Until corporate owners and officers are held liable for all the harms they cause, we will remain disadvantaged by the law as it stands.

For example a number of Gunns executives and board members in Tasmania have been taken to court by work safety authorities and have used their corporation’s ‘personhood’ to avoid their responsibilities.

They pleaded not guilty on their own behalf but made the corporation plead guilty and apologised on Gunns behalf to the worker, and then on behalf of Gunns wrote a cheque to pay the fine.

Finally they had the corporation sue the work safety authority for their court costs because they themselves had been found not guilty and therefore not responsible for safety in anyway in the workplace.

TheMarch 2009 official figures show just how successful they have been, when the employers were lumbered with $1.9Billion in 2005-2006 compared with the workers share at $26.03 billion with the rest of society carrying the can back at a cool $29.49 billion.

My god, the death toll of 1790 killed directly and by work related diseases is higher than the road toll and more than all the troops we have overseas.

If we were losing 34 soldiers a week in Afghanistan we would be in deep mourning.
So why is this any different?
On top of that fully incapacitated or seriously wounded, (using the army analogy) of 39,510 or 780 a week would mean a catastrophic military blunder.
So why are we accepting such figures at the hands of our cowardly politicians and there corporate masters?

I’ll tell you why!!

Because no one pays attention, except for those bloody unions John Howard has taught us to despise.
As a result we have let ourselves become victims of the Corporations that Abraham Lincoln was so concerned about. Seems to me, he foretold the current events accurately, and what’s more the whole world ought to have another revolution, write a new Declaration of Independence and rip away the unbounded power of these corporate ‘persons’ have taken upon themselves.

sadly bh most the punters have no idea about personhood,and how murder has been legalised by the corperations creating for themselves the right of a person..[dispite the fact the corperate/person fiction definitivly not being a living-being]

i am at a loss how to explain to people..they too have a created person[their in caps birth registration[full name]..[that under that they too have the same rights these corperate entities have,[up to and including the ability to get away with murder]

it is not till people wake up to the fact this person-hood issue,is allowing unspeakable things to be done under civil law..,or the law of trade and contract[

yet criminal law requires a victim[surely in this case there was a victim,that gives the case its required criminal juristictional standing enough to get a criminal to be held to account

im not suprised gunns is doing this stuff[arnt they linked to enron?]

anyhow the mug punters like their ignorance..[THEY REALLY DONT CARE HOW MANY are MURDED at work,..they couldnt care less knowing about how under person-hood..the persona..,they are held to account for is only a legal vector that govt uses to police the people

[where as policing people is an unconstituted/power..designed purely to revenue raise by creating person/acountability via the persona fiction..[an illegal act[reserved legally only to the corperate fiction,the'corp person]..that somehow has cleverly subverted into faciltating the farcicle oppressions on living beings

your post highlight's the problem,..but the great minds here dont[cant]concieve the whole person hood scam,..created by the oh so clever lawyers..[actually making these vile laws,thus in time will be beaten by the system..that supposedly was created to protect them

talk about ignorants..taking the mark of the beast..[that allows their..'persona'[person]to trade..,buy and sell and be sold out by traitors,..making us all sub-servant to govt act..[talk about the fox ruling the roost]...lol

forgive them lord..they know not what is being done to them

nor it seems even try to comprehend the vile done by the hoods creating the person

but they seem willing to die for the lie
[at 3 times the rate of the road-toll...lol]

BH, if we had any lawyers in the country, the Judges and Magistrates of Australia would stop judging, and let juries do it all. They make Judges and Magistrates out of lawyers, but Judges and Magistrates don’t deliver justice, they deliver law. However they are all schizophrenic and suffer from bipolar disorder, because the Parliament of the Commonwealth made all people accountable under the Criminal Code Act 1995 ( Cth) .

Anyone who aids abets counsels and procures, another person, and that includes a corporation, to offend the Criminal Code Act 1995 ( Cth) is caught since the 20th October 2001, by S 11.2 Complicity and common purpose : is taken to have committed that offence and is punishable accordingly.

That catches all their lawyers, all the directors of a corporation and the Judges and Magistrates who gave them dispensations from obedience to the law. Only a jury trial can grant a dispensation from obedience to Statute Law, and that is a uniquely Protestant Christian concept, not adopted by Roman Catholic regimes. The Pope says he and his priests can forgive sins, but a Protestant Christian believes only Jesus Christ when present in 12 disciples as a jury of your peers is able to remit a sin.

This has been part of English law since 1384 or thereabouts. Get a copy of the Criminal Code Act 1995 ( Cth) or download a copy from Comlaw, or Scaleplus after a Google search, and you will see that I am right. You have every right to be angry, and God loves an angry man. It is through anger that the law is enforced. Protest to Senator Bartlett. He is on the Constitutional committee of the Senate and is from Tassie

I absolutely agree with you.

I know that Australia had/has?? the worst Industrial accident record in the developed world. Not much has changed.

The Government/s have done nothing to change this, and the public is apathetic;-until it happens to someone close to them.

This:

'They pleaded not guilty on their own behalf but made the corporation plead guilty and apologised on Gunns behalf to the worker, and then on behalf of Gunns wrote a cheque to pay the fine.

Finally they had the corporation sue the work safety authority for their court costs because they themselves had been found not guilty and therefore not responsible for safety in anyway in the workplace.'(Quote: bucket head).

..is bloody scandalous!

The greater scandal is of course, that they CAN do this.

I hope you get more posts on this subject....

It's interesting how the collective mind works.
More people are killed by cars (and donkeys) every year than by sharks yet we fear sharks but not cars.

Likewise, industrial accidents rate just a passing mention in the media and typically only when there's some video to go with the report.

Of course there's usually some form of compensation, but for some reason, governments prefer to park an ambulance at the bottom of a cliff than to put a fence on top of it.

The real problem stems from the takeover of the law by lawyers, and the lack of a Federal Court, that constitutes itself as a court. When a Court has a Judge, it is not a court within the meaning of the common law or Constitution. A court is what the Parliament of the Commonwealth is when it convenes, but it is a legislative court, not a court of law. It follows from that that a major disinformation campaign has been carried out by the lawyer members of Parliament to convince you that they can delegate judicial power to a Court.

All readers of OLO should take the time to write to the Prime Minister, who probably monitors this website anyway, because he has contributed to it twice, as far as I know, the first time in December 2004, when he pleaded for the Labor party to be trusted for its Christian roots, and on another occasion. The readers who think that workers should get a fair go, and insurance companies should be most concerned about workplace accidents, should ask KR and his government to repeal S 39 Federal Court of Australia Act 1976 and Order 46 Rule 7A Federal Court Rules. If they do that then it is a jury in a Ch III court, that decides the damages to be paid as compensation to a widow and kids deprived of their working dad. This is the major difference between Australia and the United States of America. In America it is as of right to file a proceeding in a court, here it is up to a registrar to decide who gets to court, and a Judge deciding without a trial, can exclude you, and on many occasions they do.

We are governed at the whim of an insurance industry. KR has an online complaint form, here.
http://www.pm.gov.au/contact/index.cfm Ask him to repeal those two pieces of legislation, and the people of Australia will see a remarkable improvement in workplace health and safety, as a federal court with a jury awards severe damages for abuse of workers rights under the Constitution