Suggest you look up the meaning of the word “universal”.

You realise these are all bottom-less pits with massive corporate interests involved right? That it isn’t as simple as everyone holding hands and rainbows sprouting out of their asses. But you’d happily fund that beast huh? Fund the AMA’s every whim. LIV’s every whim?

Let’s use health as an example – everyone knows we need healthcare right? Right we can agree on that. Now, given that health spending will consume all GDP on its current trajectory if something is not done to reign it in, your suggestion is just to successively increase taxes on the rich? You don’t think anything should be done, say, to make health cost less (ie so we buy more for each dollar we spend). You are happy then for the Royal Colleges to limit supply in order to artificially inflate prices (as is the current practice)? I am advocating for mechanisms to reduce the costs of these things.

80% of the health budget is wages. Nurses wages are not the problem, they are more that reasonable (in that they get no where near their slice of the pie, by more than reasonable I mean it is not from nurses that we should get our cost reductions). However, doctors salaries and specialists (eg anyone controlled by the Royal Colleges and/or represented by the AMA) their wages are growing exponentially. So I’d just we deal with that. We don’t have a chronic shortage of any of these categories at the training side, we have a shortage due to the supply being squeezed by the Colleges who are required to register them and simply choose not to because it is not in their interests to increase supply.

Input costs could also be reduced – this would require some initial seed funding for many jurisdictions, such as Victoria where the system is already operating at a high efficiency (relative to other jursidictions) For example, it is widely understood that community based settings cost less and have better outcomes for patients – but we’d need to initially duplicate funding to transition this. .

Do you really think what I’m suggesting – reducing costs to make each dollar we spend more effective is so terrible? I’m not suggesting a cost cutting, I’m suggesting there are many in these systems getting very fat and we need to look at those so that we can re-direct existing funds to more worthy causes.

It wouldn’t.

That a proper legal aid scheme would have a proper set of fees, set and fixed against the amount of work/time a particular case might involve, so that profiteering would be impossible.
That would mean a cap – I’m not in favour of a cap as cases can differ in their complexity immensely. However, without a cap it will never be possible to eradicate profiteering. And in some circumstances, so called profiteering may actually be legitimate, thus there is no black and white here.

I believe pretty much the same thing could easily be and should be applied to health and education.
Then you do not understand the health or education systems in Australia. In health, for example, we are moving as an entire nation to activity based funding. This is a very good thing as it is output based and far more efficient and accountable than input funding. However, it is also really easy to game and many hospitals (particularly in SA and Vic who have had this funding type for a while now) have got good at gaming it. I’m not terribly against that per se, but to suggest we make it ‘impossible to profiteer’ is just foolish and naive.

Simple, and I am not interested in entering into one of your long convuluted conversations that go round and round and round.
I just wanted you to answer some questions rather than making assumptions about me that as always are not true. You assume that because I want a less expensive legal system I am anti-legal representation. Couldn’t be further from the truth – i want a less expensive legal system because i want a legal system accessible for all.

“advocate for in your previous posts”…yes I was advocating that he has a good hard long look at himself to see whereabouts his right wing wonkery might have come from…but if he doesn’t understand simple words like “universal” I guess we are onto a hide to nothing and we’ll be going round and round and round…so that’s enough from me on this issue….i trust narc enjoys it up there alone on the wing nut ferris wheel

Some examples of cases that fit the description I gave – the multiple proceedings:
*Peter Dupas – who wanted to be un-triable for offences merely because he’d done so much horror before (thus lots of negative press) it would bias the court – the High Court rightly rejected his claim that he could never be given a fair trial – on his logic Charles Manson and Hitler would never be tried;
*Delcared vexatious litigant Julian Knight – who on last count had built up over half a million in legal costs with no capacity to pay them – and that isn’t including his defence and appeals of his actual charges. Over $300k of his costs were since being delcared a vexatious litigant.
http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/vexatious-julian-knight-prompts-law-review-20130413-2hsju.html
*The recent agreement of Legal Aid to fund Dr Reeves appeal to the High Court despite him being guilty of harming more than 30 women (including convictions of GBH), who were only offered $12k each. It is estimated to cost all up around $1m for his total defence.
http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/disgraced-doctors-victim-outraged-by-appeal-20130327-2gupx.html

As for citations re costs, see (I’ve abbreviated titles):
*Aon v ANU (2009) 239 CLR 175 (and the myriad of cases that have embraced this without need for the CPA amendments)
*Johnson v Gore wood [2002] 2 AC 1 (per Lord Bingham)
*ALRC, ‘Managing Justice’ Report No 89 (2000)
*Lord Woolf, Access to Justice Report (1996, UK)
*The 2nd reading speech by (Hulls in LA; Jennings in LC) re: the Civil Procedure Act – where he cites judicial criticism of behaviour and rates charged by lawyers.
*Boniface & Legg, ‘cost delay and justice’ (2010) 39 CLWR 157
*Stewart, ‘Self-represented litigants’ (2011) 20 JJA 146 (where he discusses the inaccessibility of the legal system has led to a rise in self-represented litigants)
*Spigelman’s speech at the Compensation Court Annual Conference (May, 1999) and his article ‘Access to justice’ (2007) 29 ABR 773
*Walsh, ‘Time and Money’ (2011) 34 ABR 325

As for Legal Aid:
*Wilkinson v Kenny [1993] 3 All ER 9 – noting legal aid’s budget increasign to address rising costs rather than helping more clients
*From 2001-02 to 2010-11 there was only a 15.5% increase in grants but the case budget doubled in that time. Even taking CPI etc into account, this was a monumentous growth in costs that cannot be dismissed as a couple outlier cases.
*In 2009-10 to 2010-11 (one year) there was a 14% budget increase (over 6 times CPI for that period) which purchased LESS GRANTS of legal aid. Ergo, costs are increasing, gaming is increasing.

This is NOT merely Legal Aid or its funders at fault. This is a system that is gamed at every opportunity. There are good lawyers (competent and not exploitative) out there but the overwhelming costs of the legal system suggest that they may not be as common as we hope. Lawyers protested Case management because it is not in thier interests – despite it being in their client’s interests. Delaying tactics also hurt litigants and victims beyond the financial costs (see eg, Lord Griffiths dicta in Ketteman v Hansel; or Bryson J’s lament in Maronis Holdings [2007] NSWSC).

then you say:
there are plenty of lawyers out there, so it’s not like there’s not strong competition already regarding what rates

So are the people getting those ‘plenty of lawyers’ just getting the worse lawyers that cut corners?

In medicine, it is not acceptable that there are ‘the worst doctors cutting corners’ – there are standards that must be exceeded. Why can this not apply to lawyers? Why are they permitted to be so crap? Why are they still protected from negligence as to how they handle cases?

I will try to dig up the link for the case I reference.

As for the data on the ridiculously ever increasing costs of legal costs, the research and evidence is overwhelming. It is what provoked the Civil Procedure Act amendments and I hope to see similar modifications regarding Criminal procedure. You only need look at Legal Aid’s annual reports to see even when they are given several times the CPI in funding, they still fund less cases – that shows that the cases are more expensive. When you look at the grants, cases with similar complexity ratings are having far more scheduled claims made against them.

Jordan – the DPP already cannot persue cases that do not have a substanitally high chance of success. This is one of the reasons we have such appauling rates of rape cases going to trial – but at the same time it is an attempt to not waste money on a case that would be lost anyway. I also disagree with a no win no fee for criminal law/family law. Nevertheless we certainly need to be looking at how to make the legal system less expensive. Legal representation should be accessible for ALL – currently the costs are so prohibitive that no one on a median wage can get near it.