KEYNOTE ADDRESS: SOCIAL JUSTICE GALA 2017

JUSTICE RANGIAH OF THE FEDERAL COURT

SOCIAL JUSTICE GALA FOR THE REFUGEE & IMMIGRATION LEGAL SERVICE

BRISBANE – 31 MARCH 2017

I feel privileged to have been asked to address you on the occasion of JATL’s fundraising event in support of RAILS.  This is partly because I don’t often have a captive audience of young people who I can inflict my ideas on.

The theme underlying my speech is why we choose to study law and become lawyers. For some people it is because they can earn bucketloads of money. For some, it is because of the prestige. But for many, it is because they see the law as a way of making a difference to peoples’ lives and to our society as a whole.

The importance of the work done by RAILS, its staff, its volunteers and its management committee cannot be overstated.  Often, it is literally life changing.  I will give you just one example.

Many years ago, I was briefed by RAILS to act for a man who had been accepted as a refugee and wanted to bring his family to Australia.  Their story was tragic.  The man had been abducted from his village in Somalia. He eventually escaped and returned, only to find that his village had been razed to the ground. His wife and his two young daughters had disappeared and were believed to be dead.  He made his way to a refugee camp and was eventually accepted as a refugee by Australia.  Two years later, he was contacted by the Red Cross and he was told that his family was not dead.  They had escaped and ended up in a refugee camp in Romania, where they were living in squalid conditions. 

With the assistance of RAILS, he applied for his family to join him in Australia.  The then Minister for Immigration refused one of his daughters a visa.  The reason was that she had cerebral palsy, and the Minister considered she would be too much of a drain on Australia’s resources.  Naturally, the client was distraught.  He had thought his family was dead, then found that they were alive, but could not be reunited with them.

We challenged the Minister’s decision in the Federal Court of Australia.  On the day before the hearing, the Minister changed her mind and reversed her decision.  Some may think it was cruel to keep the family separated for so long when the same decision could have been made a year earlier.  However, the family was finally reunited.  For them, the work done by RAILS was literally life changing.  This is only one of thousands of stories and only one example of the thousands of lives that RAILS has affected. 

This is the power and the beauty of the law – the ability to profoundly affect people’s lives.  You may find that cases like the one I have described are amongst the most satisfying of your career.  All areas of law are important, but long after the commercial disputes between large companies are forgotten, what remains are the cases where you have made a real difference to someone’s life.  That is why the staff, volunteers and management committee are so passionate about the work that RAILS does. 

Many of you have chosen to study law because you believe in the ideals of fairness, justice and equality in our society and the capacity of law to make a difference to people’s lives.  As students or graduates of the University of Queensland, you will be amongst the best and brightest of the next generation of lawyers.  You may not realise it yet, but you are the people who will mould and shape our system of law for the next 20 to 50 years, and by doing so, you will have a profound impact on the way that our society will look in the future. 

So what will the law, and our society, look like in 50 years time?  I have no idea.  But we can get some idea of the scale of change that will take place over the next 50 years by looking back and examining the law and society of 50 years ago, in 1967. 

The most important legal change in Australia in 1967 was the referendum held on 27 May that year. One of the questions asked, in effect, whether s 127 of the Constitution should be repealed.  Section 127 said: 

In reckoning the numbers of the people of the Commonwealth, or of a State, or other part of the Commonwealth, aboriginal natives shall not be counted. 

The referendum question was overwhelmingly answered “yes”, but it is astonishing to think that until then, Aboriginal people were not even recognised as part of the population of their own country.  The inclusion of s 127 in the Constitution seems to have been informed by a belief that the Aboriginal race would die out and also by attitudes such as that expressed by a member of parliament from Tasmania, Mr O’Mally who, in the parliamentary debates concerning the Commonwealth Franchise Act 1902 (Cth), said about Aborigines “There is no scientific evidence that he is a human being at all”.

Incredibly, it was not until 1965 that Aborigines were allowed to vote in Queensland elections, following the Commonwealth giving Queensland Aborigines the right to vote in Commonwealth elections in 1962.  Today, there are many Aboriginal people who within their own lifetimes were disenfranchised in their own country.

Nowadays, if some politician suggested that Aborigines should be deprived of the right to vote, or that they should not be counted amongst the population of Australia, there would be astonishment and outrage.  When we look back at the society of 50 years ago, we wonder how people could possibly have thought like that, and how Aboriginal people could possibly have been treated like that. 

What I ask you to consider is this: in 20, 30 or 50 years’ time, what will people say about us?  What are the issues about which they will ask “How could they possibly have thought like that?”, or “How could they have treated people like that?”

There are several such issues that occur to me, such as our treatment of people with mental illnesses, the sexual abuse of children and the abuse of other vulnerable people.  I ask that you give consideration to the questions that I have posed because the first step in resolving a problem is to identify the problem.  Your generation of lawyers has the opportunity, and the responsibility, to identify and redress some of the great problems of inequality and injustice in our community. 

How do you do that? There are two ways. First, as lawyers you can use, shape and mould the law to make a much fairer, just and equitable society. When you look at the society of 1967, you see the legal and social repression of many groups which did not fit into the mainstream: for example, homosexuals, black people, people with disabilities and those who protested against the status quo, such as anti-Vietnam war demonstrators.  We know now of the rampant sexual abuse of children in care that authorities ignored. The changes made in these areas have been led by lawyers. In my opinion, they are changes much for the better.

The second way lawyers can redress inequality and injustice is by leading changes in societal attitudes. It is true that many lawyers are wealthy. Lawyers have a certain prestige in our society. Lawyers also wield great power because law is one of the most powerful forces in our society. With wealth, prestige and power, comes the ability to influence societal change. It is not just the Instagram models, You-Tubers and stars of “I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here!” who can influence social attitudes.

I want to briefly focus on one particular problem in our legal system and our society.  It is a problem so obvious and so fundamental that I wonder how we can have ignored it or done so little to address it for so long.  It is a legal issue as well as a societal problem. It is the problem of violence against women, including sexual assault and sexual harassment. 

All the progress that has been made towards equality in representation of women in parliament, in the judiciary and in the professions is meaningless to many women who are subjected to physical and sexual violence in Australian society.  It is a problem that has been ignored or inadequately addressed for too long. 

The statistics are chilling.  At least one woman per week is killed by a partner or former partner in Australia.  One in four Australian women over the age of 15 has experienced physical violence.  One in five Australian women has experienced sexual violence. But the precise numbers matter less than the reality that our society can have tolerated such violent and degrading treatment of so many for so long.

We think of Australia as a civilized and enlightened society.  The statistics I have cited are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the brutal treatment of woman in many of the most populous countries in the world. 

