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Aboriginal Law Bulletin

Aboriginal Law Bulletin (ALB)
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Aboriginal Law Bulletin --- "News: Private Enterprise and Native Peoples; Computer Legal Aid; Baryulgil Case" [1985] AboriginalLawB 26; (1985) 1(13) Aboriginal Law Bulletin 14


News

Private Enterprise and Native Peoples

A new organisation backed by Canadian business leaders, the Canadian Council on Native Business, has been launched in Canada to assist native business ventures to work towards economic independence.

The Chair of the Council has been reported as saying 'the Council grew out of a belief that attempts to deal with the economic conditions of Canadian Indians have been left up to governments too long and that it was time to see what could be done by the private sector'. He continued, 'The objective is to be the vehicle, the connecting link, between the private sector and native initiative'.

To achieve these aims, the Council is establishing a fund with corporate donations which will be used to provide financial help to native businesses. The main thrust of the new Canadian Council on Native Business will be to use the knowledge of Canada's top executives to help native business ventures to work towards economic independence.

The Council has a 27 member board of directors, two of whom are natives with experience in developments and the remainder of the board is a collection of industrialists,execulives,administrators and financiers.

Computer Legal Aid

At the last National Meeting of the Legal Services Bulletin, in Melbourne, it was decided that the Aboriginal Law Bulletin and the Legal Services Bulletin would accept an invitation to allow their respective texts to be reproduced on the Computerised Legal Information Retrieval Service (CLIRS). This was considered to be a process that could lead to greater use of the journals. This is because the indexing of the full text could Increase referrals by on-line users when they were undertaking topic or word searches.

CLIRS has been described as an 'electronic, up-to-the-minute encyclopaedia of the world's legal cases, judgements and laws'. CLIRS is purported to have cost $8 million to establish and is 50 per cent owned by News Limited.

The cost to law firms, courts and legal services is about $1800 a year for CLIRS and an additional $3000 for a VDT, modem (an acoustic coupler to connect the VDT to a telephone line) and a printer.

Baryulgil Case

In mid-April the preliminary hearing for the Baryulgil (James Hardie) asbestos compensation case will start in the NSW Supreme Court. This is one of the Redfern Aboriginal Legal-Service's major projects which has continued despite the fire in March. This should prove to be a very interesting case touching on many issues apart from Aboriginal worker exploitation.

At present in the USA, the legal system is suffering from congestion due to the sheer number of litigations involving asbestos industry related compensation claims it has been suggested that Lloyd's of London are being affected due to the large amounts of money involved.


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