Bryan Pape and the law

Bryan Pape is not going to be a very popular man if he gets his way. He is challenging, in High Court of Australia, the legality of the $900 payment to 8.7 million Australians, as part of the Governments economic stimulus package.
If he wins then the payments will be delayed until the Government works out the “correct” way to make the payments.

One wonders about Mr Pape’s motives. He is obviously a stickler for the law – he is after all a law lecturer at the University of New England at Armidale in NSW. But has he become so bound up with his “law” that he misses the whole point of “law”? He contends that the payments are unconstitutional. So? He should look instead at what the payments are supposed to do – to help stimulate a sick economy, by helping to maintain employment and helping cash flows across the country. Get that done, then, if he so desires and feels that deeply about it, challenge the way it was done. But don’t stop the package, don’t stop the payments rolling through the economy because it might have come out of the wrong “bucket”.

To my, admittedly non-legal, way of looking at things is that the “Law”, at its core, provides guide lines for the orderly conduct of human affairs. Laws are not perfect which is why they are occasionally “bent” to facilitate an ethically good motive; something that will benefit society. What I am talking about, in this instance, is not criminal in intent, but for the good of the population or a targeted section of the population.

In this case what good would it be to “uphold” whatever law he feels has been broken only to have the economy collapse (admittedly an extreme and possibly unlikely situation)?

To me, in this instance, the Government is doing the correct thing – consciously or unconsciously - by abiding to the ethical ‘golden rule’ of doing unto others as you would have them do unto you. Everything is secondary to that rule, including the law as codified by human beings.

As I say, if his challenge succeeds, Bryan Pape will not be a popular man. He may be ‘right’ in law, but then he will have to live with the human consequences.