In Pakistan and many countries in the middle-east, there are so called “honour killings”.  The United Nations estimates that some 5,000 woman are killed for this reason each year.  In India, the practice known as “bride burning” sees more than 8,000 woman killed per year.  These are women whose families do not pay the amounts demanded by their husband’s family for their dowry.  In Russia, domestic violence is endemic and is estimated that some 14,000 woman die from domestic violence each year.  There is presently a Bill before the Russian parliament to make moderate violence an administrative rather than criminal offence, not that there is real enforcement of criminal laws in domestic violence cases in any event.  In the USA, it is estimated that more than 20,000 calls are placed each day to domestic violence hotlines, and it is also estimated that the presence of guns in domestic violence situations increases the risk of homicide by 500%. 

There is overwhelming evidence that the astonishing level of violence against women stems from societal attitudes towards gender roles and expectations.  It seems obvious that the key to equal treatment of woman must be a societal belief that woman are equal to men.  Change must start with change in the attitude of men towards women.

There is considerable debate at the moment about whether Muslims have a responsibility to speak out against acts of terrorism perpetrated by other Muslims. What is surprising is that there has not been the same debate about the responsibility of men to speak out against the violence perpetrated by other men against women.

That gets me to really what I want to say tonight.  It is men who are the problem, not women, and it is therefore men that must be a major part of the solution.  As men, particularly men who are in a position of power and privilege, we have the responsibility to examine our own attitudes and to influence the attitudes of our peers.  It is a fact that men, particularly young men, are greatly influenced by their peers.  It is also true that domestic violence and sexual assault cross all socio-economic lines.  Any major change in the rates of violence towards woman must start with a change in societal attitudes towards woman and men must influence that change by speaking out against prevailing attitudes and against violence. 

As lawyers and potential lawyers, we have a position of great power and great privilege in our society.  We affect, influence and change one of the most powerful forces acting upon our society – the law.  Lawyers have the responsibility to use, to mould and to shape the law to produce a more equitable and just society. We also have a responsibility to use our positions to bring about changes in society’s attitudes towards legal issues.  Ask how people will look back at our society in 50 years. Ask what must change, and then do something about it.  That is the enormous contribution already made by the staff, the volunteers and management committee of RAILS, and by other community legal centers.

I have not wanted to deliver a polemic or diatribe tonight – although I may have.  However, it is not often that I have an audience of young lawyers and law students, and I thought that this is an important message to share.  I wish you all well in your careers. To return to the theme I started with, I hope that in between making a great contribution to the law and society, you enjoy all the wealth, prestige and success that a legal career brings.

Law, Liberties and Rights: Foreword by Walter Sofronoff QC

I can recall in 1991 on the occasion of my first visit to Russia, from which my father had fled on horseback in 1930 leaving his parents and his brother and sister for ever, an episode occurred which has echoed in my mind ever since. My wife and I were in a park in Leningrad, as St Petersburg was called then. It was a glorious summer’s day in July and two Russian friends had taken us to a park for a picnic. We walked past massive old oak trees and under their dark shade along a gravel path, which wound through the vast grassy parkland. Everything was a bright green of the kind you never see in Queensland. In a mimicry of those clichéd love scenes in movies, in which the lovers skip hand in hand over green grass in slow motion, I took my wife’s hand and we plunged over the grass while I bellowed out a tune, I forget what now, but perhaps the theme from Love Story or some such. I was brought round roughly from this foolishness by my Russian friends who dragged us off the grass and back onto the path. “You can’t go on the grass,” they said. I looked around. There was no ‘Keep off the grass’ sign. Why can’t I go on the grass? “Because you can’t”. I observed that there was no sign saying I couldn’t do so. “No, no,” they insisted. “If it is permissible to tread on the grass there would be a sign giving such permission.” 

There, in a brief and otherwise inconsequential human interaction evoking the entirely spontaneous and otherwise mundane reactions of the people involved, is a demonstration of the visceral state of belief of two sets of people brought up within two distinct sets of culture, tradition and history. A lesson in constitutional law as a part of the make-up of a human being. 

It had amused me a great deal when I had read, long ago, the catalogue of civil rights which had been conferred upon citizens of the Soviet Union by their written constitution. Those rights were every part the equal of those guaranteed to citizens of the United States of America and of which there is, as you know, no written equivalent in our own country. Of course, those rights were never exercised by anyone in the Soviet Union and, perhaps, there were indeed no legal or practical means to have enforced them anyway.

Why is it then, that in a country which had a written constitutional guarantee of full civil rights, two of its citizens behaved with such an instinctive appreciation that they lacked any such rights; while the two citizens of another

country, who had never enjoyed the benefit of any written guarantees of civil liberties at all, acted in accordance with a fundamental assumption that they possessed such liberties in full and that liberty under the law means, at least, that any act is permitted if it is not expressly forbidden by a valid law? Research required by a proposed constitutional challenge has required me to read again the history of the development of our constitutional system from Magna Carta to the enactment of our own Australian Constitution and to the present day.

Freedom, I learned, is the product of civilization, not an inherent attribute of nature. A society will evolve not by deciding upon a set of common laws to obey but by a spontaneous willingness on the part of a group of people to conform to the same standards of conduct. From this habit of principled conformity will evolve an articulation of rules of self-discipline - not to steal, not to murder, not to commit incest and so on.

Such a society will, over the course of time, also determine that there must be some things that nobody has power to do. From this it will follow that minorities will submit to laws conceived by the majority because the majority is prepared to submit itself to those same sets of laws. In due course habituated patterns of law making, voluntary and cheerful obedience to laws justified by the visible application of laws equally to everyone, will result in the evolution of legal institutions of an enduring kind – a legislature, courts, an executive acting in accordance with the rule of law. It is an unshakeable willingness on the part of all of us to conform to these fundamentals which has resulted in our stable constitutional democracy; everything else is just ink on paper.

When it is seen, then, that institutions such as courts, are really nothing more and nothing less than a combination of people who share a common appreciation of expected behaviour and a common knowledge and recollection of how to behave, some of that knowledge being cultural and ingrained and some of it taught as a body of formal scholarship, it may be accepted that an institution has, for just those reasons, an enduring vitality. It is hard to destroy a group. A single person will find it hard to destroy an institution comprised of numerous people engaged in patterns of repeated behaviour guided by devotion to a principle. A single rotten apple will not, in fact, taint anyone else because the others are repelled by the stench.

Nevertheless, there is no guarantee that any such institution is invulnerable to harm. Our personal concern as lawyers – whether we are lawyers in actual practice or like you, lawyers in the making – is principally with the courts. Any Australian lawyer who in due time gains a sense of his or her place in the long British, and shorter Australian, tradition of the administration of justice

will come to take for granted that the system generally works, that it is not corrupt nor corruptible and that those who work within it, by and large, are trying to do their best in accordance with proper principle as they see it. Indeed, I believe that to the extent that we take these things for granted and are right for doing so at the particular time, it is proof that these institutions are functioning properly and proof of their enduring strength. They would hardly be stable and abiding institutions if we had to be constantly worried about them.

However, life is not perfect and threats exist. Fortunately in this country, threats to the integrity of the courts do not arise from criminal behaviour on the part of outsiders or those who work within the system itself. Corruption induced by money or threats of harm to judges or lawyers is unknown. Threats to integrity are more likely to arise from the consequences of a defective personality which is driven not by principle but by selfish ambition or an unhealthy desire for power or prestige. In the case of people on the outside of the system, like politicians with power or influence in such matters, we can add as a potential source of harm a lack of proper education or relevant experience, an absent sense of history and an inability to understand what underlies the need for integrity in public office and why appointing friends just because they are friends to important posts won’t work.

People like these draw strength when they misbehave from the timidity and apathy of lawyers who seek a quiet life but who ought instead be reacting with zealous rage. A willingness to harm our precious institutions makes fools of each one of us and we should be strident in our objection to being made fools. The end of liberty in the sense in which we enjoy it in Australia is not now on the horizon and I do not believe that it ever will be. An end to our liberties of a sudden kind could only be brought about by a cataclysmic event and we, as a people, are not prone to initiate or to take part in cataclysms.

The danger does not lie there. It lies, rather, in a gradual erosion of liberty by the glacially slow elimination of rights and privileges, whether by political or by legal acts, or by the failure or refusal of those who are under a duty to act in accordance with expected standards to do so for reasons of a personal kind. Habitual rejection of principled conduct by any of us who serve the ends of justice will, in time, affect people’s expectations and faith in the system which we serve. I believe that we live in a country in which we expect and require that people be appointed to positions of power because they will do what is right and not in order that whatever they do is, for that reason, to be taken to be right. However, that could change and we can find ourselves working in a legal system staffed by political flunkies or friends of political flunkies.

Appointments made for irrelevant purposes, out of mere friendship or to serve some perceived political goal, degrade our system of justice at its foundation because, by definition, an absence of merit in an appointment means an absence of necessary technical skill or personal integrity.

If politicians persist in degrading the quality of our institutions without objection from the rest of us, our ingrained customary belief in our freedom to walk on Australian grass, the product of centuries of thought, work and sacrifice, will be replaced by a cynical, depressing and correct expectation that the grass is reserved only for the feet of those with the right connections.

The only possible way to prevent something like this happening is for those of us whose lives are lived around or within the institutions of the law, particularly lawyers, to react with loud outrage whenever we sense any intrusion upon our precious ways of life. We have examples of such principled reactions easily to hand. The journalists who, in 1986, wrote the articles and TV documentaries which compelled even a corrupt government to establish a commission of inquiry were such people. The lawyers who worked within the resulting commission, the Fitzgerald Inquiry as it came to be known, were also such people. The report of that commission, which I have been re-reading for the reason I have explained, is worth studying even today and a great deal of it has once again become highly relevant, unfortunately so. The lawyers and law students who work for free on difficult cases to defend the rights of asylum seekers (or refugees as they were called when my own parents came here from a refugee camp in the Philippines in 1949) are also of that kind. In fact, any person who feels compelled merely to write a letter to a media outlet, by a sense that an important public principle has been violated, is also in that category.

Malice, ignorance and selfishness hate the embarrassment of publicity. What all of the protectors of liberty have had in common, from Tom Paine to the lawyers who at the present time act without hope of personal gain for indigent clients oppressed by executive action, is that the remedy they seek always involves a public vindication of rights. They welcome bringing the issues into the public eye upon the grounds of reasoned principle; their opponents hate it.

And what of you, the law student?

I believe that the moment when you begin to regard yourself as a full participant in the administration of justice and a defender of its institutions comes when you decide it has come. It can be now or it may be never. But one thing is true: you do not need a degree or a practicing certificate to consider yourself qualified to be one of those at the barricades.

And you do not need to be a highly experienced lawyer to have a significant effect. In 1977 it was a law student (not me, although I wish it had been) who initiated a private prosecution against the Premier of Queensland alleging a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. He lost the case, he could hardly have won it, but he won the point: a demonstration that the law applies to everyone equally and that anyone is free to approach the courts for a remedy. And, moreover, he demonstrated that if you have a point to make in defence of liberty and the law you will often find that you are not alone but that others, perhaps powerful others, will come to stand with you if you are prepared, at first, to do it alone.

Building a Passionate Career - Advice from Stephen Page

Stephen Page is one of Australia's leading surrogacy and divorce lawyers. He has written and spoken extensively about family law, domestic violence and surrogacy.  Stephen is the author of the Australian Divorce Blog, the Australian Gay and Lesbian Law Blog and the Australian Surrogacy and Adoption Blog. We strongly encourage our readers to access these blogs to find out more about Stephen and these respective topics.

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1.     Who am I?

I am a 53 year old white Protestant male who has now been an admitted solicitor for over 30 years and an Accredited Family Law Specialist for over 20 years.  I am the father of two adult sons of whom I am very proud.

And I have a husband.  Mitchell and I married in Las Vegas in 2015.  Our marriage is not yet recognised here.

2.     Why I chose law

I was fairly lazy at high school and disorganised.  Going to university required me to be organised.  I wasn’t that good at maths but I was pretty good at English.  Both my parents were or had been teachers.  I didn’t want to be a teacher.

I didn’t have anyone in my family who was a lawyer.  My mother was the first member of her family who went to university.  My father was the first of his family to go to university.  The only lawyer I knew was the family solicitor who was not much of a guide to how to become a lawyer.

As I was approaching the end of my high school, and I looked at my career options, I thought: “Why not?” I decided to do law. 

3.     Why I didn’t go to UQ

I lived in St Lucia and UQ was a walk away from home.  Those reasons were:

a)     The rational reason.  My father, Les Page, then held a senior job in administration at UQ.  He subsequently became the academic registrar.  Thousands, probably tens of thousands of academic results were signed by him.  Given what I had heard at the dinner table about how some academic staff reacted to what they called the Kremlin, I figured that if I went to UQ, I would be bullied, because of my association with dad.  He was disappointed that I didn’t choose UQ.  Subsequently, my sister did a BA at UQ and was bullied by various staff – because of the association with my father.

b)     The emotional reason.  I ended up going to QIT open day when I was in year 12.  There was a film showing in a lecture theatre “How my law degree changed my life”.  It was even more boring than it sounds.  I wandered down to what seemed to be the world’s ugliest building, L block, which has thankfully now been demolished, put my money into a vending machine for a soft drink and out came a can of beer!  Armed with my tinny, I went next door to the Botanic Gardens and as a 17 year old thought “this is the place for me!”

4.     How I ended up doing Family Law

On graduating, I had the choice of doing what is now PLT or articles of clerkship.  Pretty well everyone did the latter back then.  We were paid a pittance and expected to work long hours.  I had one boss who told me repeatedly, how lucky I was to be paid when in his day I would have to pay to be employed as an articled clerk.  My job included taking the rubbish out, driving partners to social events, taking dry cleaning to the shop, driving here and yon to get trust account authorities, to retrieve files, acting as a waiter during my lunch hour for the firm’s partners and their clients, filing and all the other rubbish tasks that no-one else wanted to do and of course legal work.

