Page 3172 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 17 October 2006
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earth shattering to the average Joe out in the street, but an issue nonetheless—for some time. It will enable the ACT Supreme Court to be competitive with the commonwealth and other judicial situations. I suppose you could say that it is good to see the ACT government protecting conditions of some, albeit a tiny handful, of ACT government workers compared, perhaps, with new entrants to the ACT public service, who could only dream of something like this.
We are not going to propose any amendments. Basically, the legislation replaces section 37U of the Supreme Court Act 1933 with a new section 37U that deals with resident judges and ensures that their pay is equivalent to that of Federal Court judges. Section 37UA provides indemnity from the superannuation surcharge levy, while section 37UB deals with the salary of a former president of the Supreme Court. Basically, the bill clears up a number of anomalies that, I understand, have been around for a while.
DR FOSKEY (Molonglo) (5.06): There was once a cartoon showing two people fighting over a cow. One was pulling the cow by the tail and the other was pulling its horns. Underneath was a lawyer milking the cow. This joke illustrates the popular perception that legal professionals are greedy and dishonest. That perception has not been helped by incidents such as the large number of Sydney barristers who have been found not to have paid taxes for many years, nor is it helped by revelations that lawyers working for big tobacco and oil companies have deliberately misrepresented the harm caused by their products in terms of cancer rates and climate change.
It is sad that these examples cast the entire profession in a bad light because, to the best of my awareness, law is far ahead of any other profession in having an institutionalised system of pro bono work for needy litigants. Many members of the profession also stand up, sometimes at great personal expense, for human rights against incursions by parliamentary and executive arms of government. Of course, many barristers give up the lucrative appeal of private practice to take up judicial appointments, with their concomitant responsibilities, their commitments and their salary caps.
This bill elevates and protects judges’ remuneration so as to ensure that they are on par with their federal colleagues. Whilst some of these amendments appear to have been activated by an abundance of caution, I agree that this bill is a necessary and judicious safeguard. I wonder how many other ACT public service functions will be identified as being so critical that the functionaries require special treatment to ensure that they receive similar remuneration to their commonwealth counterparts as the post-budget leak continues.
We have recently witnessed some remarkable but quite reasonable criticisms from various ACT magistrates and judges being aired in the media regarding the lack of independence that the judiciary feels is being imposed upon it. They feel as though they are being treated as some kind of subsidiary division of the Department of Justice and Community Safety, and this is an untenable position for the judiciary to be put in. Their independence is too important to allow even the perception to develop that they are beholden to the executive arm of government for their day-to-day operations.
It is the Attorney-General’s role to defend the judiciary and I hope that he is not giving undue weight to the views of the DPP or the prognoses of Michael Costello or other
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