SPEECH AT THE NATIONAL ACCESS TO JUSTICE AND PRO BONO CONFERENCE

_{12 August, 2006}

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Well thanks very much Pat Mullins.

It's good to catch up with you again after so many years and whilst I know you do a lot of Pro Bono work for the Law Council, you can't you have much else to do if you not only remember that you get my newsletter Northern Opinion, but you actually do look at it every now and again!

 I've been told that I have about seven minutes to speak, which is a very short time for a politician.  To put that in perspective, in the Senate, one question takes seven minutes a minute each for asking the question and asking the supplementary and then four minutes and then one minute for the Minister to answer - so time is limited.

And I mention that ladies and gentlemen because it's a long time since I was a lawyer practicing in the bush and I guess my thoughts on this subject come more from my more recent past in the last seven years when I have been variously the Minister for Regional Services, Territories and Local Government and the Minister for Fisheries, Forestry and Conservation within the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry.

Having worked on the issue of access to justice over the course of this conference you will all be more familiar than I with the stories about difficulties in providing access to justice in rural and remote parts of Australia and with the consequences of those difficulties.

There have been any number of strategies, any number of Senate, House of Representatives and other inquiries and committee hearings into those issues – most of which I'm disappointed to say the Government has either not responded to or not accepted the recommendations of - and I could go into those in some length.

You also appreciate that it is many years since I as a country solicitor struggled to maintain an adequate and effective legal service in a country town just 90 kilometres south of Townsville, a provincial city of about 200,000 people although I was always proud of the fact that we had a country firm with 7 partners – that sounds big but whilst there were 7 partners there were never too many employed solicitors.  The only way you could keep solicitors in the country, even the close country, in those days was by making them profit sharing partners in the partnership.

But we struggled to attract the solicitors to the town, and quite frankly you could only have permanent long term solicitors if they either came from the town and did articles in the town and studied externally through the university as I did, or alternatively if they married into the town or were from some other country town which had a commonality of interest so that we could poach people from those other country towns.

Now that was 15 years ago - but I don't think things have changed.

I spoke a former partner of mine in the legal practice in Ayr and they still having, 15 years on, the same difficulty in trying to attract practitioners to my town.

And that is a town with most amenities - reasonable medical services, very good sporting services, reasonable cultural services, a very good shopping centre and a pleasant place to live - and very good fishing as well!

I'm told that QUT have a list of graduates who are seeking employment but, as I recall only about 3 out of 30 were interested outside of Brisbane or the Gold or Sunshine Coasts.

Even in Townsville in those early days and to a certain extent even today, it is still difficult to get solicitors.  And that's after more than a decade of James Cook University turning out law graduates.

However, for people in the rural part of Australia where I live, access to justice is available locally and it is certainly available in Townsville, less than an hour away.

But this is not the case in many parts of our country.

In my role as a Queensland Senator based in the north and looking after, generally speaking, country interests, I often move throughout the Torres Strait, the Gulf of Carpentaria and visit a lot of small country towns and aboriginal communities.

And it is very obvious to me, and I hate to say this, that Australia really is a country of two classes of citizen.  You have people living in capital cities or in the very large provincial cities with access to trams, trains, bus, public transport, taxis, hospitals, doctors, lawyers, the theatre, cultural and sporting events, major concerts.

And many of those services are heavily subsidised by the taxpayer – and I want to emphasise that because I'll return to the point of subsidies later.  So you have city Australians with heavily subsidised services, and then you have the other Australians.

Country people seem to be more forgiving and accepting of the limitations in their lifestyle and I suspect few would change it.  But there is no doubt that when it comes to things like provision of health services and access to justice, country people, as a whole, are disadvantaged and offcourse for poorer country people and those living in the really remote areas, which is principally but not entirely indigenous people, the access to justice and even health services is even more limited.

Now what is the solution to this?

I approached the Attorney's office, and I know he's spoken to you earlier, for some thoughts and I also had the Parliamentary Library look for material but that material you can all get by reading the books and reports.

The Attorney-General has given me figures (and I'm proud of these), which show that the money spent by our Government on justice and access to justice issues over the term of our Government has been substantially increased on what it was before.

Provision of Legal Aid was always a State responsibility but I'm proud to say the Commonwealth have contributed funds and if you were interested I could go through all of those statistics and run a line which the Government would want you to hear, - but I won't.

But I do, as I say, want to cut to the chase. 