At the university I had particularly enjoyed equity and trusts and thought therefore that I would enjoy commercial work.  The jobs market for graduates back then was horrible, the worst it had ever been and not quite as bad as it is now.  There were 29 other applicants for my position.

And then I discovered that insurance law, which is the main work that I did, was going to send me crazy.  I thought it was the most singularly boring thing I’d ever done.  If you enjoy insurance law, good luck to you.  Quite simply, I didn’t.  The firm did some family law.  A female lawyer joined the firm.  Her nickname was The Dragon.  The rest of the office had become non-smoking, but her office was filled with smoke.  Her files smelt of smoke.  The air in her office either had a blue or grey hue, depending on sunlight. 

She was a particularly good chucker.  She would chuck her phone, keys, files or whatever came to hand in her anger in dealing with other lawyers, frustration of things not being done, or of course her clients.  Being her underling, I was the recipient of much of this. 

The Dragon also was singularly the one person I have met who had an extraordinary vocabulary and use of swearing.  I have never met anyone who swore as much as she did. 

And yet, The Dragon was extremely passionate about her clients.  She was dealing with real people and their real problems.  Her clients loved her, because she fought for them.  They knew she cared.

I didn’t swear before I met her, and I have to confess I swear more now more than I would like.  I don’t throw things.  The Dragon inspired me to undertake family law.  I had hated studying family law at university and I thought that of all the subjects I could do that would be the last.  It was palm tree justice stuff.  It wasn’t real law.

I stumbled into family law much the same way as I stumbled into law. 

5.     A passion for change

When I took my oath of office on admission, I said to myself that it wasn’t just enough that I was now admitted as a solicitor.  I had to look to the high ideals of the profession.  This included helping others and above all changing the law so that it was fair.

I have continued to have a passion for the law and for my clients.  There are lawyers who are burnt out who simply should get out.  I’m lucky that every day I wake up (at least most days) and think how lucky am I to be doing this job – to be able to change people’s lives, to enable people to stand on their own two feet.

Our clients have legal problems and they call upon us to try and solve them.  Sometimes we make their problems worse.  Sometimes what we do is ineffectual.  It might be because of our own inadequacies, but more likely it’s theirs or the state of the law.

Some years ago I was phoned by an old client who phoned me to thank me.  There was nothing particularly special about this day, except this phone call came out of the blue.  I hadn’t heard from her in the previous seven years.  She said that her life had changed and it had all been because of me. I then recounted what had happened in her case.  She was an Aboriginal woman living in Brisbane.  She had been the subject of horrific domestic violence.  Her husband had roped in their teenage boys to also beat her up, with the result that on the day of separation the three of them threw her over the bonnet of their car, resulting in severe bleeding to her face, bruising and other injuries.  She managed to make it to the local GP clinic.  They patched her up.  They called the police. 

The police did not do their duty.  The police took her to a women’s refuge.  The police were obliged by law to consider charging him with an offence.  She asked them to do so.  They didn’t.  The police were obliged to seek a protection order.  They didn’t.  Instead, she came to me and sought that I solve her legal problems.  We complained about the police.  I just wanted them to do their job.  Eventually the husband was charged, and convicted, but he wasn’t jailed.

We managed to get a protection order, simply on the return day of the husband turned up late.  By the time he turned up, the magistrate refused to revoke it.  The husband didn’t apply to revoke it.

My client went to the Family Court to have her sons live with her.  The family report said that the boys were completely under the influence of their father, couldn’t make a free decision and didn’t want to spend time with my client – and nothing could be done.  My client gave up the court case.

I recounted these events to my client and said I tried everything I could, but it still felt bad.  She said: “You changed my life.”  How?  She said: “Because I didn’t believe in myself.  No-one believed in me.  Not even me believed in me – but you and you alone believed in me, and that made all the difference.” 

My client had married a very gentle man who was not a drunk or abusive.  She had managed to obtain full-time employment in what many would consider a menial job – but given that she had a grade 3 education and was from the most disadvantaged group in the country, namely an Aboriginal woman, she was doing well.  I delighted in her successes.

She then said her boys had shaken off their father and they were living with her.

I have a fundamental belief that all of us are equal under the law.  This is the underpinning of our democracy.  We all expect to be treated equally when we are before a court or subject to the rules of a statute.  Unfortunately, the law has continued to discriminate and disempower.

Often when the law is changed to remove discrimination and to empower people, such as domestic violence legislation or the Family Law Act, lawyers or judges or police are reluctant to use those powers or in fact determined not to use them because of their personal views.  It is my job as a lawyer acting for clients to uphold their rights.  At times this becomes mighty uncomfortable for others and sometimes for myself.  Family law is a hard business.  I am constantly dealing with unhappy people who have split up and may have mental health issues.  It is no walk in the park.  Upholding the human rights of these clients and their children can be immensely satisfying. 

6.     How I got into surrogacy: turning disadvantage to advantage

I was not only a good technical lawyer, but it was perceived that I had courage.  As a result, I had my first lesbian client back in 1992.  In those days, acting for lesbians in family law was difficult.  The law discriminated.  If a woman left her husband for another woman she had better watch out – the kids were likely to be taken off her.  Thankfully we don’t have that overt discrimination these days.  From that small beginning, I had a succession of lesbian clients.  Over time, I had a number of occasional trans clients and many gay clients. 

Invariably, I would be asked about how to make babies – other than the old fashioned way.  I started to give advice about artificial conception and then surrogacy. 

In 2007 I started to blog.  I am now the author of three blogs which don’t get enough time for me: The Australian Divorce Blog, Australian Gay and Lesbian Law Blog and the Australian Surrogacy and Adoption Blog.

I now do more surrogacy than anyone else.  When the law was changing in 2008 onwards across Australia, I realised that I had a competitive advantage over everyone else.  I had couples in Queensland coming to me seeking to become parents through surrogacy.  Queensland was the only state that criminalised surrogacy here and there at all times.  They asked the obvious question: “Given it’s not legal to do surrogacy here where is it legal?”  As a result, I had to find out the law in every other State.  Lawyers in other places didn’t do that.  They just relied on their local law. 

I thought that if Queensland wasn’t too slow, I would be able to use this competitive advantage and if I was really lucky, I would have a national practice.  I now have that practice.  I am the only lawyer to have appeared in four States in surrogacy matters: Queensland, NSW, Victoria and South Australia.  I have advised clients in all eight states and territories and at last count 24 countries overseas. 

I have continued to press for change.  This has resulted in me spending my own time in seeking change to occur, whether in submissions direct to ministers, or to parliamentary committees about surrogacy or gay rights or other issues or about domestic violence – I have just continued to push. 

I don’t consider that I am particularly special but I know that if I don’t, then it’s likely that no-one else will.  Having the skills of an articulate lawyer available to me and some resources with typing, I can push my message. 

