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Experience

The Hon G (Tony) Pagone AM KC has extensive expertise across a range of legal disciplines, including commercial, taxation, administrative, constitutional, public and human rights law, as well as equity, wills, and estates law. His commercial practice encompassed high-value and complex disputes in revenue, banking and finance, insolvency, corporations law, and regulatory matters.

Tony is also an experienced mediator and arbitrator, with extensive involvement in the resolution of commercial and taxation disputes, both in Australia and internationally. His judicial background, combined with his specialist expertise in complex commercial and taxation matters, allows him to bring exceptional insight and authority to alternative dispute resolution. He is a member of Lincoln’s Inn in London and a Fellow of both the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators and the Australian Centre for International Commercial Arbitration.

Admitted to legal practice in Victoria in 1980, Tony signed the Roll of Counsel in 1985 and was appointed Queen’s Counsel for Victoria in 1996. He served as a trial judge on the Supreme Court of Victoria from 2006, where he also became the judge in charge of the Commercial Court. In 2013, Tony was appointed to the Federal Court of Australia, where he was the judge in charge of the taxation national practice area. His published decisions span a wide array of legal fields, including finance, commerce, deceased estates, and migration, along with arbitral decisions and practice.

Tony retired from the Federal Court of Australia in 2018 and has since returned to private practice. He continues to be frequently briefed on significant legal issues and disputes for leading corporations and government bodies. Between 2002 and 2004, he served as Special Counsel to the Australian Taxation Office. He was also the chair of the Royal Commission into Aged Care (2019–2021) and conducted a review for Melbourne Water into a major flood event on the Maribyrnong River.

Tony holds a Bachelor of Laws from Monash University (1979), a Master of Laws from Cambridge University (1983), and a Doctor of Laws (LLD) from the University of Melbourne (2014), awarded for his research and published work on anti-tax-avoidance provisions.

He maintains strong international professional and academic connections. Tony is a Professorial Fellow at Melbourne Law School, where he lectures in postgraduate programs. He was also President of the International Association of Judges, a former board member of the International Association of Tax Judges, and Chair of the Business Law Section of the Law Council of Australia.