Stone, Andrew --- "President's page: the work goes on, the cause endures" [2014] PrecedentAULA 29; (2014) 123 Precedent 3

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PRESIDENT’S PAGE

The work goes on, the cause endures

By Andrew Stone

It is both honouring and daunting to take on the role of National President. I am not the first to take on the job with common law rights under attack and I doubt I will be the last. What I can promise is that for the next twelve months, I will do all within my power to lead the fight.

At the heart of the common law is one long-standing principle – that those who do harm, either intentionally or through inadvertence, carry a legal responsibility to make good the harm (as best as money can). This legal principle is little more than what our parents taught us – if you do something wrong, then apologise and help clean up the mess.

Insurance means the risks of causing harm by way of personal injury have been collectivised – a whole class of premium-payers bear a small portion of the risk, rather than leaving it for one individual to carry alone. Unfortunately, the price of this collective responsibility has been the abandonment of the principle of fully making good the harm caused.

Every jurisdiction across the country places artificial caps on the recovery of damages. The political pressures to decrease those caps, increase the restrictions and deny people the legal representation to assert their rights are ever present.

Over the past two years, the ALA has been prominent in fighting against the removal of individual rights in South Australia, the ACT, NSW, Victoria and Queensland. Let me extend my thanks to my two immediate predecessors, Anthony Kerin and Geraldine Collins, for their leadership of the ALA. They have set a formidable example.

We can take pride in some wins along the way. I don’t have space here to provide a state-by-state analysis, but the time and effort devoted by ALA members to campaigning against oppressive changes to individual rights has made a difference. I want to acknowledge and thank all those ALA members who have worked so hard at the state level to fight the good fight. Unfortunately, for many there is no rest, just the next campaign to fight.

All this activity has come at a cost. Under the stewardship of our General Manager, Richard Trim, reserves had been built up for a rainy day. With downpours all over the country, funds have been devoted to campaigning and lobbying against unjust tort law ‘reform’, and the outcome has been a significant depletion of our reserves. However, the lobbying work is far from done, with upcoming elections in Queensland and NSW, threatened changes to Comcare arrangements and a variety of other so-called ‘reforms’ (designed to strip individual rights) which must be fought.

To those who lead the law firms that comprise our membership, I thank you for your support and exhort you to remain engaged with the ALA. We can only do what we do as long as we have the financial resources to do it. That means we need membership numbers and we need people attending conferences, both for the conference revenue and the sponsorship that it attracts.

I understand that when times are tight, cutting back on membership of the ALA might seem like a saving. I urge you to consider just how much of your practice would be left if it were not for the efforts of the ALA in lobbying government to avoid the total decimation of the rights of the injured.

The ideal of the common law can be easily expressed – access to fair compensation with the appropriate level of legal assistance to assert those rights. As I am fond of commenting, a right which you do not have the skill, capacity or assistance to assert is really no right at all.

We have a terrific National Conference planned for Sydney in October and I hope to see plenty of you there.

Let me finish this column where I started – the promise of battles to come. You have my commitment and in turn, I seek yours. As a Kennedy buff, I offer you these words from Senator Ted Kennedy in regard to our collective pursuit of social justice: ‘The work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives and the dream shall never die.’

Andrew Stone is a barrister at Sir James Martin Chambers in Sydney. EMAIL [e-mail].