I have played a role in crafting the current Domestic and Family Violence Protection Act 2012.  I was part of a group of men, who were the first to argue that the Act say that domestic violence was gendered.  None of the women’s groups argued that!

I caused a provision to go in the earlier Act and then in this Act to ensure that kids would not be the automatic victims in court of their parents’ court applications.  Leave would be required before they could give evidence or be called as witnesses.

I caused a provision in this bill that before a magistrate made a domestic violence order, he or she would have to consider whether there was a family law order in place and whether that order should be stayed.

7.     The sky is the limit!

When I left law school we all joked who would ever had a case about when life began.  I had such a case.  In 2012 the Childrens Court of Queensland was the first Court in the world to decide when a child was conceived.  Judge Clare SC, on my submissions, found that conception of a child was at pregnancy, not at fertilisation of the embryo.  This was necessary because of a case that I had under the Surrogacy Act.  If it were the other way round, the intended parents could never become the parents of the child. 

In 2011, I spoke at the world’s first International Surrogacy Conference – held in Las Vegas.  I presented on the law back home, and because of nine systems of law the paper was almost 60 pages!

The chair of the Committee told me there was a proposal to have a Hague Convention on surrogacy, much like the Adoption Convention.  I had had something to drink at that stage.  In typical Australian bluntness, trained by The Dragon, I told him exactly what I thought.  His response was to put me in charge of the project!  He agreed with me entirely. 

The culmination of thousands of hours of work occurred in February 2016 when the House of Delegates of the American Bar Association (the Association’s Parliament) approved the policy paper that I had steered and co-written to be the official policy of the American Bar Association as to a proposed Hague Surrogacy Convention.  The paper which I had steered from my little office in Brisbane on the other side of the globe had been accepted as policy of approximately 400,000 attorneys in the world’s richest, largest and most influential lawyers’ group.  If you had told me when I graduated that I would be doing family law or I would achieve that, I would have said “Tell him he’s dreaming!”

8.     Courage to change

It is important that if we are practising law, we have passion as lawyers, as both the law and for our clients.  The practice of law despite the long hours and the constant stress is a calling, not a business.  Too often I have heard judges and barristers say to me that too rarely do lawyers reflect before putting something in action.  Too often it is shoot first and think second.

I reflect on my matters.  I do this when I am in the shower or in a vacant moment or even staring out the window. 

It is important for all of us to have courage.  I was a very quiet kid and shy.  I am now very talkative.  What changed was that I had to stand up in front of a stranger (a judge) and advocate for my clients.  If I failed, they failed.  I was not prepared to fail.

In June 2012, Attorney Bleijie wanted to turn the clock back and remove the recognition of lesbian co-partners as mothers and to criminalise gays, lesbians and singles for undertaking surrogacy. 

I decided to fight this with all my might.  I was told by colleagues that that was particularly stupid because the Government had the numbers and could push anything through.  I was told to be concerned about my position.  I was told that I was being brave.  I said that I did not see that I was being brave but that given that I was the most prominent lawyer in this field if I didn’t act, I would be rightly accused of cowardice.

Ultimately, seven of us got together (I was the only lawyer) which became an organisation: Queenslanders for Equality.  At a critical meeting I stupidly said: “So after today, who’s in charge?”  I was unanimously elected as convenor!

Our chances of success in defeating the proposal were 0-3%.  We were assisted by the community, the media, Australian Lawyers for Human Rights, Queensland Law Society, the Opposition, LNP members and others.  Ranged against us were the Australian Christian Lobby. 

After nine months of fighting, there were only two of us, not seven.  I received an email on a Monday from the other who said that he was burnt out, that he couldn’t do it anymore and that he was giving up.  It was just me against the government.  I felt the weight on my shoulders of this matter from the beginning but particularly on that day and for the next three days.  On the Thursday came the news that the government had surrendered and that it was “deferring” the proposal.  The proposal died then and there.  We had, against the odds, won!

Never forget to have courage.  Never forget that we can change the world for the better.  Each of us no matter how small and insignificant we think we are, have the capacity to do so.  Look into your heart and soul and you will see that courage with that, if you are smart and determined to get help from others, you can conquer the world.  Good luck!

Social Justice Forum #3 - Barriers to Change: Homelessness

JATL recently held our third Social Justice Forum of the year, ‘Barriers to Change: Homelessness’. As a silenced and marginalized group facing entrenched disadvantage, it is important to recognize the lived struggles of those experiencing homelessness and learn about the issues preventing access to justice and equality.

This forum warmly invited Jesse Nolan from the Brisbane Youth Service and
Cameron Lavery, Coordinator of the Homeless Person's Legal Clinic at QPILCH. 

Jesse Nolan – Brisbane Youth Service

My name is Jesse and I’m one of the caseworkers with the Brisbane Youth Service. I currently hold a drug and alcohol counseling role. I have been working in the youth sector for around eight years now. 

When I was asked to speak here, I thought I might do some research and in a true youth worker style, I chose to not do that. There are lots of statistics about the number of juveniles in the justice system and the barriers they face and you all being law students, I’m assuming you see enough statistics and it might be quite boring for me to rattle off facts. The things I will touch on today are the issues that we work with young people every day and especially some of the clients that I have on my caseload. 

It’s obviously not a surprise that there is a massive overrepresentation of Indigenous people who are involved in the justice system, through the courts and similar legal processes. I currently support a young indigenous woman, Jane* (*de-identified and name changed for privacy) whose parents are both currently homeless and sleeping on the streets of Brisbane as are most of the extended members of her family. She’s one of the most beautiful human beings that I have ever had the pleasure of working with and she is currently serving nine months on probation for essentially fare evasion.

For the time she was sentenced, I was supporting her in court. We had been waiting around three hours and at this time she had been sleeping on the street and was around six months pregnant.  The gentleman before her went before the Magistrate, he had been charged with the possession of quite a large amount of methamphetamines as well as driving under the influence (his second driving under the influence charge in a twelve month period). He had gone to court in quite a nice suit, he had his family supporting him at the courthouse as well as a private barrister. So the judge, taking all of these things into account gave him a $300 fine.

Jane went next and I was with her in court. She had just come from sleeping under a bridge to the courthouse that day. On the day she went before the court, her charges were possession of a very small amount of cannabis, as well as two or three fare evasion charges. The prosecutors were pushing for her to be incarcerated because she had previous probation periods where she had not met all of the requirements, due to her being homeless and in a domestically violent relationship, which had been outlined to the police prosecution support letter.

That circumstance could be replayed any number of times with the clients that we work with, and the level of disadvantage, particularly in the Indigenous community, is entrenched.   I have worked with two clients who are currently incarcerated for what those in the youth sector would refer to as “homelessness offences”. This term includes things like fare evasion and other minor offences that are circumstantial as a result of being homeless.

