Page 4944 - Week 16 - Tuesday, 26 November 1991
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Recently, when I made inquiries at the Estimates Committee hearing, I was given to understand that a report had been made to the Attorney. We have not heard of that, if it has been made and - - -
Mr Connolly: I will tell you about that now.
MR COLLAERY: Mr Connolly interjects and says that he will tell us about it. We would, of course, be pleased to hear about it. As we found out through the advice of the Clerk of this house, during the Estimates Committee hearing, the most competitive arrangement was, indeed, to continue using the Commonwealth Reporting Service. But I remain interested to see whether technological improvements that one sees at international convention centres are feasible, considering how many words are transcribed in this town on our budget and a variety of budgets every day.
There is also a concern in the Legal Aid Office as to whether the very large payments that are made on defences in indictable matters that require senior counsel and a level of difficult funding decisions do not derogate from community support funding, when that funding itself stems from Federal offences - federally investigated offences. Of course, the classic case I mention is the Kerry Ann Browning trial where, of course, the charges were largely related to diplomatic and federally isolated offences - charges pursued by the Commonwealth in our courts at the cost of our legal aid funds, and on the time of our courts.
I think all members should know that I am referring to a serious situation that we have yet to face up to with self-government; that is, that the Federal Government can lay its charges under its legislation and we do not get any extra allocation from the Commonwealth, in the 45-55 funding arrangement for the Legal Aid Commission, to take account of those long running, large-scale, indictable offence trials. The situation, then, is that, for that, for the police forensic work and for other matters, we need to have a greater specificity in funding declensions between the national policing components and the local components. One needs to find out the extent to which the vast cost of the Kerry Ann Browning trial could be broken down to determine the extent to which there was a payment by the national Government for the case that it pursued against that woman, and to determine whether it came off our community policing costs and so on.
Those are issues that are going to be pursued, if the Government sticks to the policing arrangement we made, which required further work on funding identification methodology before any major decisions were taken on policing in the Territory. We would be interested to hear from the Attorney whether he has received the much talked about June review and what the methodology is, because it has a direct impact back into legal aid funds. When you have sums of the order of $100,000 going out, or something like that, on an indictable trial that has been managed by
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