At a Law Council Dinner on Sunday 1 December 2024 the Attorney General waxed lyrical about matters pertaining to his portfolio. In the the course of his speechifying discussed the statutory tort and the anti doxxing provisions. His defence of the journalist exception is wrong headed. He claims it is necessary to protect freedom of the press. That is nonsense. There is no such exemption in any jurisdiction where there is a tort of privacy and somehow the press thrives in those places. It was a political not policy decision. It is a terrible mistake. That said having a tort even if in a weakened form is better than no tort.
His speech provides:
Acknowledgements
Thank you to the Law Council of Australia for hosting yet another wonderful dinner, a dinner I’m delighted to be attending for my third consecutive year since returning as Attorney-General in 2022.
I acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which we meet, the Ngunnawal people, and pay my respects to their Elders, past and present. I extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people here today.
I thank the President of the Law Council, Greg McIntyre SC, for inviting me to speak tonight. I congratulate and welcome the incoming President, Ms Juliana Warner.
I also acknowledge
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- Her Excellency the Honourable Sam Mostyn AC, Governor-General of the Commonwealth of Australia, and His Excellency Simeon Beckett SC;
- My parliamentary colleagues;
- Current and former members of the judiciary; and
- Members of the legal profession.
Legal assistance services
On 6 September this year First Ministers reached a landmark agreement for a new five year National Access to Justice Partnership.
And I am very pleased to say that yesterday, 28 November, the final signature from an Attorney-General was obtained, and it has been published today.
This agreement provides $3.9 billion in support for legal assistance services over five years – the largest Commonwealth funding contribution to the legal assistance sector ever.
It is a vast improvement on the previous agreement, which expires on 30 June next year.
Every single part of the legal assistance sector will get more funding.
The agreement contains nearly $800 million in additional funding, including $500 million to support frontline legal assistance services delivered by Community Legal Centres, Women’s Legal Services, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Services, Legal Aid Commissions and Family Violence Prevention and Legal Services.
Critically, funding will be ongoing. This means an end to a rolling five-year funding cliff. Instead of fighting for its very existence, the sector will be able to plan for the future. It will be able to more easily attract and retain employees because there is job security. This change may be an underreported element of the new agreement but its significance cannot be underestimated.
The new agreement also addresses long-standing pay parity issues in the sector. For the first time, the Commonwealth is acting to lift rates of pay for the community legal assistance sector, bringing them closer to Legal Aid Commissions – again increasing the ability of services to attract and retain good lawyers.
Unlike the previous agreement, with its inadequate fixed rate of indexation, funding will be increased in line with the Wage Cost Index – meaning Commonwealth funding will not go backwards in real terms over the life of the agreement.
The previous agreement did not provide funding security for individual parts of the sector. States and territories could, if they wished, move money from one part to another, reducing the effective value of the Commonwealth contribution. The new agreement requires jurisdictions to maintain their investment for each part of the sector over the life of the agreement.
This both maintains the value of the Commonwealth contribution and provides funding certainty to each part of the legal assistance sector.
As some in this room may remember, the new agreement was announced at a meeting of First Ministers focused on gender-based violence, and appropriately so.
Access to justice is vital for women and children trying to escape gender-based violence. It can be the difference between leaving and staying in a violent situation. It can be the difference between life and death.
I’m proud that the largest relative funding increase for legal assistance in the new agreement was for Family Violence Prevention and Legal Services – a 112 per cent increase in Commonwealth funding compared to the preceding five years.
We know that First Nations women experience disproportionate rates of family violence.
Nationally, First Nations women are seven times more likely to be homicide victims than non-Indigenous women, and of those women, 75 per cent are killed by a current or former partner.
First Nations women are 33 times more likely to be hospitalised due to family and domestic violence than non-Indigenous women.
As my colleague Senator Malarndirri McCarthy, the Minister for Indigenous Australians, has said, this is a national shame.
Doubling the funding for legal assistance services which help First Nations women escape domestic violence will not solve this problem on its own, but it is an important step forward.
Let me be clear – I know there will always be unmet need in the sector.
But I believe the new National Access to Justice Partnership is a momentous step forward.
That’s why I have been disappointed to see some misrepresentation of what the new Agreement delivers.
I expect demands from the legal profession for government to do more for the legal assistance sector.
But misrepresenting facts helps no one, least of all those in the sector.
Further, it makes little sense to make demands of the Commonwealth only.
Legal assistance is a shared responsibility, and demands on government should not focus on the national government alone.
For those in the audience who work in the community legal sector, I would like to say thank you.
You are among the most talented, committed and hardworking lawyers in the country. The Australian Government values your work. I value your work.
Privacy
You may have noticed we passed a few bills last night and early this morning.
I will go to just two of those tonight.
The first enacts tranche one of our privacy reform agenda.
The legislation does a great deal. It:
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- Creates a new statutory tort for serious invasions of privacy;
- Creates a new criminal offence for the malicious release of personal data online, known as doxxing; and
- Establishes provisions to enable the development of a new Children’s Online Privacy Code.
A privacy tort is not a new idea. In fact, that is something of an understatement.
In his 1969 Boyer Lectures Sir Zelman Cowen endorsed legislation to create an actionable right to seek redress for breaches of privacy.
The bill provides for a new statutory cause of action for individuals who have suffered a serious invasion of their privacy, and applies it to both physical privacy and information privacy. Read the rest of this entry »