We have a large number of people who are homeless for things like family violence reasons, but are not sleeping on the streets so they’re basically couch surfing. However, they do not generally have any access to income and are unaware of the Centrelink processes so they usually try and catch buses and trains, skipping the fares, to try and get to a friends house where they might be able to stay for a short period of time. This means that they tend to accrue a large number of fare evasion charges. However, we have seen young people incarcerated in juvenile detention for having a few fare evasion charges, which seems pretty ridiculous that the government is spending so much money locking people up for something as trivial as fare evasion when at the same courts, we are seeing people charged with large amounts of drugs or serious cases of domestic violence who walk free without incarceration. This often happens as a result of receiving a court date (up to 6 weeks in the future) and failing to appear. However, this is caused by entrenched features of homelessness, including focusing on where they might sleep at night and not giving attention to things not immediately linked to survival, like a court date six weeks in the future.

The other big one we have is trespassing as a result of sleeping rough. For example, a homeless person may sleep out the back of the church in King George Square, or up in the Roma Street Parklands on some property out there, and they are often charged for that. Possession and public nuisance would be the other two big ones.

For public nuisance, it’s essentially at the police’s discretion and I would say that in my experience, public nuisance is a charge they use to move people on. All of these sorts of charges lead to young people entering the justice system really early. On top of this, the failure to appear – by not realizing when they have to appear and then missing court – is taken by the Magistrates as a sign of total disrespect to the Courts. This often leads to them coming down harder on them then they would have in the first place. It’s pretty shocking to me that there are such difficult barriers for young people accessing court.

Currently the police have an operation in Brisbane City called Oscar Freeze going at the moment – a very creative name from QPS. We used to run an outreach program with QPS on every Thursday night where the police would come out and learn ways of engaging with young people. It had some really good benefits. Unfortunately, around the time the G20 summit was held, the police ceased all community type operations in Brisbane. That also probably led to them having multiple operations in the last few years, similar to Oscar Freeze, where they are essentially to target young Polynesian and Pacific Island people and move them on from the city. So, what can happen is if there are a large number of Pacific Islander young people coming out to access the food services, and they may have left home for a number of reasons including family/domestic violence but unlike other young people, they can’t access Centrelink if they are not Australian citizens. This means that they have no income, financial services or support networks, or access to services such as those provided by the Department of Housing. Basically, the police have been given a directive where they have been told to target Pacific Islander or New Zealand citizens to move them on. Their approach is to go pretty hard to these young guys. Additionally, because all of these young people are quite transient, moving between Brisbane, Ipswich, and the Gold Coast, this leads to failure to appear for notices. Getting these kids into court is a massive problem in itself and as soon as they start entering the court system, it starts to become really normalized. When they’re beginning to get into court for things like public nuisance, fare evasion, trespass and other minor things, they start to add up. Also, when in their peer group they are around people with larger or more serious offences, this becomes quite normalized for them and this leads to committing offences of a more serious nature.

We have also seen some of the older homeless community really getting up to distasteful things with the younger people sleeping out, by encouraging them in the offences they are committing and in some cases, there have been some extremely serious cases of sexual assault and other nasty stuff we won’t get into today.

We’ve already touched upon couch surfing, homelessness, and the failure to appear and the courts generally take that as a really serious sign of disrespect to the court. I have worked with a young man who is 25 years old, just had a son, and over the last twelve months he has spent about six months of that incarcerated, mostly a result of failure to appears caused by sleeping rough for the last few years. Young people are really struggling to get themselves to court.

Legal Aid is also a big hassle for young people. We find that these people entering the courts generally have no idea what their rights are so QPS will generally go pretty hard at these kids. A lot of the time they have been searched, unwarranted, and they are generally getting hassled. We have had young people that they are so terrified of King George Square that they won’t move anywhere, even if they’re five minutes past their curfew unless they are with a support worker due to being generally terrified of coming across someone.

They are also generally scared of going to court and by the directive of the police operations. There has been an influx of young people at Brisbane Children’s Court on a Friday and the Magistrates in turn are getting pretty sick of that quickly and come down hard on them. We’ve had a lot of young people currently incarcerated for some really trivial matters as a result.

The demographic that we deal with is largely unaware of their rights in their interactions with QPS and there is a current police operation where they are targeting a specific group of young people, who are probably the most vulnerable demographic of people in Queensland due to a lack of access to services (including homelessness services). The police are compounding their disadvantage, which is extremely sad and disappointing.

Cameron Lavery – Homeless Persons’ Legal Clinic

It’s really important and useful to hear from Jesse to start us off as everything we do is pro bono, through QPILCH and the pro bono volunteer lawyers, and is in collaboration with the sector. We do not achieve our outcomes without this collaboration with the sector. We have one of our Homeless Persons’ Legal Clinics out at the Brisbane Youth Service every Monday and for all of the trends that Jesse just spoke about, we see them from a legal perspective as well. It’s really useful to get that insight from someone on the ground.

Just to backtrack a bit, my name is Cameron and I am the Coordinator of QPILCH’s Homeless Persons’ Legal Clinic and also other outreach clinics for vulnerable groups, so we have clinics for refugees and asylum seekers, people with mental health concerns, and vulnerable young people transitioning from state care to independence. We have 21 clinics across the state and run in partnership with 28 law firms and over 30 other agencies. This translates to about 500 pro bono lawyers who volunteer their time through the firms to deliver these services. We help about 1700 new clients each year and we are really geared towards outcomes. The young people Jesse was talking about are one of our primary client bases and what we are trying to do as pro bono lawyers focused on civil law is to collaborate with people like Legal Aid and give practical legal advocacy in that space and try to inform people of their rights and make outcomes more appropriate.

In terms of the context of homelessness and the law, it is important to have an understanding of why the legal profession dedicates so many pro bono resources to this space. It is actually the largest part of QPILCH. This is because homeless people have experienced such chronic disadvantage and been through trauma, all kinds of vulnerabilities, and marginalization. It’s dedicated to helping people who have been really disassociated from the general idea of a balanced life.

When I talk to my volunteer lawyers about this topic, I really like to emphasize that it is a whole range of complex factors that lead to homelessness. It is really important that we acknowledge that no story is the same and that everyone has their own story to be told. We need to be respectful of peoples’ lived experiences of homelessness and understand that complex factors, including personal vulnerabilities, financial hardship, and system failures, bring the picture together.

Jesse touched on some of the factors that may contribute to homelessness. A large factor today is the effect of domestic and family violence. There are lots of statistics around that, but Homelessness Australia says that 55% of women and children experiencing homelessness have done so escaping violence. Another big factor and statistic is mental health. The correlation between homelessness and mental health is huge. We also have a large number of clients who identify as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander.

