George Brandis (Queensland, Liberal Party, Attorney-General) Share this | Hansard source

I think you take a rather pessimistic and, if I may say so, ungenerous view of the professional skill of a lot of the people who work in the legal aid system. We all know that almost all legal aid cases are either family law matters or criminal law matters—those are the two priority jurisdictions—but those criminal lawyers who represent clients in the legal aid system are by no means to be dismissed as being, as it were, the least good lawyers. I can tell you from my own experience of the profession, although I was not a criminal law practitioner, that there are many, many very fine lawyers who work in the legal aid system who could earn a lot more if they worked at the private bar or for one of the big law firms but choose not to do that for the kinds of social justice reasons that you and Senator Wright have in your different ways been adverting to. So I do not think you should be so rude, really, Senator Leyonhjelm, as to dismiss legal aid lawyers as second-rate lawyers, because they are not. It follows from that that one of the competencies of good criminal lawyers is a capacity to deal with commercial crime. Criminal lawyers are not merely people who deal with cases in which the physical dimensions of crime are the most important probative or evidentiary issues, like, for example, murders. It is also within the competencies of good criminal lawyers to deal with the commercial dimensions of criminal conduct, including tracing money through various accounts, trusts and other structures that may be artificially created to launder or conceal its movement. So the competency that you say that criminal lawyers working in the legal aid system lack is not a competency which is entirely missing from that system; it is a competency of an element of criminal practice.