Law Society of NSW - Council Elections

Lawmen of New South Wales,

Commeth the hour, commeth the man. I am writing to you by electronic transmission to ask your support as I seek election for the Large Firm position at this year’s Law Society Council elections. This email is unrelated to any I may have previously sent to your in your capacity as a potential conduit of Nigerian financing opportunities. For the avoidance of doubt, those offers remain open.

At literally any moment now you will receive your ballot papers from the NSW Law Society. Here is what I will stand for when I am elected to the Law Society Council:

a) The wholesale repeal of CLERP 7, in all of its insidious guises.
b) The appointment of Wyatt Roy and Justin Bieber to the Juvenile Justice Sub-Committee of the Law Society of NSW.
c) Using the corporations power to overcome the High Court’s lamentable Octaviar decision.
d) Convening a citizens’ assembly to resolve once and for all whether there is a fifth category in Masters v Cameron.
e) Outlawing severability clauses.
f) Stopping jurisprudential waste and turning back the boats.

For those of you that are unaware of my many, many distinguished years as a Lawman, I have set out below a brief ‘snap shot’ of career highlights:

· Career victories against Sir Garfield Barwick: 2

· Golden Gavel winner, 1945

· Internationally renowned authority on the training and discipline of hounds

· Author of Whitelocke: On Lawmanship 3rd Edition and countless other learned texts, including ‘Mary Sidney Herbert: A Winsome Spinster’ and ‘The Separation of Canon and Common Law: Eight (8) Centuries of Legal Madness’

In short, I will bring erudition, accountability, dignity and a detailed knowledge of the training of hounds to the role of large Firm Member, which for too long has been dominated by the vested interests of solicitors who work for large firms.

If you agree that these ideas are right for our time, then please vote for me in the Law Society Council elections.

A faint heart never won a fair maiden. Be brave and vote.

Kind regards,

Bullstrode Whitelocke K.C.
Knight of the Thistle, Order of the Companions of Honour, Knight of the Hutt River Province, President of the Australian Chapter of the Stone Masons, 18 times Heraclitus Society Man of the Year, The Leverhulme Medal for the application of Heraclitus to Chemistry, The Royal Guelphic Order, Knight Grand Commander of The Most Eminent Order of the Indian Empire, Kaisar-I-Hind Medal, Officer of the Order of Australia, Australian Antarctic Medal, Champion Shots Medal.
Albert Bathurst Piddington Chambers

Ten Years of CLERP: A Retrospective: Part 1

Over the next 18 to 24 months I plan to release a ten part retrospective on the first decade of CLERP. The last ten years have seen incredible changes to the social, economic and jurisprudential fabric of Australia, all of which can be more or less attributed to the all-pervading influence of CLERP.

For the younger members of my readership, CLERP was and is a programme of amendments made by the Corporate Law Economic Reform Program Act 1999 to the Corporations Law in Australia. These changes focused on many areas of corporate regulation, including accounting standards, fundraising and takeovers. CLERP attempted to improve productivity, promote market freedom and increase investor protection. It is fair to say that, while demonstrating a fanatical, almost French, obsession with the codification of law, CLERP has achieved both none and all of these goals.

It is widely known that I was responsible for almost all the significant reforms achieved by CLERP. Like the great Theban King Laius and fictional scientist Miles Bennett Dyson*, I fear that, having created my brilliant offspring (CLERP), it will ultimately lead to my tragic downfall. For example, I inserted a requirement in the Corporations Act 2001 that a majority shareholder seeking to enforce compulsory acquisition must provide a report from an expert opining on the fairness of the offer price. This amendment dovetailed neatly with my newly established expert takeover share price assessment business but the subsequent success of which saw me spiral into erratic behaviour and a chronic dependence on colonic irrigation. I was quite unprepared for the trappings of overnight wealth and fame.

