Education
Walker was educated at The King"s School in Sydney. He graduated with degrees in arts and law from the.
Walker was educated at The King"s School in Sydney. He graduated with degrees in arts and law from the.
Walker was admitted to the New South Wales bar in 1979. He was appointed Senior Counsel in 1993. He was president of the NSW Bar Association from November 2001 to November 2003, and had been vice-president from 1996 to 2001.
He was president of the Law Council of Australia from 1997 to 1998.
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. Bret has been a director on the board of the Sydney Writers" Festival since 2000.
Walker is the chairman of The Red Room Company, a not-for-profit organisation that creates, publishes and promotes poetry in unusual ways. 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 Bret Walker was appointed as the independent national security legislation monitor.
In 2015, Walker suggested that a proposed change to Australia"s citizenship laws to give the power to the immigration minister to strip citizenship of people who support terrorism was unconstitutional, this was a misquote of the INSLM 2014 report by prime minister Tony Abbott. In a 2015 interview with Lateline, Walker criticised the Australian "habit of seeing a problem and passing a law about it".
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.