversight of the activities of union leaders, the criminal nature of some of their activities and the creation of new statutory regulatory powers.

It’s difficult to believe that it would cost $46m for the Heydon royal commission to take 21 months and 189 hearing days to arrive at much the same discoveries, with the caveat that it is hard to identify most types of union misconduct and that what had been uncovered is the “small tip of an enormous iceberg”.

Economist John Quiggin says the auditor general should be called in to “investigate this appalling waste of public money”.

The two people the Abbott government expected to be scalped, Bill Shorten and Julia Gillard, are home free.

Heydon’s recommendations for structural reform include: uniform regulations for the deregistration of employee and employer union organisations; a new Registered Organisations Commission, along the lines of Asic; powers for the Fair Work regulator to investigate criminal offences (see also the Winneke royal commission into the BLF); proper training for union managers; improved financial management and accountability; etc.

This is an echo from down the ages. For instance, in 1976 the Sweeney royal commission found that the maritime unions were demanding indemnity payments from foreign shipowners to secure industrial protection. Legislation was recommended for proper reporting and accounting principles.

In 1982, the Winneke royal commission looked at bribery and corruption in the the building construction unions and, among other things, recommended legislation for the disclosure of loans to union officials.

In 1984, the Costigan royal commission examined the criminal activities of the ship painters and dockers union and recommended uniform state and federal laws to deal with racketeering.

In 1989, Heydon and Meagher recommended that union officials should have the same fiduciary duties as company directors.

This is not to say that the Turc report is without surprises. For example, it is mercifully free of Heydon’s usual Latinisms that he enjoys sprinkling on his work: “non haec in feeder veni” (from the 2013 Han Haron Monis implied freedom of communication case) and even “hostis humani generis” in the Jayant Patel case of 2012.

The extent to which a royal commissioner should keep away from public controversy was certainly a well-ventilated feature of Heydon’s term at the helm of the inquiry. The excitement of the Barwick lecture tended to overshadow what might have been controversial public forays. For instance, last year he launched a book, Democracy in Decline by the arch-conservative legal academic, James Allan from Queensland.

The tome got stuck into all the usual beasties: activist judges, bills of rights, and the dangerous spread of international law. Heydon let it all hang out as he piled on the praise:

For those whose world view is shaped by academia, by the public service ethos, by the metropolitan press, and by judicial-political consensus which does not tolerate dissenting opinions, the book will seem deeply shocking. For anyone else it will be wonderfully refreshing and cleansing, like a sudden storm after a long succession of oppressively sultry days.

One can never be too vigilant against the treachery of the universities, those in public service, the wicked popular press, and mainstream judicial thinking.

These messages occasionally shone through in Heydon’s high court judgments. In the human rights case of Vera Momcilovic, with a bit of help from Iago, he said:

The odour of human rights is sweet and addictive. It is a comforting drug stronger than poppy or mandragora or all the drowsy syrups in the world. But the effect can only be maintained over time by increasing the strength of the dose. In human rights circles there are no enemies on the left, so to speak.

He also gave the “shirt of Nessus” a long-overdue outing in Moncilovic.

We also missed from the final report of the Turc his concerns about Soviet communism that he enjoyed weaving into his high court reasons. For instance, in South Australia v Totani he reminded us that conditions in Adelaide are very different from the Soviet Union, “in the days when ‘the wonderful Georgian’ [Stalin] was responsible for administering the bill of rights provisions contained in the 1936 constitution and Harold Laski was ‘lecturing about the beauties of the Russian system’.”

So the great cold war warrior, opponent of a modern rights-based civil society, who gave the academically underweight Tony Abbott a Rhodes scholarship, has coughed-up the goods – devoid of the historical and linguistic adornment we’ve come to expect.

He did it relatively quickly, no doubt bearing in mind his own observation about slow lane litigation, where, “The torpid languor of one hand washes the drowsy procrastination of the other.”

And here the torpor of summer hasn’t helped employment minister Michaelia Cash ramp-up Heydon’s report into a full-blooded, spellbinding election issue.