public service, his fellow Members of Parliament s and officials of the Labour Party. He defied all, and, on July 19, 1973, in the dead of night typed the first appointment himself, found the envelope and stamp, walked to a post box and posted it himself. Lois D’Arcy, carries the honour of being appointed the first genuinely independent civil celebrant in Australia, and actually in all the world. Although it was a radical move at the time, the programme proved to be very successful. In 2015, 74.9 per cent of marrying couples in Australia chose a civil marriage celebrant to officiate. The programme broadened to include secular funerals of substance, namings and other ceremonies which celebrated the landmarks of human existence. Murphy took an enthusiastic interest in this programme - sending telegrams of congratulation to the first several hundred couples married by civil celebrants and would often unexpectedly turn up uninvited to weddings performed by celebrants to delight in his achievement. Human Rights Bill As Attorney-General, Murphy drew up a Human Rights Bill (which lapsed with the double dissolution of 1974) giving as among the reasons: "in criminal law, our protections against detention for interrogation and unreasonable search and seizure, for access to counsel and to ensure the segregation of different categories of prisoners are inadequate. Australian laws on the powers of the police, the rights of an accused person and the state of the penal system generally are unsatisfactory. Our privacy laws are vague and ineffective. There are few effective constraints on the gathering of information, or its disclosure, or surveillance, against unwanted publicity by government, the media or commercial organisations". Murphy also introduced important legislation substantially abolishing appeals to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, removing censorship, providing freedom of access to government information, reforming corporations and trade practices law, protecting the environment, abolishing the death penalty and outlawing racial and other discrimination. Furthermore, Murphy established a systematic legal aid service for all courts, set up the Australian Law Reform Commission with Michael Kirby as its inaugural chairman and set up the Australian Institute of Criminology. Murphy took the French Government to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to protest against its nuclear tests in the Pacific. The French government conducted 41 atmospheric nuclear tests at Mururoa after 1966 and formally ceased atmospheric nuclear testing in 1974 as a result of public pressure facilitated by Murphy's ICJ