Spring Newsletter
We are delighted to publish the April 2012 Spring Bulletin giving you the latest news and update on MATA and courses and events being run. Click on the link below to read the new MATA newsletter – and see What MATAs. Read MoreThe non-rise of non-lawyer Mediators
This paper is the substance of the talk at the CMC Debate held on the 18th January 2012 titled,
“Non-lawyers make the best Mediators”
It is ironic that, for a party-focussed process where legal arguments fall quickly away and settlement occurs through commercial negotiation, lawyer-Mediators get most of the work. It should be common sense to most people that a mediator with a business background (who is used to the everyday pressures of running a business; to whom commercial negotiation is the stuff of life; who understands the importance of cash flow and who recognises the importance of spending time on wealth-creation and relationship-building rather than on paper-searches, witness statements and giving evidence in court) – that business-grounded person is of much greater value to the mediation process that someone who understands and practices the law.
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Joanna Kalowski Cross-Culturalism
JOANNA KALOWSKI is a mediator, facilitator and judicial educator, and is director of Joanna Kalowski and Associates, a management consultancy specialising in dispute resolution, cross-cultural communication and organisational development. She has worked for over twenty years in Australia and New Zealand, as well as in Singapore, Thailand, Hong Kong and India. Over the last seven years, Joanna has also run workshops in Italy, Germany, England, Denmark, Spain, Switzerland and France, including a three-day summer school for the Centre de Mediation de Paris (CMAP) in 2005, conducted in French on Majorca.
Joanna has mediated over 300 cases: indigenous land claims, environmental matters, community involvement in public infrastructure projects, commercial, industrial and academic disputes.
Between 1984 and 1988, Joanna was Director of Community Relations at the NSW Anti-Discrimination Board, and from 1988 to 1996, a member of the Federal Administrative Appeals Tribunal. She joined the National Native Title Tribunal for a three year appointment in 1996. In 2001 she was Chairman of LEADR, Australia’s largest non-profit dispute resolution organisation, and was their Visiting Fellow in 2006-7. For eleven years, she was co-presenter of LEADR’s Australian and overseas training program. Joanna has held a range of other board and advisory council memberships, including the Public Interest Advocacy Centre where she served a decade on the Board, and the advisory council of the Indigenous Law Centre of the University of New South Wales. An adult educator by background, Jo has also served on the Ethics Review Committee (Human Subjects) of Macquarie University, the National Population Council advising the Minister for Immigration, and the NSW Board of Adult Education. She was a director of Sydney Dance Company for three years and foundation Chair of the first Australian Foodbank from 1992 to 1995. Over the past five years, Joanna has been active as a judicial educator, working with courts and Tribunals across Australia in areas such as managing tension in the courtroom, communicating with unrepresented litigants and cross-cultural communication. She also assisted judges of the Family Court of Australia for three years during the introduction of the less adversarial trial process in disputes over children. Joanna speaks fluent French, and also speaks German and Italian. In 2002, she was appointed to the Geneva-based World Intellectual Property Organisation’s Panel of Neutrals, and in 2003 to the Centre de Mediation et d’Arbitrage in Paris, where she lives and works for part of each year. In 2008, she accepted appointment to the International Mediator Institute (IMI), and serves on its independent standards commission and the reference group setting standards in intercultural mediation. This year, Joanna was appointed Diversity Advocate to the ANZ Bank.
Cross-cultural imperative
Australia in context: the cross-cultural imperative
In its recent political past, events in Australia have served to remind us of the dangers inherent in cultural “encapsulation”, to borrow a phrase from Wrenn (1985), a state of mind which prevents people from becoming sensitive to cultural variations among individuals and from accepting the legitimacy of other world views. Wrenn’s description of encapsulation applies with terrifying accuracy to the now infamous former member for Oxley, Pauline Hanson:
“Such a person holds unreasoned assumptions which are accepted without proof and protected without regard to rationality, and may favour professional roles which further contribute to and preserve the encapsulation… Without the possibility of evaluating other viewpoints, the culturally encapsulated person bears no responsibility to accommodate or interpret the behaviour of others except through self-reference criteria.”
