Page 493 - Week 02 - Tuesday, 10 February 2009
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When a conflict arises between a fair trial and freedom of speech, the former has prevailed because the compromise of a fair trial for a particular accused may cause them permanent harm …
One of the questions we have to ask today in considering whether we express serious concern about the actions of the Attorney is whether the Attorney has caused permanent harm to these men whose case is live before the court.
In the case of the New South Wales Attorney-General v Time Inc Magazine, Mr Justice Gleeson of the New South Wales Supreme Court, although acknowledging that there was a perfectly legitimate right to express views about a particular case, said that there is no right under the constitution or at common law to do so at the expense of the due administration of justice.
Mr Speaker, the Attorney-General is the person in this territory charged with maintaining the administration of justice, and all the commentary on this matter talks about the most paramount right of people and the most important thing that we can do, which is to ensure that the administration of justice is fair.
What we saw from the Attorney-General the other day was a failure of fairness. The ACT laws are replete with fine words about the right to a fair trial. The most obvious are the provisions of sections 21 and 22 of the Stanhope government’s Human Rights Act which read in part in section 21:
(1) Everyone has the right to have criminal charges, and rights and obligations recognised by law, decided by a competent, independent and impartial court or tribunal after a fair and public hearing.
Section 22 says:
(1) Everyone charged with a criminal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law.
Mr Corbell threw that out the other day because he went out and said he thought it was quite clear what the charge should be and what these people should be charged for and that it was not only his view; it was the view of Corrective Services, it was the view of the government.
He did not say it once; he said it three times. He had two opportunities. The second time he came down and made a public statement face-to-face with the camera. He did not recant those views; he repeated them, Mr Speaker. It seems to me that these rights which the ACT government says that it upholds are good for everyone except if you happen to be an inconvenient inmate of the BRC and Simon Corbell is the Attorney-General.
You know, Mr Speaker, that the Stanhope government is really good at high-sounding words, but its actions often fail to live up to the rhetoric. One of the occasions when their actions failed to live up to their rhetoric was on 3 February. On that day we saw a member of this Assembly trash all the laws and flout all the conventions.
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