Page 3316 - Week 12 - Tuesday, 18 September 1990
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only people who win out of a court case are the lawyers. Nobody else wins. They win extremely well. As I said, we had a case in the Equity Court and my partner and I won it, and it cost us $55,000. If you tell me that is winning, Mr Speaker, I will tell you I would not want to put my money on that sort of a horse.
MR KAINE (Chief Minister) (3.58): I am a bit reluctant to engage in debate on this matter of public importance. If you look at the visitors gallery, look specifically at the press gallery and look at the benches of the Opposition at the moment you would have to wonder just how important this matter is. I will come back to that later. But Mr Connolly thinks it is important, so I suppose we have to engage in this debate.
I would have to say that I am completely confused sometimes by Mrs Grassby's approach to this question of debate. First of all she talked about abolishing magistrates. I do not see anything in the report that talks about abolishing magistrates. I do not know whether Mrs Grassby did not understand what she read, or whether it is another case of deliberate misrepresentation by the Labor Party on what the report proposes. There is certainly no statement there, that I am aware of, that says we are going to abolish anything.
Then she went on and talked about the cast of thousands with the little people paying. Well, that is what the change is about - to simplify the processes so that people understand it, and to keep the hearings down to the lowest possible level in the courts, where there is as little argy-bargy as is necessary, and in a fairly informal context, so the people do not feel threatened by the system and do understand what is going on. That is exactly what the restructuring proposals have to do with. So I am not quite clear on what Mrs Grassby was attempting to do.
But I was impressed with her proposition that we have a system and we should not change it. I presume that that attitude is also the case in connection with schools, hospitals, community services and any other service. In other words, it is the arch-conservatism of the Labor Party really coming to the fore, that we must not change anything, not even for the better.
Mr Speaker, what are the proposals that have been considered by the Government really about. There are two elements. One element is changes to the legal system, and the other element is changes to the structure in which the legal system works. Now, to suggest that we should refer that latter element, the structural changes within which the legal system works, to the Community Law Reform Committee would, in my view, be totally inappropriate.
Setting aside the legal system itself for the moment, what we are trying to do is to get the arrangements right; to get the administrative processes right; to get the legal
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