Page 4500 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 14 October 2009
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worthy of the support of the Assembly. I commend once again Mrs Dunne for her outstanding work in bringing it forward.
MRS DUNNE (Ginninderra) (5.28), in reply: It is a matter of considerable disappointment that we have come to the eleventh hour on this very lengthy discussion and we have seen an outrageous backflip from the Greens, which I will touch on a little later. It is a very disappointing thing to hear the sophistry from the Attorney-General on this subject.
Really what it boils down to is that the attorney wants to put forward a proposal where, by his own admission, just about everybody who is anybody in this town gets consulted on who becomes the next Chief Magistrate or the next magistrate or the next member of the Supreme Court, except the ACT Legislative Assembly. The attorney described a situation where there would be a selection panel who would make recommendations to him. That selection panel would consist of former judicial officers of the ACT, existing judicial officers from elsewhere and a representative of his department, then the minister would take that short list to the Bar Association, the Chief Magistrate, the Chief Justice, the Law Society—there is quite an extensive list of people.
That is an improvement on the system that we had for the last lot of judicial appointments, which were touched on by Mr Seselja, and certainly an improvement on when we appointed the last magistrate to the ACT Magistrates Court, when no-one actually knew that there was a vacancy until the magistrate was appointed; not even the Chief Magistrate was consulted on that matter.
That is not a reflection upon the merit of the people who were appointed to that position, and especially in the case of the most recent appointment to the Magistrates Court; I think it was an excellent appointment. It is not a reflection on the merits of those people; it is a reflection upon the secretive manner in which this government and previous governments have gone about the process.
We have all spoken here about opening our procedures up to the cleansing light of day, not doing things in dark corridors. We have had a lengthy discussion about this. Mr Seselja dwelt on the lengthy public discussion in relation to judicial appointments. The Canberra Liberals have gone through a long process of discussion on this matter. This bill was introduced in the previous Assembly. In this Assembly I circulated this bill as an exposure draft. I consulted with members of the law fraternity and I received support from the law fraternity for this. I consulted with members of the Assembly. Eventually, in August I introduced this as the bill we see here today. It was listed for debate in September and on, I think, the day before it was listed for debate in September the government came up with its amendments.
All through that process, since I have been dealing with this, we have had what I thought was bipartisan support from the Liberal Party and the Greens for this change. I have had a number of conversations with Mr Rattenbury on this subject, and my staff have had conversations with his staff on this matter, and there has been really no concern raised about this—until this morning. So imagine my surprise when Mr Rattenbury came to my office this morning and said, “We really can’t do anything. We can’t support this because we are now concerned about this becoming a US
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