Page 3086 - Week 11 - Tuesday, 10 September 1991
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MR COLLAERY (8.02): Mr Speaker, I rise as, if I recall it, No. 105 on the ACT roll. I think they are into the thousands now. That is where you earn grey hairs. This is a tidying up provision and, on reflection, and given the circumstances of the last somewhat well attended admission ceremony recently, perhaps we should have thought twice before we agreed to discharge this Bill, it having been introduced by the Alliance Government earlier in the year, before the Government fell. The Bill was introduced, in fact, on 2 May 1991. It was discharged by this house on 21 June 1991. I think that the act of the Assembly in discharging it has put added pressure on the Supreme Court to go ahead with the next scheduled admission ceremony on 4 October this year.
By way of background, the process by which large numbers of practitioners, mainly, in my experience, from Malaysia, Hong Kong and Singapore, were having themselves enrolled here was largely social, because we saw very few of them again after the day of admission, as the Chief Justice so aptly observed at one of the ceremonies I attended last year. They were paying a fee, one would imagine, indirectly or directly, for their air flight here, for any holiday they had on the side and for assistance from at least one of the large firms in this town in being admitted. So, it did have a sort of business aspect to it which, of course, is going to drop away. The fact of the matter was that, with four admission ceremonies a day, this process was occupying at least a half-day of the three judges' time - a half-day that this Territory sorely needs elsewhere.
The Bill otherwise simplifies, rectifies and improves a whole range of procedures which will make the administration of the Supreme Court easier, and the chance has been taken to make some other tidying up amendments. Although this seems to be a mere procedural amendment, the fact is that quite an amount of work has gone into bringing forward this amendment in correspondence with the legal profession, particularly the Law Society of the ACT, the Bar and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Mr Justice Jeffrey Miles, who was at all times extremely helpful, if not a little keen - "impatient" could even be the word - to see this amendment brought forward.
One word of caution to the Attorney: I note that the Bill has the Macklin procedure for commencement; that is, the procedure that the Democrats have now insisted upon, namely, that, if Bills are not brought in by the Government, they otherwise commence, as in this case, six months afterwards. I point out to the Attorney that the next admission day is on 4 October 1991. I checked with the court late today, and already eight applications have been filed from practitioners who fit the description of the new excluded classes. Nine more may well be filed today or tomorrow.
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