Page 3306 - Week 12 - Tuesday, 18 September 1990
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because there has been no Government statement forthcoming on this very important Curtis report. In the absence of a ministerial statement to respond to, the Opposition feels it is incumbent upon it to raise this for community concern.
In April, the Canberra community learnt from the pages of the Canberra Times that the Alliance Government had what was described as a radical proposal for restructuring the court system. We learnt, from utterances of the Attorney-General there reported, that the model for the reform of the ACT courts would be the New Zealand unified system. In due course, in April, Mr Lindsay Curtis was commissioned to prepare a consultant's brief. The terms of reference to Mr Curtis were that he report on how a unified court system might work, but not on whether or not a unified court system was the best model for the ACT. This is an important point to make, because I am in no way being critical of Mr Curtis' report or suggesting that Mr Curtis is wrong in recommending a unified court structure. Mr Curtis had no say in that question. He was merely asked to report on how such a structure might operate. Of course, Mr Curtis is also a person in whom the community is entitled to have some confidence, having served successive governments very well in senior positions in the Attorney-General's Department.
Mr Speaker, the Curtis report makes, essentially, two lines of proposal for reform of the courts. The first is procedural reform and on that the recommendations of the Curtis report, I am pleased to say to Mr Collaery, will receive the warm support of the Opposition. Procedural reforms to simplify the process of litigation in the Magistrates Court and the Supreme Court are to be welcomed by the Opposition, by this Assembly generally, and I am quite confident they will be welcomed by the profession and the wider community. The proposals to simplify the transfer of matters between the Supreme Court and the Magistrates Court, again, are welcomed by the Opposition. They are in line with the general move to cross-vesting that has occurred throughout Australia in recent years, and can be enthusiastically supported by this Opposition because our basic principle in reform of the court structure is to achieve a more open and accessible system of justice. This type of procedural reform, we accept, will do just that. Perhaps it is overdue in the ACT, but it is a welcome reform and we will be supportive of the Government in its moves along this line.
The area of concern, however, is the apparent locking in of the Government position on the question of structural reform. I say "apparent locking in" because from the first public utterances on this issue, the first newspaper report of radical proposals to restructure the courts, we see a commitment to this unified court structure, this so-called New Zealand model. This is a model that we previously criticised, and it has been criticised by the profession and it has been criticised by the judiciary.
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