NACLC DINNER SPEECH. I pay my respects to the Wurundjeri people and acknowledge their ongoing fight for justice.

Transcription

1 NACLC DINNER SPEECH I pay my respects to the Wurundjeri people and acknowledge their ongoing fight for justice. I am honoured to speak to our conference theme of Storytelling in CLCs Work: Reasons, Roles and Risks. I ve read that all dinner speeches are actually just toasts. Feel free to drink at any time throughout and I ll give you a big hint at the end. My words tonight aren t a collection of war stories, though I do have plenty. My words tonight won t be completely light-hearted either and I make no apologies for that. I may have mislead the Captains of our ship that it would just be a few light anecdotes. Whoops.sorry skippers. I went back through my casework: welfare rights, coroners inquests, institutional abuse, refugees so much material, all fairly grim. Please laugh, if you didn t you would cry. I begin with 2 particularly stupid ideas. Stupid idea #1.

2 -2- In 2002, the British Columbian government cut the provincial legal aid budget by 40%. They closed all community law offices. Enter stupid idea #2. Around the same time they set up public computer kiosks called Legal Information Network Kiosks ( LINK ) where people could access information to resolve their legal problems. 3 years on the kiosks were evaluated. The findings were threefold: 1. Hardly anyone used the kiosks; 2. The small number that used them needed help from a Legal Information Outreach Worker; 3. Consequently, the Kiosks were actually very expensive. So what happened? Sadly, legal aid in BC never recovered. At least 50 million is needed to get back to 2002 levels. What happened was Government thought to replace humans with machines? But, it turned out every machine needed it s own human to

3 -3- help a human. So in the end the machines actually cost lots more than the humans. It was artificial unintelligence posing as innovation. In line with our theme, the kiosks represented risk without reason. Government should have foreseen the failure. Our Canadian colleagues saw it coming, but of course no one listened to them. In 1950, scientist Alan Turing asked, can a machine think? He posed this in a scientific paper headed: The Imitation Game. This became the Turing Test. It is a blind test where humans converse by text with computers and humans and guess which is which. Artificial intelligence is reached when humans and computers are indistinguishable. Turing was a leading light at Bletchley Park and helped crack the Nazi Enigma Code. His, and other s work is said to have shortened the war by 2-4 years. Despite this, he was prosecuted for being gay and subjected to chemical castration. He took his own life with cyanide at 41. He was posthumously pardoned in 2013, remarkably just in time for the Hollywood release of the Benedict Cumberbatch version of his life. However, 49,000 other gay men are not yet pardoned and the Pardon49k petitioners continue to lobby for justice.

4 -4- The Turing Test was made famous in the sci-fi classic Blade Runner. Protagonist Deckard uses his Voight-Kampff machine to detect the so-called replicants who lack any sense of empathy. Based on the cult novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep it explored the existence of defining qualities that separate humans from machines. Empathy is one of those qualities. Empathy is derived from the Ancient Greek word for affection, passion and partiality. So what separates all of us from kiosks and other un-innovations? This question has a simple answer that illustrates a critical quality of CLCs. We are subjects of experience. It is our unique, empathic CLC experience that sets us apart. We listen and care. It is our passion and partiality. We take action based on community needs. Our actions often defy the norm: standing knee deep in mud and mangroves at while bulldozers, police and protesters clash. Spending 5 days to take a 1-page statement about institutional abuse via sight board from a man who couldn t walk or talk. Doing protection visas for 30 or more evacuees from a Pacific island undergoing a coup d'état. Sometimes moments shape us, like a Federal Court appeal we lost for a man facing deportation. He was almost exactly my age and had lived 35 of his 44 years in Australia. The judge gave him some time with his wife. We, and the bailiff were left alone. It was a Friday. What sticks in my mind is their last kiss. I didn t watch but couldn t help but

5 -5- see. A heartbreaking, tender, intimate moment. A courtroom is no place for a last kiss. Or my personal hero, a Victorian prisoner s lawyer who protested the strip searches of women prisoners leaping on stage and brown-eyeing the Victorian Attorney General during conference welcome drinks. In that one moment she perfectly captured our spirit, defiance, cheekiness and outrage. 12 years ago, I gave a presentation to this conference called Will the Real CLC Please Stand Up! It aimed to generate discussion around WHAT is a CLC. It seemed a perfectly reasonable inquiry. I now know it was the wrong question. Cicero s elements of circumstance were immortalized in Kipling s Just So Stories: The first stanza of the poem reads: I keep 6 honest serving men, They taught me all I knew. Their names are what and why and when And how and where and who In asking WHAT is a CLC, I should have instead asked WHY and WHO?

