Page 800 - Week 03 - Thursday, 25 March 1993
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It also is fairly obvious that the issues which are faced by that Senate committee are the purview, the responsibility, of the ACT and State governments. Government charges, with some exceptions, for the most part are ACT government charges or charges imposed by ACT courts acting under ACT legislation. Court rules and regulations which affect the way in which courts do their business are, since the middle of last year, now entirely, in the ACT's case, the responsibility of the ACT Government, with the exception of things like the Family Court and the Federal Court. Lawyers' fees again are matters regulated by enactments made by this Assembly rather than by other bodies. Legal aid is a matter under the control of the ACT rather than under the Federal Government. So, clearly, there was extensive overlap, and the committee decided that it should await the appearance of some work on the part of that Senate standing committee before attempting to cover the same ground.
A report is now available. In February - last month - the Senate standing committee produced a report entitled, "The Cost of Justice - Foundations for Reform". Although that report is not anything like as extensive an answer to the questions posed as one might like, it is in the nature of an interim report and therefore is the kind of issue that we need to be examining in our own context. There are some useful things arising from the Senate report. For the most part, the report is essentially a statement of the principles that one ought to be using to approach the problem of the cost of justice and the sorts of problems that are facing individuals in that situation.
It makes some recommendations about how these issues might be tackled, not necessarily directly but over a period. It recommends that there be a report annually by courts and tribunals on the cost of providing services to the community and accessibility to those services, so that the courts and tribunals themselves have some responsibility for determining how people are getting access to them and whether they are producing effective services to the community. There was also a recommendation that the Australian Bureau of Statistics collect statistical material which touches on the operation of the legal profession and the legal system in Australia. That will be very useful for an inquiry such as ours where, for example, we are required to examine the relative cost-effectiveness of lawyers as compared with other occupations in the community.
A third recommendation was that the Senate committee convene a legal forum regularly to air issues touching on this matter, and to allow groups - for example, the Law Society, the Bar Association and community groups assisting people in their circumstances - to air issues and to discuss questions of reform and the way progress is being made.
Mr Stevenson: I am listening, Gary.
MR HUMPHRIES: Thank you, Dennis. All those things are obviously important and relevant to the ACT inquiry. However, we have had to wait for the Senate inquiry to produce some work which would allow us to focus our efforts and not reproduce and duplicate. It is now very close to our reporting date and I am therefore moving, on behalf of the committee, that the reporting date be put back until the last sitting day of June. That will permit us to digest the work done by the Senate standing committee and to ensure that what we have done does not unnecessarily cut across the work of that other committee but builds on the work already done and produces an answer which is both achievable and relevant to the circumstances of the ACT. I commend the motion to the house.
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