I'm a lawyer myself and I share your concern.

First, I agree with you that lawyers have a very particular way of looking at the world which is not representative of the rest of the population.

Secondly, I'd distinguish between a lawyer who has practiced (particularly someone who is a litigator), because they are likely to have had a lot of interactions with people from all walks of life, compared someone who has gone straight into politics.

My friends and I have been discussing political apparatchiks - people who have treated politics as a career. This includes some of the lawyers in parliament, but also the former staff members of pollies, union hacks etc. I think these people get disconnected from the way the rest of the world thinks because they haven't lived in the real world for a long, long time.

It could be far, far worse, if we had diplomats instead of lawyers.

Julia is a bad case, being a lawyer who has run in tandem with a diplomat, for a few years.

Lawyers tend to see problems as legal issues and therefore tend to see legislation/regulation as the solution. I'm not suggesting lawyer politicians are solely responsible for the spaghetti of laws that invade our daily lives. Bureaucrats tend to see regulation as the solution to so much as well. It's an irony that as we ordinary citizens become better educated and thereby better able to make reasoned decisions about a whole load of stuff, including our personal lives, the politician lawyers reduce our opportunity to do so by passing so many laws. If it's not a law, it'll be a regulation. If not that, a code of conduct. If not that, a protocol. And so on.

As a lawyer myself I accept and to some extent share the concern - it is, after all, far from unique. It may well not be a good thing for our parliaments to be dominated by any particular segment of society.
That said, is it necessarily a problem? Like the author points out - it has always been this way more or less. Generally speaking we seem no worse for it. Or is it perhaps suggested that if we had more tradespeople, miners and factory workers in our parliament we would be much better off than we are now?

Well I think one of our best Prime Ministers or is my favourite anyway, (though I wasn't around at the time) was Ben Chifley - an ex Train Driver, who apparently taught himself law. I myself have become so sick of blooming lawyers. But he was definitely a man of the people. He actually use to sit in a park and would listen and talk to people who had approached him. He lost his election for wanting to nationalise banks. What a good idea that would have been!

<< Lawyers have traditionally been the largest professional sub-group not only in the federal cabinet but also in the parliament…..a whopping 40 per cent of the whole legislature! >>

So then, why do we have a poor rule of law in this country??

Why are something like 50 000 visa overstayers allowed to continue breaching their visa conditions year after year, in an apparently permanent and politically condoned (or blind-eyed) breach of the law?

Why wasn’t onshore asylum seeking just clamped right down on as soon as there was any sign of our border-protection laws being breached?

Why aren’t speed limits policed at face value instead of a few kilometres over?

Why aren’t Queensland nude beaches denudified, given that they are technically illegal?

Why isn’t our national police force boosted so that they can properly administer the full gamut of the law, instead of being constantly stretched and unable to properly do the job?

In short, why haven’t we got a much better rule of law if we are run by lawyers??