Aust, lawyers told to cut fees

Press, 5 July 1983, Page 11

Aust, lawyers told to cut fees

By

CHRIS PETERS

of NZPA

Sydney The Australian AttorneyGeneral, Senator Gareth Evans, has warned the country’s lawyers to cut their fees and put their houses in order or the Government could do it for them. In a hard-hitting address to 1000 lawyers while opening their national convention in Brisbane, he said that the Government had a significant range of powers

to “influence” lawyers in their fees and the kind of services they offered. He told the lawyers that unless the cost of legal services was cut they would lose a lot of their work from the Government and private individuals. He said that the Government had a responsibility to ensure it got value for the money it spent on its own legal business and on legal aid services.

“A simple and alarming fact is that since 1979-80,

Commonwealth legal aid payments for private lawyers had increased in real terms by 80.2 per cent while the number of cases handled by those lawyers during that period has increased by only 27.1 per cent,” he said. Mr Evans said that a vast number of people could not get prompt and competent legal service because they were not poor enough to get legal aid, and not wealthy enough to afford lawyers’ fees.