Page 4122 - Week 14 - Thursday, 25 October 1990
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MR MOORE (12.11): Mr Speaker, in some ways it surprises me that I am in a position to comment on this, and I do it very much from an outsider's perspective - that of somebody who is outside the legal system. But in recent times I have had some experience in dealing with the legal system and I think that it is important to make a few comments on this report.
I suppose the most significant thing that has come to me is the question of to what extent this report should be involved with courts and to what extent it should be involved with justice. It seems to me that, with the efforts that the courts and the legal profession make to deliver justice to the people, one thing that is most clear is that the lack of accessibility of ordinary people to the courts has left a huge gap in the delivery of justice. When I look at this particular report, that whole area seems to me to be missing. When I tried to work out why, I finally got to attachment A - the consultant's brief on the review of the courts.
It is not so much what the consultant had to say but the way in which he was constrained. I think that is a most significant aspect of this report, and it reflects the Government's and the Attorney-General's lack of willingness to go for broad consultation. It is not the first example of this lack of broad consultation we have seen from the Alliance Government. It is the same sort of consultation that we saw on the schools - the sort of consultation that says, "Okay, we are going to close schools; you decide which ones". In this case it is, "We are going to have a unified court system. Mr Curtis, tell us how to go about it but do not cover the whole area". So I looked at the Attorney-General's specific objectives in that attachment and saw:
that the most flexible and cost-effective use is made of available judicial and quasi-judicial resources -
and I thought, "Good", and I then saw:
to simplify litigation by avoiding undue jurisdictional overlap.
As for "to simplify litigation", I thought, "Wow! We are actually getting somewhere". But, as for "by avoiding undue jurisdictional overlap", I thought, "Sure, that is important, but there is a lot more to it than that". Then there was:
to enable a streamlining of court procedures with consequent reduction in the cost of litigation -
also a positive report but also narrow. The next was:
to achieve economies in court administration.
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