Look lawyers are an altruistic bunch with little regard for money and they want to make sure that everyone has access to justice as that wonderful ABC TV movie, Hell hath Harbour Views clearly shows.  A marvellous film.  If any of you haven't seen it you should.

But notwithstanding the "typical" lawyers shown in Hell hath Harbour Views there are offcourse some in the profession who are genuinely altruistic and who will go to community centres, take on legal aid work and live in remote areas just to provide a service.

These are exceptional people and I congratulate them and thank them for what they do.

But it would be foolish to think that the majority of practitioners fit into that category – and I'm not being critical here.

Lawyers study long and hard and are entitled to the rewards of their endeavours.

Many young lawyers these years are in six figure salaries after a year or two's work.

To me you have to look at this question in the broad.

You can have all the enquiries, all the reports, all the programs from various governments giving subsidies for legal aid here or assisted legal service there but I think if we're seriously to address this we do have to make it worth the while of practitioners to practice in country areas.

You have to use market forces to attract lawyers to the bush and that needs financial attraction.

And quite frankly the only way that can be done is by government incentives.

I'm one of a small band of parliamentarians who believes that a Zone Tax System, operating in the way it used to operate when it was first introduced, would encourage, not just lawyers, but engineers, doctors, health professionals, indigenous managers and many other Australians to live in country Australia because it is financially profitable to do this.

The Zone Tax Rebate was introduced in 1945 to provide special income tax concessions for people residing in certain remote zones of Australia.  The ATO website states "in recognition of the disadvantages that taxpayers are subject to, because of the uncongenial climatic conditions, isolation and high coasts of living, in comparison to other areas of Australia".

The Basic Wage in 1945 was about $7.38 per week and the Zone Allowance was $80.  About 10 times the average weekly wage.  Now the Average Wage is about $700 per week but the zone allowance for the year is $338 per year, about half the average wage.

If the relativity was maintained at 10 times the average wage it would be $7000 per year instead of $338.

So a Zone Tax Rebate even in that order would start to encourage professionals into remote Australia.

In addition to that I do see a role where private practitioners should be able to charge governments for provision of services to those less fortunate in our community at market rates and generally speaking in this discussion, that means people living in remote areas or indigenous people.

It's not a popular thing to suggest that governments should subsidise private practitioners, but I think realistically if you want to get real access to justice you have to introduce the profit motive. The profit incentive can not come from poor people and that's where the government needs to assist.

Some of you may be aghast at this but I'm trying to, as I say, cut through all of the academic and theoretical solutions and get to the real problem.  It's pointless in my view coming up with bit solutions.  It's necessary to get to the underlying issue.

If you really want a solution to the limited access country people have to justice then you have to look at the money aspect, you then have to work out how you can make it worthwhile for someone to practice law in an area which can serve remote areas and do without many of the creature comforts that a lawyer and his family would expect to find in a capital city.

How do you go about that – I'm not sure.  I know the Federal and State Governments contribute huge amounts of money to various legal aid programs.   Perhaps it needs to have a 'wipe the slate clean' look at some of these programs and see whether the money couldn't be better spent simply encouraging private practitioners into the bush to provide the services and to allow them to maintain the sort of lifestyle that their colleagues in the city might have.

One way is to support proposals for a zone tax scheme.

In what other ways can Governments provide the financial support to the market?

Over the years we've put a lot of money into the bush with telecommunications subsidies, road subsidies, electricity subsidies, drought subsidies, farmers subsidies in various guises together amounting to billions of dollars.

All of these are important to country people including country lawyers.

But should we look further in a country as wealthy as Australia?

We do have to decide whether it is to be a nation which is fair to all of its citizens, not just those living in the capitals.

Fairness demands equal access to services and clearly country people don't have that.

I am not being critical of my Government – in fact I proudly say we have done more for the bush than all other Governments in history.

But we do need, I believe, to have a serious debate about country people and the bush, about fairness, about access to justice and other services and attack the problem from a clean start.

Perhaps it is time to wipe the slate clean – and have a radical look at ways of ensuring fairness to all Australians regardless of geography.

If you can do that, the problems of access to justice may well disappear.

Thanks for having me with you – I wish you well in your deliberations and hope that you may come up with some practical solutions.  Perhaps as part of that you may want to look at issues like a more realistic Zone Tax Scheme as one way of encouraging more solicitors to the bush and so providing better access to justice of all country people.

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