Page 3318 - Week 12 - Tuesday, 18 September 1990
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The Community Law Reform Committee is quite competent to offer an opinion on these matters if it is so inclined. It does not need a referral from us in order to do that. It is a committee of experts who, I am quite sure, would not feel constrained in giving the Government the benefit of their views if they had the time and the inclination to look at the Curtis report and tell us about it.
In conclusion, Mr Speaker, I submit that Mr Connolly's MPI is no matter of public importance at all. I refer again to the media gallery. There is not a journalist in the house and there has not been one here during most of this debate. So clearly there is very little interest from journalists in this matter. There is no interest on the part of the Opposition. The Leader of the Opposition has not been here during the entire debate and at no time have there been more than three members of the Opposition sitting on the benches during this debate. I think that is a measure of how much a matter of public importance this is and I would suggest that in future we spend our hour either debating matters that are really matters of public importance or getting on with the important business of the Assembly.
MR WOOD (4.05): Mr Speaker, at least we all agree that the restructure of the court system in the ACT is a matter of high priority. The Chief Minister has just said that there is not much interest in it on the part of the journalists and seemed to suggest that this was the criterion we should follow in deciding how important things are. Yet my understanding is the Chief Minister spends a great deal of time avoiding journalists. It is interesting to note that he wants to give them a greater recognition at this stage.
Mr Speaker, the definitive work on courts has long been that of Charles Dickens, one of the greater reformers of history. I am sure the lawyers in the house will understand if I give a brief quote from Bleak House on what Charles Dickens thought about courts. After spending a page or two very well describing a thick fog in London Town he wrote this short paragraph:
Never can there come fog too thick, never can there come mud and mire too deep, to assort with the groping and floundering condition which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary sinners, holds, this day, in the sight of heaven and earth.
Now is that the case today still? I would not claim that the courts are in quite the state of disrepute that they were in in Dickens' day, but at the same time no-one in the ACT today would say that the courts are working as the ideal model or as well as they should. There is still too often the valid judgment that it is the law rather than justice that rules. Charles Dickens went on, in better style than I ever could, to talk about the ruthless search for precedents and the convoluted thinking that went on in the courts of that day. Is this not the case still today;
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