Mark Dreyfus (Isaacs, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Attorney General) Share this | Hansard source

I'll say again, although the Attorney-General has already read out from my media release yesterday, that litigation funding and class actions provide a vital path to justice for ordinary Australians trying to uphold their rights against wealthy defendants with vastly greater resources. I did give as an example in that media release yesterday when we saw this inquiry was about to be launched that, just last November, the Federal Court ruled in favour of the three lead applicants in a class action of more than 1,350 women who sued Johnson & Johnson and two subsidiaries for negligence in relation to pelvic mesh implants. These were hundreds of Australian women left in debilitating pain for years because of a faulty product banding together through a class action to achieve some measure of justice. Just like many, many litigants, they would not have been able to obtain redress and they would not have been able to obtain justice were it not for the class action process.

I waited through those 15 minutes of the Attorney-General's rant against class actions generally and against litigation funders to hear him refer to the government's own inquiry report which we have been waiting 17 months for a response to. That's the really pathetic thing about this hapless government—having commissioned the Law Reform Commission to do an inquiry into litigation funding and class actions, they have not yet, 17 months on, responded to the detailed recommendations of the Law Reform Commission report. That's because they didn't like the outcome.

Does anyone think it's a coincidence that this new inquiry into class actions—and, make no mistake, this is not confined to litigation funding; this is a general inquiry with very broad terms of reference into class actions as well—to be carried out by a government dominated committee was first proposed by the Attorney-General in the first week of March, just days after some 10,000 victims of the Morrison government's cruel robodebt scheme signed up to a class action to sue the government for the harm this terrible, illegal scheme inflicted on them? I'd remind the House that the robodebt scheme is not only cruel; the Federal Court has found it to be unlawful. Under that scheme, the Morrison government sought to intimidate innocent and vulnerable Australians into paying debts they did not owe. Perversely, the Morrison government has called this extortion racket an 'economic measure'. And now, rather than taking responsibility for its unlawful conduct, the Morrison government wants to make it harder for victims of robodebt to seek redress.

When Australian consumers are ripped off and injured by predatory companies selling dodgy financial products and dangerous consumer items, the Morrison government would also like to deny those Australian consumers any legal recourse unless they have millions of dollars lying around to pay for a legal action against a huge company with limitless legal resources.

There's been a lot of commentary in recent days about this proposed inquiry, and lots of dodgy statistics have been thrown around by those opposite and just today by the Attorney-General. But, contrary to government claims—and they need to listen to this—research by the commercial law firm Allens found that the total number of class action filings was actually down 20 per cent in 2019, and shareholder class actions, which the government seem to have a particular concern about, were actually down 63 per cent last year. So far this year—this is another matter that has featured in their publicity—we're only aware of three new shareholder class actions, none of which relate to COVID-19 matters.

Significantly, the biggest source of new class action cases in 2019 came from consumer actions arising from the banking royal commission, the same royal commission that the government voted against 26 times. The government had been crying for years that there was no point in inquiring into misconduct by the banks because there was nothing to see. But, to the surprise of nobody but the government, the inquiry revealed a litany of abuse by the big banks against their customers, against ordinary Australians who trusted them. The Morrison government then wrung their hands and cried crocodile tears, saying, 'How could we have known?' Then they got their marketing people into gear. The Prime Minister talked about a 'tough response'. This Prime Minister does like to talk tough, but he's delivered little more than a few focus-group-tested lines.

Now the Morrison government are delaying action again because they say they're too busy with COVID-19. But apparently they're not so busy they can't launch a new inquiry to stymie class actions against predatory companies, because, for them, that's a priority.

In opposing this inquiry, Labor's not suggesting that the legal regime governing class action proceedings is perfect. But we do not need another inquiry to tell us how to improve it. What we need is some actual governing by this hapless government and an actual response to the Australian Law Reform Commission inquiry that this government commissioned and which got one mention in the Attorney-General's 15-minute speech today. After a comprehensive inquiry lasting a year, involving consultations with some 60 key stakeholders, the Australian Law Reform Commission—

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