National kill off Legal Aid
'Crooked lawyers' force review of legal aid
Justice Minister Simon Power will ask Cabinet to agree to sweeping changes to legal aid after revelations hundreds of crooked lawyers are ripping off taxpayers. He has vowed "urgent structural change" to shore up public confidence in the system. Power has asked justice officials to compile an urgent report on how quickly the Legal Services Agency can be disestablished and folded into the Ministry of Justice. Cabinet will consider the report on Monday.
National declare, ‘Kill all the Lawyers’ after their brilliant attack on legal aid by Margaret Bazely that claimed over $100 million was being stolen every year by greedy evil lawyers and that it was corrupt and Legal Aid must now be run directly by the Ministry of Justice.
Really? Legal Aid is corrupt is it and Legal Aid now needs to be decided by the Government through the Ministry of Justice?
(Please tell me Jesus that this is a horrible fucking joke)
This idea is a bit like the National Education standards that were recently described by education specialists as the worst thing to ever happen in Education, ever.
Folks, this is the worst thing to happen to law, ever. Legal aid is deadly underfunded, and by removing the independence of legal aid, the State now decide which defence they will fund and which one they won’t. Remember the Ahmed Zaoui case? If it had been within the power of the Ministry of Justice, they would’ve cut legal aid funding immediately, and let’s not forget Ahmed Zaoui had all charges dropped against him.
Allowing the Government to be able to manipulate the funding of the defence cases against them is an outrage, and let’s be clear about the so called evidence that Bazely has used to claim 80% of the Manakau District Court are guilty of fraudulent behaviour. As Gordon Campbell over at Scoop rightfully points out, all her evidence is gossip, look at the report and it’s a mish mash of hear say and second hand reports, this is all the evidence required to take all the independence away from Legal Aid? I thought only Scott Watson could get convicted on such circumstantial evidence, I had no idea we could convict the entire legal profession on such pathetic evidence.
This ripping off of an independently funded legal aid system comes right when the Government is gearing up to throw more and more of us in prisons. While few were looking, National once again went into urgency and rammed through last week prison privatization & allowing prisoners to be held in Police cells for a few late night justice sessions.
10 of Britain's 11 private prisons rank in the bottom 25 per cent over there and the head of GEO, the private prison conglomerate was in NZ telling the select committee that private prisons won’t be cheaper. Yet National and ACT are allowing a McPrison industry to open here and profit from human misery.
It is time lawyers wised up to what National are trying to do here is actually in the worst interests of Justice and the sooner you join the Unions, the Teachers, ACC sexual abuse claimants, beneficiaries, environmentalists and the Public Service the sooner we can challenge this hard right Government
posted by Bomber @ 7:36 am
3 comments
3 Comments:
No joke sorry sonny.
This is what happens when people's legitimate concerns about abuses of the legal aid system go ignored.
It has been no secret that career criminals are racking up huge legal aid bills that the tax payer has to foot for YEARS, nothing has ever been done to sop this until now.
"the Unions, the Teachers, ACC sexual abuse claimants, beneficiaries, environmentalists and the Public Service" have stood by for the past 10 years and let Labour do what ever they wanted which included ignoring these sorts of problems. Now National are in power and no one else gives a shit what the above mentioned groups think.
Will this improve matters? Probably not knowing the way National seems to be able to fuck everything up, but that's what you get when you ignore these sorts of issues for so long - they fester away and people will accept any alternative to the status quo of doing nothing.
Interesting that Dame Margaret Bazley was for a number of years a member of the Risk Management Committee of the Legal Services Agency. She has been a member since at least 2005, possibly longer. The Committee was meant to review the Agency’s risks, monitor the results of audits of contractual and legislative compliance of listed legal aid lawyers, review management reports on areas of risk such as business continuity, fraud and legislative compliance and review internal audit reports.
I wonder how much she earned and what she was doing for that money ...
"Allowing the Government to be able to manipulate the funding of the defence cases against them is an outrage"
Where is the actual proof that this will occur?
You're actually ignoring what is an ongoing serious problem that the agency has been driving out practitioners from vital areas such as family law because of its incompetence. Start looking at the facts instead of just sounding off for a change.
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