Page 1319 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 5 April 2011
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These principles really do form a cornerstone of the system of justice as we know it. Currently, the commonwealth act operates within the ACT and sets these principles. What this has meant in effect is that federal parliament has debated and passed evidence law and applied it in the ACT courts. This is not what happens in other Australian jurisdictions. Elsewhere, our counterparts in the states have their own evidence law, and today we will join them.
As it stands, the bill today basically cuts and pastes the existing commonwealth act over into the ACT statute book. There will be no substantive change made to the evidence law that applies as of today compared to after our own act comes into effect. What does change with this bill is that the ACT will gain the ability to examine its own evidence law and improve it in the future where opportunity is identified. This has not been open to us in the past.
To illustrate this point, the attorney has announced his plans to release two further evidence amendment bills later this year. These will propose further improvements to the base of evidence law that comes across today from the commonwealth. I understand that these bills are being discussed with key stakeholders as we speak, in the lead-up to them being presented in the Assembly. I think it is valuable that there is a discussion going on before the bills are tabled. It is not always the case, but I think that this will hopefully mean that the bills that do come before us will be ones that already have a large amount of work done on them and hopefully have a significant level of consensus built around them.
The bill is a rather large one; it runs to nearly 180 pages. Thankfully, that is not 180 pages of brand new legislation proposed for the ACT. As I have said, instead, the bill essentially picks up the existing commonwealth law that applies in the ACT and brings it across and enacts it as a stand-alone ACT law.
The Greens have approached this legislative task slightly differently to perhaps how we normally do. We have not approached the bill as a new legislative proposal, but rather as an adoption of current law and process. Coming at it from this perspective, the key question we have asked ourselves is: where are the changes being made from the existing legislation that applies in the ACT?
Departmental advice provided to my office, and I think just tabled by Mrs Dunne, has highlighted those places in the bill which diverge from the act that currently applies. We have followed each of these through to ensure they are minor drafting changes and not changes of a substantive nature that would fundamentally change the evidence law of the ACT. The majority of them are indeed minor drafting updates to make the act fit with ACT drafting practice. One interesting area that warrants mention where we will not be adopting the provisions of the commonwealth act is the treatment of evidence given by a sexual assault victim to their counsellor.
This is a very important and sensitive issue because there are competing interests at stake here. On the one hand, the victim has an interest in privacy and not having their very personal details discussed, analysed and potentially cross-examined in open court.
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