Who are the Real 'Heroes' and 'Villains': The Print Media's Role in Constructing the 'Public Liability Crisis' as a 'Moral Prank'

The recent process of tort reform in Australia has been undertaken in an atmosphere of crisis and has arguably thus far been reactive, ad hoc and ineffectual. In particular, there has been massive press attention directed towards public liability claims and their outcomes. The print media has discursively constructed the issue of public liability claims and their outcomes as a 'liability crisis', connecting the crisis to escalating and unsustainable insurance premiums that are having major effects on 'the Australian way of life'. This coverage implies that increasingly trivial matters are being litigated, and therefore signals self - interested lawyering and judicial remoteness from public opinion that must be corrected. Further, it is implied that there has been a wider shift away from balanced notions of personal responsibility in regard to risk-taking behaviours that must also be corrected; the 'public liability crisis' is constructed as a 'moral crisis'. Detailed examination of the discursive construction of the players in the so - called 'public liability crisis' reveals that litigants, lawyers and judges are constructed as a deviant population; references are made to 'lotto litigants', 'judges playing Santa Claus' and the 'greedy lawyers'. The heroes are the Federal and State governments, who are cracking down on this 'epidemic'. It is such storytelling or narratives within print media discourses about the 'public liability crisis' that are considered in this paper. Cohen's 'moral panic' criteria is applied in order to frame this analysis theoretically.