Victorian government accused of undermining rule of law in bid to avoid Lawyer X scandal payouts
The Victorian government has been accused of undermining the law and trying to avoid taking responsibility for corruption after it moved to prevent itself from being sued over the Nicola Gobbo controversy.
Gobbo’s lawyer, lawyers for other clients already suing the state government and legal bodies all lashed the proposed changes.
The proposed laws would prevent the government or any police officer being sued in relation to “specified human sources”.
The sources are Gobbo, a former gangland lawyer who worked as a police informer known as Lawyer X, and Joseph Acquaro, another former gangland lawyer who was not registered as an informer but provided information to police before he was killed in 2016.
There are at least four current legal claims against the government for its conduct in relation to the handling of Gobbo, including a claim by Gobbo against the force.
One of those cases, involving Faruk Orman, has been running for four years, with the government using external lawyers to argue the case, including in the court of appeal.
It is unclear what impact Labor’s bill will have on current cases, including on the costs incurred by people who have sued the government.
Robinson Gill principal lawyer Jeremy King, who represents Orman but was speaking about the changes generally, said the law set a troubling precedent.
It eroded fundamental aspects of democracy, he said, including the independence of the judiciary, people’s civil right to take legal action and the separation of powers between the government and courts.
“It is shutting down claims that in their nature involve government corruption,” he said.
“If they do it to this group of people, what’s to stop them doing it to another group of people?
“Who’s next? People who want to sue the education department for childhood sexual abuse in schools?”
Gobbo’s lawyer, Angela Sdrinis, said her client had made a claim for damages against Victoria police officers for their conduct in her case.
She said the proposed law could prevent hundreds of people from taking legal action, given the royal commission into the management of police informers found that more 1000 convictions may have been directly or indirectly tainted by the negligent use of Gobbo as a human source.
About $200m was spent on the royal commission and delivering its recommendations, the government has said.
“It is an extraordinary attack on the rule of law and the possibility of accountability for abuses of power by police and other state actors,” Sdrinis said.
“The government concern is not for taxpayer dollars, the government concern is saving face.”
The Law Institute of Victoria also said the bill undermined the justice system.
“The state has enormous power over its citizens, and for it to legislate out of liability when the power is wielded improperly is wrong,” its chief executive, Adam Awty, said.
The attorney general, Jaclyn Symes, dismissed concerns about the scope of the bill on Tuesday morning, saying it was for “a very specific cohort”.
Labor needs the support of either the Coalition opposition or the Greens and two other crossbench MPs to pass its agenda through the upper house.
But Guardian Australia understands the progressive bloc of crossbenchers, consisting of four Greens MPs, two Legalise Cannabis MPs and Georgie Purcell from the Animal Justice party, are yet to form a position on the bill but are leaning towards voting against it, given concerns of civil liberty groups.
The opposition are also yet to form a position. But the shadow attorney general, Michael O’Brien, criticised the government’s attempt to pass the bill through both the lower and upper houses by the end of the week.
“The government is trying to sweep away all the civil liability that this scandal has created, and worse … [it is] trying to rush it through the parliament without any scrutiny, without any proper debate, but we won’t be supporting any rush on this. It’s far too important,” O’Brien told reporters.
“It’s an extraordinary precedent the government’s looking to set, to say the government can pass a law, to say, ‘It doesn’t matter what we did, we’re not responsible, you can’t sue us’. It’s just extraordinary. It deserves proper scrutiny and that’s what we’ll be seeking to provide.”
