Page 3587 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 24 November 2021
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Firstly, there is an allocation of $13.3 million to continue supporting the Drug and Alcohol Court for a further two years, including funding staff in the Justice and Community Safety Directorate, ACT Health, ACT Policing, Legal Aid and the Community Services Directorate.
The Drug and Alcohol Court deals with offending related to serious drug and alcohol use. It aims to rehabilitate high-risk and high-need offenders and to protect the community by providing health and justice interventions while holding people to account for their behaviour. This is a very positive initiative designed to give people intensive support through a detailed interaction with a particular judge and also with a range of support services. As it happens, yesterday I was speaking with Justice Refshauge, who leads this court. He was very positive about the impacts. Not every person makes it through this program—not everyone graduates—but those who are graduating from the program are very positive about the impact it is having on their lives and the opportunities that it is presenting to them. I am very pleased that this budget continues the funding for that innovative court system.
The second area is $6.8 million to enhance the ICT infrastructure of the ACT Civil and Administrative Tribunal, ACAT, including supplying specialised recording, transcription and audio-visual equipment to the hearing rooms at the tribunal’s new premises at Allara House.
The next area is the $3.8 million to support the establishment of a dedicated coroner function, including a coroner and associated staff. I am really pleased that we as a government have taken this very positive step to promote healing for families and to do more to prevent deaths. The government will also provide additional resourcing for a special magistrate to help clear the backlog of cases in the Magistrates Court. In these two commitments, we are providing resources which the courts need to deal with the standard business that goes on in the courts.
We are seeing increased demand on the Magistrates Court, but particularly there is this commitment to a dedicated coroner; this is something that we Greens took to the election; we were very clear that we saw it as a really important reform. For some time now, I have been talking to family groups about a range of reforms in the Coroner’s Court. This is the first of them that is needed, in my view. It is about having a specialised and dedicated resource that will both speed up the progress of matters through the coronial system and also develop an area of practice and an area of expertise that will see our coroners system become a much better one.
The current system, where each of the magistrates is the coroner on a cyclical basis, is very challenging. The magistrates need to take on the coronial responsibilities in addition to the work they already do as a busy magistrate. Whilst they do it with great conviction, the obvious strength in having a dedicated coroner who will think about building the practices of that area of the court will necessarily offer more consistency than having magistrates cycling through the process. It can only benefit this area of jurisprudence in the ACT.
The recruitment is now underway. The budget initiative begins immediately. We are now in the process of recruiting. Mindful of the separation of powers, I look forward
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