Given his long-public views on the matter, it was no surprise to see Parliament’s Joint Committee on Corporations and Financial Services invite The Australian’s legal columnist Chris Merritt (now of the Rule of Law Institute) to air his assured support for its proposed class action reforms.

Alas, his contributions were (also predictably) insufficient to impress the Labor members of said committee. Labor MPs Steve Georganas, Julian Hill, Deborah O’Neill and Louise Pratt devoted a whole section of their dissenting report to what they dubbed “the mysterious Rule of Law Institute”, on whose evidence they advocated “no reliance whatsoever”.