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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 8 Hansard (19 August) . . Page.. 2871 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

eroded by the actions and the comments of the Prime Minister and his government, and that misleading the people and the parliament of this country is now expected and accepted. In other words, there is no real ethical leadership coming from business or from government.

Given all that, the role of the law in civil matters takes on extra significance as a forum in which an issue can be measured up; where the merits of a case can be argued, analysed and rebutted; where people can be held accountable for their actions; and as a vehicle through which we can edge our way closer to a common understanding of ethical behaviour and, indeed, of social responsibility.

There may be cheaper or more profitable ways of managing risk and deciding on compensation than the courts, but access to justice, to a forum in which some real evaluation of the rights and wrongs can occur, ought to be inviolate. What we are facing through the combined actions of business and government is a slip back towards a regime that has the viability of business, rather than the rights of citizens, at heart.

MR SMYTH (Leader of the Opposition) (9.43): Mr Speaker, although the opposition will be supporting this bill as it is better than nothing, we still believe that tinkering with tort law reform is the wrong approach. I am also pleased to note that the Chief Minister has overcome his petulant temper tantrums and come to a compromise with the Australian Medical Association on a number of key points after all the accusations about Rolls-Royce-driving doctors.

I speak tonight in the light of the revelation by the Chief Minister at about a quarter to seven tonight that he is now going to introduce threshold limits, something against which he has been fighting a rearguard action and which he claims to have strenuously sought to avoid. He says that it is law reform that gives him no pleasure, but it is something that he has been forced to do because his government ignored the obvious, Mr Speaker, in that the real way to achieve reform in medical indemnity and, indeed, in public liability is to move to a no-fault system, as we currently have in both the compulsory third party law and the workers compensation law in this territory.

Mr Speaker, we have a medical profession in deep crisis. You have to remember that you cannot force doctors to practise medicine. You have to establish conditions conducive to people staying in the profession. The person in the ACT to whom the community has entrusted resolution of the crisis has been behaving more like a two-year-old in a supermarket being refused a lollypop. But that said, it is pleasing that he has eventually pulled his head in and has come up with a package that doctors and others in the community can live with for now. Unfortunately, hubris has gotten in the way of any real reform.

Mr Speaker, a personal injury system that relies on individuals going to battle in an adversarial court for what I believe are quite reasonable requirements for care and compensation cannot be anything but a travesty. As I have said before, Mr Speaker, you cannot achieve reform in personal injury law unless you recognise the role of early reporting, early intervention and rehabilitation. To do anything less is to fail to deal with the problem. What amazes me is that we as a society recognise that fact in

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