Page 1320 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 5 April 2011
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On the other hand, the defendant and justice more generally have an interest in a fair trial and being able to test evidence.
The ACT’s Miscellaneous Evidence Act already treats this issue in a responsible and mature way. There are detailed provisions that set out the factors the court must consider before making a decision on the admissibility of information disclosed to a sexual counsellor. The commonwealth provisions on this issue are less detailed and less robust. It is appropriate that the ACT retain the laws that we currently have on this discrete issue and I think the bill, as proposed today, is a good way of dealing with it.
In conclusion, the bill is an important one because it sets out for the first time the key principles of evidence law in an ACT law. The attorney has foreshadowed that there will be more evidence bills to come during this year and the department is in the process of asking for stakeholder comment on them. Once the bills are presented, I will look forward to the Assembly then analysing them and playing our part in the improvement of the evidence law.
I should just briefly comment on Mrs Dunne’s desire to adjourn the debate. I was not aware that she was going to bring that forward today. I think that, in essence, the Greens certainly feel we have had time to get across the issues in this debate, particularly given that the majority of the bill is already operational in the ACT. I think that when it comes to the significant changes to our evidence law, they are set to come in evidence bills 2 and 3, as they might be known, and in those cases we will be dealing with evidence law that is rather less well settled. I think that will be included in things such as whistleblower and journalist protection.
They will be areas that we need to look at in some further detail but I am confident that the bill we are passing today does focus on settled law, that we are not doing anything here that requires further consideration and that we can pass this bill today, as the first step in what will be a series of steps through the course of this year.
MR CORBELL (Molonglo—Attorney-General, Minister for the Environment, Climate Change and Water, Minister for Energy and Minister for Police and Emergency Services) (12.26) in reply: I thank Mr Rattenbury and the Greens for their support of this bill.
The passage of the Evidence Bill 2011 today will create the ACT’s first Evidence Act since self-government. It will replace the application of the commonwealth’s Evidence Act 1995 in the territory.
Since self-government, the commonwealth’s law of evidence has been directly applied in the territory and this arrangement has over time created a number of difficulties about the legal relationship between commonwealth and ACT law. The bill will create a stand-alone Evidence Act to overcome these difficulties and at the same time will independently adopt the model of uniform evidence law agreed to by attorneys-general in 2007.
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