In terms of our work in the space, what do we do as lawyers? We know that vulnerable people have multiple and complex legal needs but often don’t think about them as legal needs. They might think of going to court as something that a lawyer might be involved with but in their day to day life, they may not think that they should see a lawyer about a guy who is hassling them for money for example. They are thinking about mostly urgent needs, so things like “where am I going to sleep tonight?” and “when will I see my family and friends again?”. As the need for a lawyer isn’t necessarily at the forefront of their minds, we know that lawyers can help with things like debts, housing issues, mental health law, government decisions, employment, discrimination, and other things that we have touched on in law school. We can make a different in real life for these vulnerable people.

What we try to do as an outreach legal clinic is give vulnerable young people (and all ages) kind of a menu of ways that we can help and ask questions about legal needs. We created a document called the Legal Health Check, which is a diagnostic tool that is really about asking the right questions at the right time. Back in 2009, we found that if you ask someone experiencing homelessness “do you need a lawyer?” they will reply with no. But if you ask questions around the issues in their life, for example, “are you due in court?” or “is anyone chasing you for money?” or “do you have any housing hassles?”, it makes a big difference. It’s important as lawyers and future lawyers to recognize the privileged position we are in and we can use our communication and other professional skills to make things accessible for vulnerable people. We aspire to have a genuine conversation with the client to be able to allow them to access other services.

We also have clinics at crisis hostels, mental health wards, refugee settlement agencies, and other community based neighbourhood centres. We go to the clients because we know that they won’t come to us because of their vulnerable circumstances. It’s not because they are not interested in getting some help, it’s just they have too much going on and it just won’t happen unfortunately.

What are the key areas of legal need? Jesse has already touched on interactions with the criminal justice system and that is just one part of the puzzle for us, albeit a large one. Interactions with the public space or on public transport can be a real starting point for a spiral with the legal system. For us, a huge issue is SPER [State Penalties Enforcement Registry] fines. For students completing Clinical Legal Education with the HPLC, I always start off with talking about SPER fines because it’s such a big wake up call about the law and legal needs of people experiencing homelessness. Regarding SPER, a few years ago we looked at our data and found that when we asked a question about SPER we found that 65% of our HPLC clients had a SPER fine and on average they had $5000 of SPER debt, related to things like fare evasion and minor criminal charges (things like begging, moving on, obstructing police, and failing to appear), which are interconnected with the circumstances of homelessness. This SPER debt creates a huge burden on the back of our clients. Other issues we help with all the time are things like housing and tenancy, decision-making capacities, and interactions with the government and government decisions, such as Child Safety, Centrelink, and the Justice Department.

more information

Brisbane Youth Service: http://www.brisyouth.org/

Homeless Persons' Legal Clinic: http://www.qpilch.org.au/cms/page.asp?ID=60736

In Conversation With: Monica Taylor and Jennifer Gibbons of the UQ Pro Bono Centre

Interviewed by Chloë Bennett

For law students, gaining exposure to the legal industry is an invaluable experience.  The UQ Pro Bono Centre, part of the T.C. Beirne School of Law, recognises this need and helps to bridge the gap between studies and practical experience by promoting the value of pro bono work.  The vast opportunities offered by the centre foster the importance of pro bono whilst simultaneously developing the skills necessary for a legal career. Chloë Bennett caught up with the Centre Director, Monica Taylor, and the Centre's Senior Administration Officer Jennifer Gibbons to discuss the importance of pro bono work. 

Chloë: So tell us a bit about yourselves…

Monica: I did an Arts/Law degree at UQ many years ago and commenced practice in a large firm.  After about three years I side-stepped into community legal work and was the first full-time coordinator for the Homeless Persons’ Legal Clinic at QPILCH. I did a lot of pro bono work when I was a law student.  For me, it was only a matter of time before I tried to find paid work in the legal assistance sector. After QPILCH I went overseas, started a family, did some overseas pro bono work, and ended up coming back to UQ to head up the Centre.

Jennifer: I’ve been in the law school for 12 years. When I started at UQ I administrated the PLT program that UQ used to offer. When PLEAT was cancelled I transferred to administering the law post-grad programs, overseeing LLMs and, initially, the PHDs. I stayed with this for ten years and then was given the opportunity to assist Monica in the Centre part time to support her expansion of the Centre’s activities. I am now in the Centre full-time and I love the work. I enjoy the connection with undergrad students. I’m amazed by what we’re all achieving together and amazed by the students and the work that they do.

Chloë: Can you give us some background about the Centre?

Monica: The Centre started in 2009.  It was a vision of law school academics, in particular Assoc. Prof. Tamara Walsh, who is still actively involved. Tamara did an extraordinary amount of ground work to establish the Centre within the University structure and she also established the Manning St Project. That is where law students attend Caxton Legal Centre and work on law reform and policy research for different agencies, over a full semester.  Paul O’Shea (who has since left the school) started the first clinical law elective, and since that time the Clinical Legal Education (CLE) Program has significantly expanded.  It’s now one of the strongest electives within the law school.

The Pro Bono Roster has always been the Centre’s ‘engine room’ – it is a database where students register their interest. They’re not compelled to do pro bono work or any of the activities posted. It’s only if they have the skills, interest and time that they may choose to apply for the relevant task.

The most recent program within the Centre was established in 2011; the High Schools Program. Assoc. Prof. Peter Billings was the architect of this initiative, where students design and deliver lessons on asylum/refugee law and international humanitarian law to high school students.  Most recently, Dr Francesca Bartlett started a new HSP program focusing on domestic violence and the law.

Chloë: How many students are there on the Roster?

Jennifer: We suspect it’s around 450. We have just migrated over to a StudentHub system which will allow new students to the roster to look at archival opportunities as examples of opportunities that may arise. I’m also finalising a handbook for students on the roster which will act as a guide throughout their pro bono commitments as well as include such mundane things as applying for travel reimbursement, hints and tips for research, publishing, intellectual property and so on.

Monica: Roughly about a third of the entire law cohort is on the roster. 

Chloë: One of the publications the Manning Street Project has produced is the Pro Bono Values Project. One of the interesting findings in that Report was that the moral obligation to perform pro bono was as important as the professional drive to do it. Given the current job market, and the volume of law students in Australia, do you think that going forward the moral or professional drive will be more important? Are we nurturing the professional obligation?

Monica: I think law schools really have a fundamental obligation to socialise students in the direction of public interest law practice, but you can’t mandate morality and you can’t mandate pro bono work. What the Pro Bono Values Project suggests is that if you make people do it, or if you over-coordinate the delivery of pro bono work –– it may impact negatively on the quality of work produced.

There’s a question of whether law schools ought to simply expose students to public interest legal work through clinical legal education (where they gain academic credit) or in the pro bono tradition? At UQ we have opted for both and there is curricular synergy between the two. The other thing we need to be mindful of when designing pro bono activities is that students already have tremendous demands on their time, particularly if they have jobs or are raising a family.

Jennifer: I think there are also a number of students who lose their way by second year. They’ve become so bogged down in GPAs and competitiveness, and quite often joining the roster helps them re-gain motivation. It can be quite illuminating to realise they do have other options within the profession and can make a difference. I think while the obligations and the moral aspects of the law school and the law profession are important, the feeling of contribution and gaining a new direction in your degree can make true pro bono service really valuable to the individual.