6 -6- I heard our plenary speaker suggest WHAT is the critical inquiry because it leads to facts whereas WHY leads to opinion. It is opinion we worship in the temple of CLC. We aren t bland providers of legal services. We have opinions about how the law should be construed, reformed and applied. Our opinions are based on client s stories. Simon Rice s paper to the 2010 conference said CLCs have not kept track of who and why they are. He suggested we fight to retain relevancy, resist the inducements of conformity and the threats of ostracism. He questioned our reasons, our roles and the attendant risks of becoming complacent. His comments could not have been truer given this year s happenings. He pointed out we are strongest when our proposals are grounded in the real experience of our constituency. I will come back to that word constituency. 45 years ago in Yale Law Journal, Stephen Wexler issued a timeless warning about community law :- It is usually the Government which pays a poverty lawyer; it is also often the government that a poverty lawyer will oppose in his client's interests. Thus, the more effective a poor people's

7 -7- lawyer, the more problems he poses for those who pay him...the better they are at their jobs, the more likely it becomes that the Government will eliminate their jobs. Some might say truer words were never spoken. Recently, a Productivity Commissioner suggested that CLCs lacked a mobilised constituency beyond themselves. He was making the same point that Simon Rice made. Is it true that our constituency is nothing more than a diaspora of those we assist, who then move on once we close their case? Is it that we hear their story, but no one hears ours? Is our story different from theirs? Are we like children, who our political parents say we should be seen but not heard.? I don t think so, and the answer is linked to the WHY. In respect of WHY, our course has become clearer in the last 12 months. The NACLC and CLCs ran an astonishing campaign, underpinned by Rosie Batty s fierce advocacy. Our peers were fearless and I have never been prouder. Much was, and still is at stake. That campaign was built on the Community Law campaign and the fundamental importance of dealing with family violence. Family

8 -8- violence isn t the only WHY but must rank among the most enduring and important. Freedom from violence is a fundamental human right that overshadows all others. It has been so since CLCs were first established. Exactly 20 years ago this week, federal Parliament heard about the importance of CLC work in domestic violence, highlighted by a fresh injection of funds called the Justice Statement. Our history is a history of opposing violence. Our collective history and our personal history. I vividly recall a client from my first year at TCLS. I was giving advice in a house converted to community centre opposite a large shopping centre. I was in a kid s bedroom surrounded by bunk beds and seated at a low table and chairs. The client was a perpetrator who insisted that he had a defence to the application. He aggressively insisted the allegations were inaccurate surely the Magistrate should be told he punched twice her in the face, not six or seven times. His attitude was akin to those who feel they should avoid a speeding for a misspelled name on the ticket. I was young and I could barely control my own anger with this man. What he did after we parted I will never know. I recall speaking with my friend and colleague Anne Lewis the next day. He and other

9 -9- clients in my formative years left me with an indelible notion that no case is more important than where human life is at stake. Alongside opposing violence, we must oppose poverty through our work. Community legal workers are, as Wexler said a valuable piece of property in a poor community. Alongside opposing violence and poverty we must oppose hate. Indulge me in one brief client story. You could call it part of the war on Hate. I had the privilege of running the first GLBTI vilification case in Qld. The complaint centered on the front-page headline of a redneck paper in Mission Beach that warned Poofters Beware. The ensuing piece went on to report that vigilante groups had formed to deal with any gay men found showing public affection in this very popular deep north resort town or on its beaches. It was a town which attracted large crowds post-sydney Mardi Gras. We won that case but I fear we may be losing the war. I see the bile and invective posted online these days, most of which goes unchecked. We must respond to this grostequery. It worries me that one of the first defences raised to save section 18C was how rarely the provision had been used. Surely this was counter-intuitive? The second question is who we are? Ultimately, the who defies definition to the outside world. But we know each other when we

10 -10- meet and share our experiences and our empathy. We don t need a secret handshake or silly uniform. Who we are is shaped by why we are. It attracts us to CLCs and keeps us here, possibly longer than we should be at times. Let s briefly go back to the Turing Test. A disturbing feature is the frequency of the false positive, in which hidden human foils are misidentified as machines. We must guard against any loss of our humanity. Tonight I want you all to eat, drink, dance and be merry. You have earned it. Savour old friends and make some new ones. Never forget what makes us unique is the why our reasons and the who our roles. Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It s not. Some time during the early part of our recent funding crisis, Attorney- General Brandis stated, I have been close to the community legal sector all of my life, many of my friends work in that sector It seems the Attorney General and I actually have something in common. So, let s raise a glass to friends in CLCs. Thank you and enjoy dinner