(continued)

You appear to have made the classic litigant's blunder of thinking with your anger instead of your brain. Whilst it is altogether understandable, it is unwise. Perhaps your lawyers should have advised you better, it's impossible for an outsider to tell, but I would be surprised if they didn't express strong doubts about your chances of obtaining a very useful result.

Fighting a government bureaucracy is not an easy thing to do and should only be done in the clearest of cases. As it stands your case against the DET seems based on a conclusion that previous good performances mean a later unimpressive performance must be wrong. While that may be cause for strong suspicion and frustration with the system, it is not an ironclad argument.
The money you have spent on legal fees, or may spend pursuing action against your lawyers would have been much better spent on a private school, private tutors, supporting yourself whilst home tutoring, or some other solution.

I would also be wary of always going straight into bat for your children every time they complain of bias. Whilst parents plainly should protect their children, children whose parents are overly interventionist do their children a great disservice. Whilst you may wish to teach your children that you love them and will do battle for them, often what they actually come to understand is that they can get away with a great deal at school because their teachers are always 'afraid' of having to deal with their irrate parents. Moreover, teachers, other parents and even your children's peers will resent you and your children for getting special treatment, not on their merits, but because you make such a scene. Even if you get concessions from the school/DET you and your family will lose a great deal in credibility and social standing.

Life isn't fair, and it is a mistake to mislead your children into believing it is.

Kalin1. Once again you have created the picture that you want in your head and think that I have dealt with this matter a certain way and somehow it must be my fault. Remember ‘almost impossible’ doesn’t mean actually impossible!

I only made formal allegations of bias and victimization AFTER we received the documents under FOI that showed alarming amounts of evidence of bias, manipulation and misconduct. I was so upset with what those documents showed that I had a couple of highly educated friend’s draft the first letter so that it wouldn’t be emotional, angry or bitter. This letter gave the DET the opportunity to call it a mistake and to fix it but they chose not to. Would you like me to show you a copy? That was in 2002 and they haven’t stopped targeting my children since. They chose to attack my family instead of dealing with the matter and they have been doing it year after year. They did this because, had they done the right thing, then it would have been admitting that they were guilty and they avoid that ‘at any cost’.

What do you call ‘at all costs’? Should I fear for my life because I speak out against injustices and I exercise my right to lodge complaints and expect the system to act fairly and in a proper manner? Should I go into hiding when I lodge an action in the Supreme Court?

Yes we spent some money trying to get justice and we were dealt with unfairly. This money was not enough to even get private schooling for 2 of my children for one year? You might think it a waste but trying to get protection and justice for our children is NEVER a waste.

You keep blaming me.....You keep wanting to protect them. The handling and dealing with complaints is set up to cover up and discredit the complainant. If they don't acknowledge a complaint then people think that the complainant must be wrong, have no evidence and or somehow causing the problems.

So unfair and unjust.

Jolanda,

I'd be very interested to know what you think triggered these people's dislike of you and your family?

For the sake of trying to be useful, I'll now respond to your original post. As I understand it the key facts are:

During various proceedings, DET undertook to produce documents which it then failed to produce.
The loss/destruction, although suspicious, was explained.
You were ultimately unsuccessful in your action.
Total costs were $25,000.

In the ADT, costs are generally not awarded but if so are generally only on a party/party basis (probably about 2/3 of actual costs).

If cost are awarded they generally awarded in favour of the successful party.

If a party has behaved in a misleading or deliberately obstructive way, then any costs incurred AS A RESULT of this behaviour may be awarded against that party regardless of the final result.

As you were unsuccessful, the bulk of the $25,000 costs would never have been awarded in your favour.

If extra costs were incurred because the DET undertook to provide information at a later date and then failed to do so, the only costs which MIGHT have been awarded in your favour would be those directly attributable to DET's not having advised you at the earlier date that the documents were unavailable (NOT THE COSTS ARISING OUT OF THE UNAVAILABILITY OF THE EVIDENCE ITSELF). At most you might have been awarded the party/party cost of one day's hearing, which I would guess at perhaps one or two thoudsand dollars.

If your lawyers had asked for such costs your opponent might have also been prompted to ask, in which case the tribunal member may have awarded your costs (say $2,000) and then awarding the DET's costs for the overall preceedings (say 2/3 of a similar $25,000) which would have left you about $13,000 further in the hole.

Any dispute with your lawyer's failure to ask for costs is unlikely to be over anything more than $2,000 or so.

I hope this at least is of some assistance.

Kalin1. I was not unsuccessful. The Tribunal ordered they provide certain documents. However there were some particular documents that the ADT agreed with the DET that it was an unreasonable diversion of resources for the Department to provide them. Problem was that these were the same documents that the DET had previously agreed to provide us with and didn’t produce. As well as not asking for costs our Legal Representative didn’t let the ADT know, despite me insisting that they do so, that the reason that we were asking for these documents again is because the DET didn’t honour previous agreements. The DET was presenting the matter like I kept asking for the same information again and again and our legal team just let them present it that way…

Yes the DET destroyed documents, documents that were specifically requested to be set aside in their original form. The Ombudsman then said that he would not investigate any of our allegations because we didn’t have the original answer sheets. This FOI application was necessary as the DET destroyed the original answer sheets and we had to get other documents so as to prove what was already obvious in the documents.

How can those that we are making allegations against of bias and manipulation of test scores and documents be able to just say that they thought that it wasn’t necessary to keep the original documents as they had their computer records? These scores were imported from an outside source! These documents were specifically requested to be set aside under FOI. So, tell me, does any excuse do?

The DET has been behaving in a illegal manner, they are not honouring agreements, misrepresenting and destroying documents so that they can cover up their bias and misconduct. The hearing went for 3 days - not 1. $6,000 would have meant that we could have taken the matter further when the documents awarded clearly supported that we were telling the truth.

Anyway I appreciate you focusing on the issues.