Chloë: It’s the long-running joke in law school that people who started their degrees to make a difference are dissuaded from this idea through their degrees. Commercial law firms also have a monopoly over advertising and sponsorship within the law school, and it can feel like they are the only viable career path for a young lawyer. Do you think there’s more that can be done to actively encourage students to pursue social-justice oriented roles in the profession? Or does that drive to help people come from a more personal place?

Monica: There are many law students and graduates.  The legal assistance sector is underfunded and is set to receive a 30% cut from June 2017, and there’s huge unmet legal need.  As one lawyer has described it, community legal centres are ‘stretched to breaking point’ and ordinary people go without having their legal needs addressed.  What we have then, is market distortion and a problem with few career pathways into the CLC sector despite a strong supply of new lawyers who want to work in the public interest.  Greater funding for the sector would naturally open more pathways into jobs and that would go some way to go towards aligning the job market.  The solution is not about more people doing pro bono work for nothing, it’s about stimulating and sustaining long-term employment in the legal assistance sector.

Jennifer: And that’s about funding.

Monica: Yes, and I see that as a part of the role of government, and also to a lesser extent the role of individual or institutional philanthropy, but fundamentally, government has a responsibility to fund legal assistance services .

Chloë: The PBC is very unique in terms of law schools in Australia. While other universities now offer clinical placement programs, there’s not really another internal driver of pro bono in another law school like the one we have at TCB. Why do you think no one else has adopted this structure and why do you think there’s an advantage to it?

Monica: There are many student-led clubs that focus on pro bono in universities in other parts of the world. Canada has an organisation which facilities student pro bono across the country. Closer to home, Bond University has an on-campus pro bono club. 

Our Head of School has seen the value of student and community engagement and the role of the Centre as a vehicle for the school to partner with the community legal sector.  Prof. Derrington’s vision and also that of her predecessors, has allowed the Centre to come into existence and for it to grow.  There have been numerous leadership champions in the law school who have consistently backed the Centre.

Jennifer: They haven’t just backed it - they have encouraged and fostered it by firstly funding a dedicated director and then later an administrator.  What it all boils down to is that UQ students are lucky to have this unique opportunity in such a structured way.

Chloë: While the Values Report didn’t really go into it in depth, there was some discussion about making pro bono mandatory. Do you think that there’s any benefit in making pro bono mandatory for students? Or, for example, they have to do a certain number of hours, or a placement like in health or education degrees, or do Roster activity before they graduate?

Monica: I don’t believe in mandating pro bono. There are the equity issues you can’t ignore. There’s also the plain fact that not everyone studying a law degree has their sights set on legal practice and we need to have flexibility to accommodate people who are studying law as a general degree. Most students don’t want to close the door to practice but there are some students who have no aspiration to become a lawyer.  

There are overseas examples of mandatory student pro bono – the New York Bar Association has a requirement that students must complete 50 hours of pro bono work before they can be admitted. My other view is that we need to be really careful about promising everything for nothing and using students as unpaid labour – you need to provide opportunities, but not expect it of them. By all means inspire students through clinic and other elective offerings and by creating interesting and meaningful pro bono work – but there’s a line in the sand for me between inspiration and making it mandatory.

Jennifer: If a student is trying to support themselves or a family you can’t expect them to do pro bono. One shoe doesn’t fit all. Further, we don’t want reluctant help – perhaps putting at issue the quality of the help that people are giving? The beauty of the Centre is that UQ has about 450 willing students who have volunteered for this work. That’s a very different thing to offer than just ‘UQ students are available to you.’ 

Chloë: Do you think there is enough emphasis given to the professional responsibility of pro bono in regular course work at UQ? It is emphasised really strongly in subjects like Legal Profession, but that’s usually in the later years of the degree, and a few years after they qualify to sign up for the roster.

Monica: I think we could all do a better job of integrating the message throughout the degree from start to finish.  The problem is partly a product of the Priestly 11 and what you have to study to be admitted – we’re hamstrung a bit by those requirements. But then I think we could do more. The Centre has been working with Dr Burdon who coordinates Law and Society to have a session in that course about access to justice, and students who are engaged in pro bono work come and speak about what they’re involved in. I do think we need to make it a more continuous message.

Chloë: But that’s up to everyone.

Monica: Yes. You can possibly teach every course with some social justice flavour – for example you could have a really interesting critique of corporations law, and administrative law is just ripe for it, with judicial review. But then I do have sympathy for wanting to efficiently run a course, especially with large numbers of students.

Chloë: And now that they have cut the cohort size, do you think there’s more of an opportunity to encourage people to think about these issues because of a more tight-knit community?

Monica: Yes, quite possibly. We don’t really know what a smaller cohort will be like yet, but there will hopefully be more opportunities to have conversations about access to justice and pro bono.

Jennifer: Hopefully it will also mean there’s a higher ratio of students who can take up opportunities on the Roster and in the Clinical Placements.

Chloë: What is your vision for the Centre over the next few years?

Monica: Quality; not quantity. I don’t necessarily want to see us measure our impact just through numbers of tasks and students. I am focused on making sure those tasks have been done as well as possible; that students have had a really positive experience; and the ‘value add’ for the CLC or law firm is clear. The second thing is we have identified through our strategic plan is growth in international pro bono and CLE opportunities.  A lot of that work is now in process. The MoU we signed with the Supreme and National Courts of PNG has seen opportunities slowly trickle through to students, but that, again, is something that we have to be really respectful about: it is not about self-promotion. At the end of the day it is about service.

Jennifer: It is about service. In a law relationship, confidentiality is so important and there are times where you can’t shout your achievements from the rooftops. That is something that the Centre respects and so do our students. It’s about maintaining the trust between the Centre, the students, and individual Centre Partners. It’s about being able to trust that if partners seek Centre assistance they get that quality support.

Chloë: Finally, what would you say to students who want to get involved?

Jennifer: Come on down!

Monica: Absolutely, sign up. You’re not committing to anything by registering on the pro bono roster. I’d like to think that we are approachable: we have an open door policy and we will happily speak to students about the opportunities.

Jennifer: I think that’s the major message, particularly to students who are on the roster, have applied for opportunities and haven’t received a role. We try to give every student a fair go. It isn’t all about GPA, it really is about who is the best fit for the opportunity available at the time.

Monica: I would also say that we always try to be responsive to student ideas, and a lot of initiatives now exist because of an idea that a student had.  

UQ Law students who have completed sixteen units of LLB Laws courses are welcome to register online for the The UQ Pro Bono Centre Roster. All positions are advertised via StudentHub. Applications for LAWS5180 - Clinical Legal Education Program are also open until 4 November 2016. The list of clinics available, as well as the application form, can be found here.  JATL sincerely thanks Monica and Jennifer for their time!