Page 4418 - Week 14 - Wednesday, 8 December 1993
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Because we were trying to speed up proceedings the other day I tabled in this place the Legal Practitioners (Amendment) Bill and my remarks on it. Those remarks made it very clear that the Government is looking at a further stage of reform of the legal profession. One aspect of that next stage is the development of a professional discipline panel, made up of members of the community and lawyers, to streamline legal disciplinary matters. I do not think it would be fair on the profession for us to jump the gun on that and do that by amendment to this Bill, but the Government does telegraph that that is its intention. For that reason we would not want to weaken the provisions of this Bill, which we see as some form of compromise between the Law Society's favoured option and the Government's favoured option. The Government's favoured option, I am happy to indicate at the outset, is to say that a single judge will deal with the whole process; that is, a disciplinary matter involving a solicitor could be dealt with by a single judge who could find facts and could impose penalty.
Given that a member of the public can be dealt with by a judge alone - indeed, a penalty will be imposed by a judge alone, up to and including penalties for murder - I see it as hard to rationalise why a legal practitioner, when it comes time to impose a penalty for breach of professional ethics, needs to be dealt with by three judges. However, we were prepared to accept, as a compromise with the Law Society, a package that removes the current position where three judges have to find facts and impose penalty. The fact finding can be a quite long process; it can involve, say, a week of hearings. It is, in effect, a contested civil case. That ties up three judges. We would need only a few of those matters a year to have a significant impact on the court's resources.
We have been fortunate in the ACT. Perhaps I should not say that we have been fortunate; perhaps I should give some credit to the profession. The ACT profession can hold up its head well in comparison with the profession in other States in that there have been very few instances of ACT solicitors involving themselves in unprofessional conduct in the sense that we have not had cases of defaults on trust accounts and defrauding of clients' moneys. Such cases have been fairly widely publicised in some other States. So the court, fortunately, has not regularly been called upon to involve itself in disciplinary matters, but it would not take very many to have a very substantial impact on court resources.
The Government takes the view that the position in this Bill is a compromise. The Law Society's favoured position is three judges to inquire into facts and three judges to find the guilt and impose the penalty. Our view is that a single judge can find the facts and that then goes to a panel of three judges. The fact finding is the long process. The three judges then probably would sit for only a day to look at those found facts. That is a satisfactory position which is on course to the Government's eventual favoured position where the legal profession would be dealt with as the medical professions are - by a professional disciplinary body made up not of judges, with all the costs, staff and infrastructure involved in judges sitting, but a panel of professionals and members of the public. They would deal with this just as any other profession is dealt with.
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