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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 01 Hansard (Tuesday, 10 February 2004) . . Page.. 79 ..

I was disappointed and somewhat amazed to hear that we still cannot get full information from the Supreme Court, a court that handles a miniscule percentage of matters compared with the Magistrates Court.

At 5.00 pm, in accordance with standing order 34, the debate was interrupted. The motion for the adjournment of the Assembly having been put and negatived, the debate was resumed.

MR STEFANIAK: For example, we had a very detailed breakdown for the Magistrates Court of how many matters were part heard, how many matters had been adjourned till the following year, how many convictions there had been and how many civil matters had been finalised, but it was still difficult to get that amount of information for the Supreme Court.

I note that improvements have been made, but I certainly hope that that situation will be rectified by the next time we look at the annual reports, because that issue was raised by the then Leader of the Opposition when he was shadow Attorney-General and it continues to be a problem. I certainly commend that to him.

When we dealt with the matters finalised by the Supreme Court in the criminal jurisdiction—I do not think we had full information in relation to the civil ones—we did find out that 97 matters had been finalised. Unfortunately, only 38 per cent of those defendants—37 of them—were actually sentenced to a term of imprisonment. It may even have been weekend detention or periodic detention. We could not get a break-up on that and I am still waiting for those figures.

It was disturbing that the most serious offence in the ACT was shown as “other”, of which eight people were convicted and five people were sentenced to imprisonment, home detention or periodic detention, but we still do not know what “other” actually means. That just indicates the statistical problems with data coming from that court. I certainly hope that we will not have those problems next year, but that situation has been ongoing.

We made a recommendation in relation to the need for secure mental health facilities. There have been some problems there, as expressed by the Director of Public Prosecutions in his report. I will be brief in referring to that report. I raised a disturbing issue in relation to page 1 of the report. I note that the attorney indicated that he and the director would talk about it and they might look at the need for some legislation. I certainly hope that they will.

The issue related to a complaint some years ago by former Chief Justice Geoffrey Miles that defendants who breached recognisance were not prosecuted for the breaches and brought back to court—for example, someone who was sentenced to, say, two years imprisonment and whose sentence was suspended on entering into a bond to be of good behaviour for 12 months and who went out and committed another offence and was not brought back for a breach of the recognisance. The Director of Public Prosecutions said in his report:

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