This bleak tale is about the death of government.

I am 78, in indifferent health – lung cancer in remission, and incurable emphysema.  If it matters, I am a retired lawyer on a part pension who presided over statutory tribunals on a sessional basis for thirty of my fifty years in the law – and got sacked from both.

Recently, I made my final move, to Yarraville, to be close to my daughter and a base hospital.  Then I discovered an issue in rising damp in my swish recently built apartments, and that the whole block was riddled with the problem – to the extent that the government insurer, VMIA, just cannot keep up.

The builder is broke and should be behind bars.  The rectification will cost more than $90,000 – eight times what I paid for my first house. 

I lodged a claim with the government insurer.  Or I thought I did.  The VMIA robots had other ideas.

Dear Geoffrey Gibson

This email is to inform you that your claim 00043068 is currently in the status of DRAFT and has not been submitted. The Draft 00043068 will be automatically closed if you do not submit it within five days of this email….

That missive landed on 25 December.  Happy Christmas, Citizen Geoffrey. 

Then VMIA rejected my claim on grounds that my lawyers say are unsustainable, for reasons given in VCAT precedents. 

I issued proceedings there very reluctantly, because delay is a byword – not just months, but years.  They are even more financially crippled than VMIA, whose name is now notorious among the many thousands of victims of shysters.

So I said that we should meet to discuss settlement, and set out my legal advice.  Six months later, I still await a response – from a government agency that I fund that is supposed to be a ‘model litigant’.  I am getting the usual runaround from lawyers.  There are many claims on VMIA on this bombsite, but it appoints lawyers randomly – one hand does not know what the other does.  Now, my local MP, after strenuous endeavour, says that the Minister cannot intervene.

That being so, I may have to take out a reverse mortgage, and possibly bequeath a Bleak House law suit to my daughter.

So much for thirty years’ service to my government.

I have three complaints.  Government has failed to enforce its building regulations, or adequately to fund and staff VMIA.  Above all, it has let VCAT become a waste-land.  These failures have nothing to do with party politics.

The VCAT collapse is dreadful.  Denying justice is the ultimate failure.  There is a simple enough remedy.  Appoint a dozen or so barristers of ten years standing on a sessional basis with instructions to resolve all disputes within six weeks of filing.  It takes some effort and experience, but I managed it for thirty years – and with very tricky cases.  (My little case could take a morning – if someone says what the point is.)

The whole point of the profession is to get people through the wounding roundabout as soon as practicable.  Justice delayed is justice denied.

It gets worse.  VCAT is not a judicial body.  This tribunal is part of the executive – and it has therefore been shredded like most of our civil service.  Its members lack the constitutional protection that judges have.

But it has a Supreme Court judge as its President.  And its statute says that the President and Vice Presidents are ‘to direct the business of the Tribunal’ and ‘are responsible for the management of the administrative affairs of the Tribunal.’  

A judge is therefore running part of the civil service.  So much for the separation of powers.  The irony is that after killing off responsible government under the Westminster System, government has chosen to make a judge responsible for directing civil servants.

Judges may be driven to act, or precluded from acting, by ‘government policy.’  That is anathema.  I should know.  When permanent members, whose job was threatened, usurped my role as head the Taxation Division, after its first eighteen years, the then President, to the horror of Treasury, said that ‘government policy’ stopped him from intervening.  No judge should ever be put in that position.  The whole process was fraught.  Good advisers stopped me from suing – but it still smoulders, woundingly.

VCAT is a festering failure.  The scandal now is public.  A superior justice is obliged to preside over a sustained denial of justice.

I set out these misgivings in a book, The Making of a Lawyer, 2008.  I said that judges who have to play a part in politics will do it badly and will debase their currency.  The result?  Rien.

We Victorians are paying a dreadful price for the attrition of the civil service by both parties over two generations.  VMIA and VCAT just stand mute like Easter Island statues.  One dying government agency colludes with another to maim the system.  The government of the State of Victoria looks to be broken – juristically,  financially, and morally.