Savings for justice

At Simpson's trial in March 2005, his legal aid lawyer, Joanne Harris, adhered to the ethics; she persuaded the judge, Anthony Whealy, to conceal his suicide attempt because it might cause him "unfair prejudice". The director of public prosecutions (DPP), Nicholas Cowdery, decided not to proceed. Simpson walked.

A glimpse of what legal aid lawyers may get emerged in an article by Richard Ackland in The Sydney Morning Herald of 29 November 2013. He said it was estimated that legal aid costs for a four-week murder trial would be $280,000.

That is $14,000 a day to be whacked up between, say, a barrister and an instructing solicitor. That may explain why legal aid costs taxpayers two or three times as much as the office of the DPP.

Tony Koch reported in The Australian (17 May, 2008) that the Queensland DPP got about $30 million a year from state and federal sources to try to put criminals in prison; legal aid lawyers got $101 million a year to try to keep them out.

In New South Wales, the DPP's budget for 2007-08 was $96 million; the legal aid budget was $214 million. In 2009, DPP Cowdery was obliged to drop some prosecutions, and could not provide lawyers for some courts.

As for possible civil legal aid, a couple of points can be made.

George Brandis is said to believe that aspects of the Racial Discrimination Act are an unwarranted restriction on "free" speech. If he believes that, he will remove the bias in libel law which restricts free speech in the media and elsewhere.

The bias comes from a string of false presumptions, including a presumption of guilt for defendants, which pervert justice, and make it fairly easy for scoundrels to win libel actions. After US judges removed the bias in 1964, there were half as many libel actions in the entire United States as there were in Sydney.

Civil legal aid would probably swamp the courts and taxpayers. Perhaps school children could use it to sue Education Minister Pyne and Prime Minister Abbott for going back on their promise to adhere to the Gonski education reforms.