Heydon may well be completely unbiased and may well have brought to this politically super-charged inquiry a completely impartial and unprejudiced mind.

Heydon's verdict was to some extent inevitable. When a judge is asked to rule on his or her self - especially on questions of impartiality - disentangling the personal from the public, the subjective from the objective, is difficult. It is itself a conflict of interest.

This is undoubtedly correct, inasmuch as some parties are concerned, but the question mark hanging over the royal commissioner's impartiality remains and, despite his determination to continue, is not limited to unionists, dodgy or otherwise.

But self-evidently, many people do not think so.

In any event, Heydon appears to have sloughed off his own admirably economical direction in another case, that being British American Tobacco Australia Services Limited v Laurie of February 2010, where he said: "It is fundamental to the administration of justice that the judge be neutral. It is for this reason that the appearance of departure from neutrality is a ground of disqualification ... Because the rule is concerned with the appearance of bias, and not the actuality, it is the perception of the hypothetical observer that provides the yardstick. It is the public's perception of neutrality with which the rule is concerned. In Livesey it was recognised that the lay observer might reasonably apprehend that a judge who has found a state of affairs to exist, or who has come to a clear view about the credit of a witness, may not be inclined to depart from that view in a subsequent case. It is a recognition of human nature."

Prima facie, the retention of the royal commissioner is a win for the Abbott government. Heydon's departure in ignominious circumstances would have de-spurred a process which is central to the political architecture of the Coalition's re-election.

Yet it has also served to deepen public suspicion that its aims were always partisan - and that the $60 million-plus allocated is a vast sum of public funds directed to a political cause deemed advantageous to the incumbent government.

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