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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 8 Hansard (21 August) . . Page.. 3008 ..
MR STANHOPE (continuing):
is final report, Lord Woolf continued:
... I explained that this too was an area where certain excesses needed to be restrained: in particular the cost, especially in smaller cases, and the temptation for parties and their legal advisers to deploy expert witnesses as a party weapon rather than as a source of objective assistance to the court. My recommendation that there should be greater use of a single expert has caused much controversy. In chapter 13 I examine the matter further, but still conclude that there is considerable scope, even within a procedure which will remain essentially adversarial in character, for greater use of a single expert. The development of protocols provides a potential voluntary route to achieving this in many instances. Here, as in some other respects, many of those who have acknowledged the need for change in principle hesitate before the practical implications of that recognition. I fully understand their unease. But this is the kind of choice which has to be made if practical improvements of any significance are to be achieved.
The civil justice reform evaluation issued by the UK Lord Chancellor's Department in August 2002 has evaluated the success of the Lord Woolf reforms, and the assessment of the reforms introduced as a result of Lord Woolf's report is summarised as:
The use of single joint experts appears to have worked well. It is likely that their use has contributed to a less adversarial culture and helped to achieve earlier settlements.
It's the government's opinion, Mr Speaker, that any attempt to water down this particular reform in this bill today will lead to a half-baked response, a return to the past that will allow the continuance of all the problems inherent in the practice of hiring guns to give evidence that supports your own case. Anybody that's ever been a party to or witness to a case in our courts where witnesses or experts play a major part knows it's essentially a fiction.
One party goes out, and if you've got a big wallet, buys in the most expensive expert that you can buy in. Your opponent, depending on the size of their wallet, goes out and buys the most expensive, biggest, best-known and well-known expert that they can buy in. Guess what? They always have a different opinion. Funny about that!
The claims are that this reform will kill off the adversarial system. I think it's interesting in essence that we find that the Greens and the Democrats are asking for us to bolster the adversarial system, keep that adversarial nature of our legal system going. The major driver of adversariality in courts is expert witnesses, and that's what you're arguing for. You want us to keep it going; keep the hired-guns-at-20-paces mentality that is the major inhibitor of early settlement, fewer opportunities for mediation and settling these sorts of things in a reasonable way.
The United Kingdom has had the benefit of expert witnesses, as proposed here. The most recent assessment of the reform has indicated the worth and value of the reform. It works. And we should take this opportunity to cure this same defect in our present regime of experts.
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