Page 1482 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 17 April 1991
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Labor governments in this town, there was no avenue or right of appeal against those sorts of decisions for the residents. They were done, literally, as the lights were turned out by the Federal Labor Government. I hope that the Curtis report, and the options raised within the Curtis report, will ensure that those sorts of incidents are not allowed to happen again.
MR HUMPHRIES (Minister for Health, Education and the Arts) (3.41): Mr Deputy Speaker, I welcome this report. I have long believed that the ACT needed to review and reconsider its court structures. As one who has worked in those courts, I understand both the strengths and the weaknesses of that structure, and I am very happy to see this opening salvo, as it were, in what I hope will be a very significant public debate.
I think the first thing that strikes one when reading this report is that for a very long time courts in the Australian Capital Territory have been at the very bottom of the Commonwealth's priority list. National needs quite clearly have prevailed over the ACT's needs for some time. That, of course, is a pattern which is evident not just in respect of courts. Obviously the situation in our hospital system and the state of the Royal Canberra Hospital North are very much evidence of that particular problem. Nonetheless, self-government has given us the opportunity of reviewing our assets and ensuring that they keep up with the needs of people in this Territory as well, of course, as stay in tune with our financial capabilities.
At the time of the release of this paper, Mr Collaery, the Attorney-General, described it as an historic document which was likely to put the ACT "at the forefront of court structure reform in Australia". The review was prepared by Lindsay Curtis of the Commonwealth Attorney-General's Department. I do believe that, as Mr Collaery indicated, the paper is historic. It is, of course, very much a matter of debate as to how far the States could take reforms of the kind mentioned in this paper, given that we have a particular opportunity in the ACT that stems from our size, and in particular the lack of large distances.
Obviously in the States it is important to provide court structures that permit access to people in a wide variety of places, and the problem in those other States has always been how one provides access to superior courts in such a way as not to deny people access to affordable justice, but also in such a way as not to spread the resources too thinly and have judges constantly on the road travelling between regional centres, sitting as superior courts. So there are limited opportunities for reform elsewhere in Australia based on our ACT possibilities; nonetheless, there is no reason for us not to explore the best model for us here.
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