Page 1729 - Week 06 - Tuesday, 6 June 2006
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will have very much the same rights and remedies as a client in Victoria, New South Wales or any other Australian jurisdiction.
The disciplinary action taken against a practitioner in the ACT may now also be enforced in any other Australian state or territory, and vice versa. Barristers will now be granted practising certificates—something that did not occur in the past—and they will be subject to provisions about insurance and compliance. Barristers, because of the nature of their work, will not, for example, receive or manage trust money or trust property.
As a result of the agreement between the states and territories, the bill is set to commence on 1 July this year. In fact, that is absolutely essential for the bar, especially in Canberra. There are certain areas of it, which I think the attorney alluded to in his speech, which will commence later on, over the next few months, to enable the profession to get ready for them.
I thank the government for the briefings I have had on this, and also the profession for their input and their continued input. As I said earlier, there were a number of significant problems during the course of this project but they seem to have been ironed out. We now see how it operates in practice. It is interesting and indeed very pleasing to see that groups that are affected have largely welcomed this move. It is a positive one which I think will bring significant benefits to the legal profession and indeed to clients generally.
DR FOSKEY (Molonglo) (10.56): This society and this economy rely heavily on the rule of law to mediate its transactions. Law intrudes into almost every facet of our lives. A look at any broadsheet reveals that many, if not most, reported issues involve some element of legal proceedings or statutory interpretation. As power shifts from broadly representative governments to unelected and privately interested boardrooms, the ethical standards of the legal profession take on increasingly greater significance. This bill is a partial codification of those ethical standards.
In Australia there are limited protections for what we fondly describe as human rights, given the absence of a national bill of rights and a federal government that has shown scant regard for either human rights protections or long-standing legal principles. Without legal protection, human rights are in danger of becoming no more than, as Jeremy Bentham described, nonsense upon stilts.
One protection we do have against arbitrary or despotic government lies in the constitutional provisions that prescribe the separation of powers between the judiciary and the executive. The present judiciary’s grasp of contemporary liberal ethics is often far ahead of many elected governments and their officials. The courts of appeal in many common law countries provide welcome voices, expressing dissent and disgust over human rights abuses committed in the name of immigration or so-called anti-terror legislation, among others. In the absence of strong moral leadership from business leaders or the other arms of government, we look to the judiciary in the legal profession to uphold basic tenets of human decency and social responsibility.
In briefing sessions, representatives of the legal profession and the department express dismay and disbelief at the suggestion that lawyers do not always act with the utmost probity. While I am inclined to believe that most lawyers take their ethical duties very
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