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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 10 Hansard (3 September) . . Page.. 2931 ..

MS HORODNY (continuing):

As for the proposal for a mechanism whereby specified persons and bodies or a corporation may avoid the necessity of paying money into the tribunal, I think it is fair to say that there must be careful safeguards in place.

Finally, on the broader issue of fees and charges, I note that the Minister may determine fees and charges for proceedings in the tribunal, facilities and services provided by the registrar, or any other general purposes. These determinations will be disallowable. As the explanatory statement says, the Minister will be able to make exemptions or to defer liability for the payment of fees and charges. I wonder whether the Minister has considered providing automatic exemptions explicitly in the legislation. It is our understanding that the Administrative Appeals Tribunal has specific categories of exemption, and this might be worth considering for the Small Claims Tribunal as well.

MR HUMPHRIES (Attorney-General) (11.42), in reply: I thank members for their comments about this exposure draft of legislation. I am glad that there has been some debate about this, because the Government would like to bring forward the legislation reasonably soon. Having the views of members is useful in that regard because it means that we can consider both that and the community's input to the process to thoroughly reform the small claims process and put it onto a firm footing for the future.

The Small Claims Court has been a very worthwhile endeavour to widen the net of justice and provide access to people who previously were intimidated by the concept of going to a court. Steps to take this legislation forward, to change the name of the body to a tribunal rather than a court, and to provide for low-level means of resolving disputes through, for example, a referee, are all designed to take that process even further. I believe, Mr Speaker, that this will be very much the trend of the future - a desire to bring disputes down to a lower level of resolution, to ensure that there is a capacity to deal with disputes at an appropriately early stage in the course of an action. The use of mediation, I think, will be an increasingly important part of that process as well.

I want to make only a brief comment about two elements that were referred to in the speeches by Ms Follett and Ms Horodny. One is the debate about the name of the body. Ms Follett suggested that there should be a Consumer and Small Claims Tribunal rather than just a Small Claims Tribunal. The Government did consider at very great length whether to call it a Consumer and Small Claims Tribunal and rejected the idea, not so much because it would narrow the focus of the court or the tribunal, which incidentally is one of the problems it would suffer from, but rather because of the mischaracterisation that occurs. The court or the tribunal is not just about the interests of consumers; it is about a large number of people. You must remember that a consumer is one half of a relationship. A consumer is the receiver of goods or services. A retailer or provider of services is the other half of that equation. To pretend that this court or body is about only the interests of one of the two people in that relationship is quite misleading. Indeed, Mr Speaker, I think that the records of the court would probably show that at the present time it is as much the retailer or provider of services who uses the Small Claims Court to obtain redress.

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