Liberal-National
Party drone, the Menzies
Research Centre,
was the 66th
individual or organisation to make a submission to the Parliamentary
Joint Committee on Corporations and Financial Services’ Inquiry
into the Litigation funding and the regulation of the class action
industry.
This submission
was written by
twenty-five year-old James
Mathias (shown left),
Chief of Staff at the Menzies Institute
and unsuccessful Liberal candidate for the seat of Holt at the 2016
feferal election.
It would appear from the evidence Mathias gave to the Inquiry that he shares an office with the Liberal Party in Canberra.
Young
James is definitely not a scholar and,
typical of that peculiar breed of young Liberals, he made a a mess of
the submission right from the opening lines.
On
13 July 2020 The
Guardian report
his
appearance
at the first public hearing of the Inquiry:
Mathias
appeared on Monday before a parliamentary committee investigating
whether Australia’s class action industry needs tighter regulation…
The
first line of the submission from the MRC – the Liberal party
thinktank – quoted the federal court justice Michael Lee as saying
in a judgment on 5 June: “The phrase ‘access to justice’ is
often misused by litigation funders to justify what at bottom is a
commercial endeavour to make money out of the conduct of litigation.”
It
was purportedly from a judgment on class actions stemming from
allegations that the Australian defence department negligently
allowed toxic chemicals known as Pfas to escape from defence bases
and contaminate local environments.
But
Mathias, who was just 21 when he ran as a federal candidate for the
Victorian seat of Holt in 2016, confirmed under questioning he had
“not read the full judgment” cited in the submission as
“judgments are very long – some hundreds of pages”.
O’Neill
said the judgment was actually 37 pages long and “the words you
quote in the very first line of your submission are nowhere, nowhere
to be found in his honour’s judgment”.
The
NSW senator said the only place that quote could be found was in an
article in the legal journal Lawyerly on 9 June, titled “‘A
significant inequality of arms’: Funding led to better outcomes in
PFAS class action, judge says”…..
In
Lee’s judgment of 5 June, the judge made a more qualified statement
that “the term ‘access to justice’ is commonly misused, most
often by some funders who fasten upon it as an inapt rhetorical
device”.
He
then cautioned against generalisations. While noting “litigation
funding is about putting in place a joint commercial enterprise aimed
at making money”, Lee went on to say that recognising that reality
“does not diminish the importance of litigation funding in allowing
these class members to vindicate their claims against the
commonwealth”.
Referring
to the alleged victims in the Pfas class actions, Lee continued:
“Without litigation funding, the claims of these group members
would not have been litigated in an adversarial way but, rather, they
would likely have been placed in the position of being supplicants
requesting compensation, in circumstances where they would have been
the subject of a significant inequality of arms….
When
contacted for a response to the criticism of his submission, Mathias
said it was “astonishing that the Guardian would be siding with
foreign backed, super-profitable litigation funders just because it
does not like the politics of the MRC”.
The
5
June 2020 judgement
in question GAVIN
SMITH et al v COMMONWEALTH OF AUSTRALIA (DEPARTMENT OF DEFENCE) can
be found at
https://www.judgments.fedcourt.gov.au/judgments/Judgments/fca/single/2020/2020fca0837
*James Mathias Snapshot found on Twitter
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