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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 6 Hansard (18 June) . . Page.. 2034 ..

MR STEFANIAK

It is all very well to say that the number of insurance companies doing this type of insurance has gone down from 35 to two. Over the last 20 years-and this has accelerated in the last five or six years-I have noticed a horrible tendency for Australia to follow the United States in litigating for anything. Twenty or 30 years ago people would quite often simply cop something on the chin and say, "That was simply bad luck. It is not really anyone's fault, it is fate, it is a fact of life and we will just get on with the job."

That sort of attitude has not applied for decades in America. I can remember people laughing, my legal colleagues laughing, at how crazy the American tort situation was, and just how easy it was to sue for anything. But really, in the last half decade I think we have gone down that path. Whilst a lot of good comes out of the United States and it is a great democracy, I would have thought the government would be the last in the world to want to follow willy-nilly trends in the United States. Australia is, I would have hoped, a very different country.

It is pleasing to see that some sensible decisions are starting to come out of the courts in terms of liability and overturning crazy decisions where drunks who fall off bridges into creeks and injure themselves, through no fault of anyone but themselves, actually get $600,000 or $700,000. It is good to see that those sorts of things are being overturned. Decisions have been overturned in cases such as the one in which someone, through no fault of the council-the council could not possibly control such an event-dived into a sandbar at a beach and had the bad luck, I suppose, to injure himself.

I was pleased to see some of the excellent decisions by Justice Terry Connolly, formerly the Master of the Supreme Court and an Attorney-General of this place, which exercised some general commonsense. There is still a very bad tendency of people being able to get money for all sorts of reasons, and this has contributed significantly to the crisis. Often when you look at what is happening you wonder whether there is any justification and whether there is a better way. I think what Mr Smyth is doing is indicating very much a better way.

It is not just the medical crisis-and I will come to that-but it is other things, too. I was pleased to see Mr Smyth address adventure activities. Horse riding in the ACT is a very popular sport, and we have about 3,000 horse owners. There were some great acts of bravery and some great tragedies in some horrible danger zones during the recent fires. I think an owner of a horse stud had his horse riding school plus his home in Chapman burnt down. It is part of our life because we are, as much as anything else, a rural community.

Horse riding is, of course, an adventure activity and a number of riding schools have simply gone to the wall. I am aware of one owner who simply has basically said, "Look, I'm going to take a risk. I can't afford to be insured, I will take a risk."I know of a number of others who have simply said, "No, we just can't operate."Businesses have actually gone to the wall over this. So it is more than just a medical crisis.

We have seen sporting teams' insurance double and quadruple. We have seen the crazy situation of organisations such as stamp collectors and knitting groups, whose members would never remotely have a real chance of sustaining an injury, feeling that they have to

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