Page 4314 - Week 14 - Thursday, 24 October 1991
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MR COLLAERY (5.19): Mr Speaker, I wish to speak on the proposed new clause again, as I may. Your frown worries me sometimes, Mr Speaker.
MR SPEAKER: I beg your pardon?
MR COLLAERY: Your frown worries me. I can see it from here.
Mr Berry: I might frown a bit, too. Would it be enough to get you to sit down? I will frown, too.
MR COLLAERY: I am just making sure that I do not fall out of grace and favour, Mr Berry. Mr Speaker, I wanted to respond to Mr Stefaniak, in a way. I accept the genuine disappointment that he feels. I accept that this is not solely his idea and that there are responsible, informed people, particularly around the court system, encouraging Mr Stefaniak with it. But that comes from people who have been at the coalface, on the battlefield, and a certain level of fatigue sets in when you are dealing with what appears, in a sharp focus, to be an injustice and a cost to the purse.
But in a wider frame, every community has to deal with these lost causes; every community has to absorb the cost of them. You need to look at this issue in wider context, Mr Speaker, rather than the immediate concerns of seeing at the court parents who clearly could not care less about their children's behaviour. There are parents like that. But this provision does not seek to limit it to those who habitually neglect. I have already pointed out that those two words are not capable of proper humane description in a clause of this nature.
Mr Speaker, Mr Stefaniak has also overlooked the fact that even neglectful parents often line up and pay quite large legal fees to defend their children. That is particularly the case where we have these well-off parents involved. They will come flying in and expend a large sum of money to protest the innocence of their children. They are penalised in that sense: They are brought along to court; they share the ignominy of it all, and they do pay fees. It was generally my policy, Mr Speaker, to get young boys whom I defended to cut the prickly hedge outside my office. I certainly did not declare it as income, because it gave me no benefit at all; they usually broke my shears and ruined the hedge every time they did it.
Mrs Grassby: What did you do for the girls, Bernard?
MR COLLAERY: Mrs Grassby interjects: Did I ask girls to do it? Certainly not; they rarely appeared in the court lists, anyway. I raise that issue because the legal profession needs to look towards contributing to this function. One of the areas that the legal profession must consider in the child protection issues is whether this is an appropriate area for large professional fee earnings.
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