Automatically pass $event with ng-click?

Take a peek at the ng-click directive source:

...
compile: function($element, attr) {
  var fn = $parse(attr[directiveName]);
  return function(scope, element, attr) {
    element.on(lowercase(name), function(event) {
      scope.$apply(function() {
        fn(scope, {$event:event});
      });
    });
  };
}

It shows how the event object is being passed on to the ng-click expression, using $event as a name of the parameter. This is done by the $parse service, which doesn’t allow for the parameters to bleed into the target scope, which means the answer is no, you can’t access the $event object any other way but through the callback parameter.