Legal System Unaccountability

	Sign In Sign-Up

(Courier Mail, 2 April 1997)
Legal system escapes scrutiny

By ROBERT BOND

Attorney-General Denver Beanland's Bill to amend the Queensland Law Society Act will mean legal consumers continuing to suffer a complaints system under which lawyers judge themselves.

Consumer groups find this inadequate and outdated and predict it will fail to protect the public from an increasingly rapacious legal system.

Eight consumer groups asked for a meeting with Beanland to explain the excesses of the system, but were told the Attorney-General had made up his mind.

However, 24 representatives of these same eight groups recently had a meeting with shadow attorney-general Matt Foley and Opposition consumer affairs spokesman Judith Spence and forcefully described how an unaccountable legal system was contributing to people being defrauded, overcharged and bankrupted in cases where legal costs were 90% or more of any settlement.

The Queensland public rarely hears about many of these cases because the legal system has a code of silence. This code of silence is backed by defamation laws that are being used by legal professionals to prevent members of the public from bringing these matters to notice.

This results in most Queenslanders being unaware of what is happening in the legal system until they have the misfortune to have to use it.

The legal community directs the reform agenda, makes up most of the rules which increase legal costs, and charge the consumer any amount they decide. Consumers contribute millions of dollars to the General Practitioner's Fidelity Guarantee Fund to which the Queensland Law Society has total access.

In the last year, consumers have suffered major reverses in many areas of the legal system. The Queensland Law Society has claimed that it is not to blame for not notifying police about possible criminal activities by its members.

The Bill before Parliament is allowing the society to continue to investigate complaints against its members, and is establishing a kangaroo court masquerading as a tribunal made up of two solicitors and one lay person with the majority ruling.

Consumer funds in the General Practitioner's Fidelity Guarantee Fund are being used by the society for any purpose it decides.

These examples show how successful the society is at defending the interests of its members. This lobby group has been just as successful at suppressing consumer legal reform over the last 20 years. This goes a long way to explaining why consumers are so downtrodden by the system.

Examples put to Foley included:

According to The Home Owners Protection Association, solicitors turned $30,000 building disputes into $150,000 legal bills, forcing the sale of the owner's home.
Mortgage fraud topped $70 million with hard-working people losing their life's work to fraud and solicitor negligence.
Pensioners were being regularly bullied because they lacked the money to defend themselves in a system in which tens of thousands of dollars are needed to become a minor player.
Complaints from the Health Consumers Network about their members being overcharged and having to run the risk of forced sales of lifelong assets because of prolonged legal proceedings.
The belief by the Consumer Law and Reform Association that consumers should be given the means to help themselves and not have to depend so much on lawyers.

The common denominator for all these consumer groups is a legal system that has lost touch with the fundamental needs of the community. The system is the way it is because a generation of politicians had taken the easy way out and allowed the legal community to have its way.

Many of us are shocked at Labor regularly adding lawyers to the Labor team. Many loyal Labor supporters are publicly saying there are too many Labor lawyers. Is Labor a traditional party for the battlers or an elitist party representing the privileged professionals?

It is surely time the 89 Queensland politicians realised the legal system is there to serve the needs of consumers and not to maintain the privilege and status of the legal community at an absurd level.

Back