With that background now forever in your mind, we move to the year 2000, the first of CLERP. In analysing that crucial year, it is important to remember that while drafting CLERP in 1999 I was deeply influenced by my privileged childhood in the Great Depression, the decade long stagflation in the Eastern Bloc throughout the 1980s and my short but profoundly influential dalliance with Raelian theology. Recognisant of those influences, it is abundantly clear that the most significant CLERP related events in the year 2000 were:

a) Australia introduces the Goods and Services Tax (GST). This was a terrible result of Peter Costello’s incredible overreaction to the CLERP requirement that the legislature, rather than the AASC, should now make determinations regarding which types of entities should comply with accounting standards;

b) Labor won the August 12 1990 Isaacs By-Election. This was despite the fact that I had amended the entire of Division 9 (Evidentiary use of certain material) of the Australian Securities and Investments Commission Act 1989 to, when read backwards, repeat the line “Ann Corcoran is the Great Satan”; and

c) Even more influentially, the Brisbane Broncos won the NRL grand final. Unlikely hero Harvey Howard later confided to me that the confidence that CLERP had given him, as a retail investor, allowed him to focus on delivering a match winning performance from the interchange bench.

So, gentle reader, there ends the first instalment of the Twilight saga of Australian corporate law reform. Stay tuned for more of the CLERP retrospective. In future editions you will discover incredible facts such as CLERP’s unlikely connection to the grounding of the Pasha Bulker and how simplified company lodgement and compliance procedures led to the 2005 chart success of Shannon Noll’s “Lift”.


*Incredibly, not only do I believe the character Miles Bennett Dyson in the tech-reality drama Terminator 2 was based on me, the script of the fourth instalment of that highly popular moving picture franchise was almost entirely faithful to the wording of my first draft of the fourth edition of CLERP: “CLERP Salvation”.

CLERP article and a review from the vault

I recently submitted an article to my friends at the Alternative Law Journal entitled “The first ten years of CLERP: the codification of the Business Judgment Rule and other catastrophes in Corporate Australia’s lost decade”.

The article itself is a detailed and masterful critique of failed government policy but the stoush I had with the editor who tried to trim back the 176 page conclusion reminded me of a previous battle I’d had with the shadowy figures behind this publication.

In 2007 I had a lucrative beneficial interest in the release of a musical compact disc by an intrepid group of Sydney musicians trading as the Vexatious Litigants. Their album was met with almost universal acclaim: Ian “Molly” Meldrum described it as “the best jurisprudential jam since L.A.W by Dr Dre”, with the notable exception of a hatchet piece by my many enemies at the Alternative Law Journal. This review included such slanderous remarks as:

“There is much mystery around the formation and foundations of the band. They claim to be merely a hip hop unit made up of four University of New South Wales students (being two vocalists, a DJ and a percussionist/cellist) who decided to form a band after ‘years of attending gigs and not attending class’. But rumours abound that they have had their ’props‘ (hip hop term for credentials) established through the strong physical and financial support of the legendary Bullstrode Whitelocke KC — a barrister, politician, and philanthropist who is supposedly the enigmatic backer for the band.”

This line certainly did me no favours with my old sparring partners at the Australian Tax Office! Even worse was to come with the final kick in the teeth being this:

“The only real letdown was having to sit through the final track on the CD/EP, ‘The leper on the doorstep of equity’ a 19 minute lecture on the differences between ‘Notices to Perform’ and ‘Notices to Complete’, which reeks of a desperate clamber for mainstream acceptance by the legal fraternity. To me, this goes against the spirit of the rest of the CD, as the opening lines of the first track state: ‘Better shout out cos I’m the lawyer your mum warned you about, I push the boundaries of reasonable doubt, I never cite cases from the authorised reports, I ignore the compensatory nature of damages in torts’.”

I found this remark particularly disappointing as dealing with the difference between “notices to complete” and “notices to perform” in popular music has been taboo for far too long. Mainstream media criticism of artists brave enough to confront this issue has probably set back the movement any number of years. In fact, I can’t think of a single song or moving picture film since this review which has dealt with this important distinction.

The Full Text of this scandalous review can be found at:

http://altlj.org/images/assets/pdfs/Law_and_Culture_AltLJ_Issue_32_3_BullstrodeCD.pdf

I continue to reserve my rights but look forward to the publication of CLERP article in the next edition of Alternative Law Journal.