Page 1996 - Week 07 - Thursday, 17 June 1993
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
not a matter on which the ACT Government can make any decision off its own bat, but very serious questions of cost arise and it could be said that the tax deductibility of costs incurred in obtaining advice from lawyers contributes significantly to the high prices paid by ordinary citizens when they attend lawyers.
It was also the view of the committee that the Government should review its own policies with respect to the purchase of legal services. Certainly, the committee was told that the Commonwealth Government's policies with respect to the purchase of legal services were out of kilter with its policies with respect to the funding of legal aid; that is, the amount for which it expected to purchase services from lawyers was in many cases much greater than the amount for which it expected legal aid to be able to purchase the same lawyers' services. The committee had no submission concerning what policies affected the ACT Government's policy in this area but felt that that matter needed to be reviewed in order to ensure that some balance was struck. Bringing those two matters into kilter will obviously be a continuing process over many years, but we feel that it will significantly affect the overall cost of lawyers.
Madam Speaker, the second area which the committee would like to conduct a further inquiry into is the court system itself. Naturally, and necessarily perhaps, the court system is complex and inaccessible because of the complexity of the common law and, to some extent, the statute law which it administers. Of course, the buildings themselves in the ACT are also relatively inaccessible; that is, the physical location of courts is inaccessible merely because they are so scattered around many locations. The committee is aware of the Government's decision to proceed with the building of a new home for the Magistrates Court. We welcome the decision to proceed with the building of new court accommodation and hope that that will proceed quickly, but we realise that in the interim that in itself constitutes a barrier to accessibility to justice.
A number of other issues, however, can be dealt with in the interim. Madam Speaker, particular among those is the role of alternative dispute mechanisms in our system. The committee recommends that the Government give consideration to making it mandatory that alternative dispute resolution, such as mediation, be used before any action is heard in courts, particularly our superior court, the Supreme Court. The system of alternative dispute resolution is already in place in many respects in the ACT. It is a system which is being used, but it is not a system which is, I think it is fair to say, seriously considered by many lawyers. The system, in many ways, tends to view alternative dispute resolution as the poor cousin, the kind of forum you use when you are desperate or when you do not believe that proceeding directly to court is the best way of maximising your advantage. We need to de-emphasise that way of thinking. One way would be to emphasise the role which can be played by alternative dispute resolution by making it mandatory for that to occur.
Madam Speaker, I do not propose to use more than my allotted time, because there is much business to do here today; only to say that we have covered a great deal of ground in this inquiry, but we have acknowledged that we have only scratched the surface of that inquiry. Our inquiry, of course, has paralleled similar exercises in other jurisdictions, particularly the inquiry by the Senate Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs, which has been doing work of this kind since 1989. We do not wish to reproduce that work, since we
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .