Go to the public, lawyers told

Press, 16 July 1983, Page 8

Go to the public, lawyers told

PA Wellington The legal profession could not let itself be seen as an elite, unduly preoccupied with maintaining ancient privileges, said the Leader of the Opposition, Mr Lange, last evening. Instead, it must get into the community and welcome community participation in its affairs, he said at a Wanganui District Law Society Bar dinner. “Members of the Bench have been abused by people who should know better,” said Mr Lange, who practised as a lawyer before entering Parliament.

“Is that abuse not an expression of a common kind of contempt for established authority, and is such contempt not usually directed at what is alien and misunderstood?” he said.

Mr Lange said the law was under threat “because there are elements in the community to whom the

due proces of law seems nothing but an empty form, and the legal profession an anachronism, held at best in weary cynicism.” The Stewart Royal Commission was a good example of how the public often did not understand how the legal profession worked. “That report tells the story of rich criminals who used the proceeds of crime to buy themselves the best legal defence they could,” said Mr Lange. “If the public are wrong to see that as a prostitution of the legal profession, that is not the public’s fault. “If the public are wrong to hold in contempt the barrister who finds the technicality which acquits his or her client of a charge of drunken driving, that is not the public’s fault. It is your fault because you have not explained yourselves well enough,” Mr Lange said. If the profession was privileged, or seen to be privileged, it should not be

surprised if it came under attack from radical or populist elements, he said. Mr Lange suggested that unconstitutional proceedings, such as the scrapping of Labour’s superannuatibn scheme in 1976 and the moves to by-pass objectors to the Clyde dam development last year, were possible. because of public opinion or indifference. “Both were possible because they allowed popular feeling to overcome unpopular targets, or defeat interests to which large parts of the public were indifferent.

“The legal principles which took such a hammering must have seemed irrelevant or unimportant to many people, or none of this would have been allowed to happen,” he said. Mr Lange said that the legal profession and Parliamentarians had a responsibility to see that the law was made properly and practised fairly.