Having worked across corporate boardrooms and remote communities, Hear Me Out Project Lead, Kert Stavorn has seen how differently people can experience the legal system. Here, he reflects on access to justice, his own experience and the power of Hear Me Out.
I've spent more than 20 years working in and around the law across Australia and Southeast Asia, in corporate boardrooms of Fortune 500 companies and in remote communities where the idea of 'seeking a lawyer’ seems like an abstract concept.
This contrast has always struck me. It’s hard not to think about how a lack of access to justice is the source of much inequality. It is the realisation that even though we have a legal system, not everyone gets to have a voice that is listened to.
I do need to acknowledge the privilege I have been afforded and consider myself incredibly blessed. I am also an immigrant, a person of colour and a person of indigenous heritage. Across all three, I learned that the law does not treat everyone the same.
I can very easily empathise with the people I have met in marginalised communities, because I am acutely aware that I also come from a marginalised community. My own lived experience, and the narrative about my worth that I was fed growing up, often makes me question whether certain rights are only really afforded to a certain segment of society. I can only imagine how much more challenging this would be to those experiencing intersectional barriers.
If a person doesn't have the money for a lawyer, the language to describe what happened to them or the confidence to walk into a system that wasn't built with them in mind, then justice becomes abstract all over again. It exists, but just not for them.
This is why I'm proud to be leading Hear Me Out (HMO) at the National Justice Project. HMO is built for the person who might otherwise never get past that first, hardest step.
It's a free, plain-language platform where someone can describe what's happened to them, understand what their rights are, and through its built-in complaint writer, put together a properly drafted complaint without needing a lawyer first. It's grounded in factsheets built by lawyers so the guidance is accurate and specific. Right now it covers NSW and Victoria, with WA coming soon.
Amartya Sen, in The Idea of Justice, wrote something that has stayed with me for a while.
“What moves us, reasonably enough, is not the realisation that the world falls short of being completely just, which few of us expect, but that there are clearly remediable injustices around us which we want to eliminate.”
That's what HMO is, in practice: a tool built around remediable injustice. It doesn't promise a perfectly just system. It removes a specific, fixable barrier.
It is for people who look a lot like the person I used to be, standing outside a system that assumed I already belonged.
If you work in access to justice, know someone who needs a starting point, or simply want to see what a plain-language first step into the justice system looks like, I'd love for you to take a look at Hear Me Out and tell me what you think.