Page 1486 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 17 April 1991
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and place of the Children's Court and the Family Court, and their interaction with roles that come out of the Office of Community Advocate, particularly the guardianship role that we are going to introduce shortly.
I thank the members of the community - all of those groups and others - for their comments. I want to assure those who have expressed fears that there might be some detuning of our finely developed administrative law functions in the Territory that that will not occur. The ramifications for administrative law, I think, were made out by a number of commentators, including Mr Connolly. I do not think there is any dispute about the essential concern we must have to preserve the advances that have been made in that jurisdiction, and to ensure that we do not formalise and lawyerise and thereby undo the reforms of the 1970s and onwards in administrative law.
In essence, the Government is not faced with widely differing views in the responses. It is faced with some different solutions offered for commonly perceived problems. Clearly, what we have to deliver is accessible, swift justice. That requires not only a court structure that works but also a court fabric and, as members know, the Commonwealth has not yet shown any sign of honouring the clearly understood agreement with the judges of our Supreme Court and the magistracy that it would provide a proper court precinct for the court judicial community in the Territory. The Commonwealth has not done that and we are left with the hotchpotch that my colleague Mr Humphries referred to. That is a matter on which I trust we will get bipartisan support when we come to deal with the issues of the proposed court precinct, the Federal funding contributions to that and Federal involvement with the Federal Court.
The relevance of the next issue that I wish to raise was, I thought, borne out in question time today in my response to a question regarding someone's stay in the Belconnen Remand Centre. Stays in the BRC seem to be exceeding 200 days - on my swift analysis - and can even go close to 300 days. Any court process is dependent largely on the effective workings of those who litigate in it. When parties to criminal proceedings find themselves not to trial after close to a year whilst a person remains in custody - and, as our law stands, innocent - we have serious questions arising that we need to address in the overall context of expediting proceedings.
It is common for governments to be attacked for those problems. This is a government that is attacking the issue holistically and will continue to do that. I cannot, in the time available to me, tell you all of the fronts that we are working on at the moment to deal with jurisprudential problems, sentencing problems, and other issues in the Territory. They have to be approached without offending all of those influential groups involved, and while maintaining public confidence in the judicial
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