Page 1606 - Week 04 - Thursday, 7 April 2011
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backlog in the Supreme Court. If the legal community and the court community do not find that these have been efficacious in terms of delivering justice, they can be removed because their reason for being inserted will have been removed.
In addition to the changes to an indictable offence, the government bill also extends the civil jurisdiction of the Magistrates Court, enabling the court to determine matters involving claims of up to $250,000. The current threshold is only $50,000.
I note that there are various alternative approaches that have been suggested by the ACT Law Society and the ACT Bar Association. The Law Society has suggested a threshold of $100,000, with $250,000 being dealt with by the consent of the parties. The Bar Association suggests a threshold of $150,000, or $250,000 with the consent of the parties.
The threshold amounts proposed by the government seem to the Canberra Liberals reasonable in the context of the quantum of claims being made these days in civil matters. More importantly, the Canberra Liberals consider that the government’s approach is simpler than that proposed by the legal fraternity. Given that a civil matter is already in court, negotiation as to which court should hear the matter doubtless would only add to the existing antagonism between the parties and not speed things up.
Finally, the bill also establishes two new courts: firstly, the family violence court, which is given its own status within the Magistrates Court; and, secondly, the Galambany court, which gives statutory recognition to the specialist ACT Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander circle sentencing court. It too will operate within the Magistrates Court and will provide culturally sensitive sentencing for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander offenders. The Canberra Liberals will be supporting the establishment of these two jurisdictions.
I want to spend a few moments to reflect upon the work that has been done by the non-government parties, in consultation with the legal community, in coming to a better solution than the one proposed by the government. I want to acknowledge the considerable work that has been done in this regard by Mr Rattenbury and his staff in developing amendments to the government bill relating to criminal jurisdiction in the Magistrates Court.
These amendments were crafted in order to pick up an approach that was proposed by the legal fraternity. I was going to go down this path myself. Mr Rattenbury informed me that he had already started the process and I deferred to him in this regard. I was open to supporting Mr Rattenbury’s amendments, but I was troubled when I saw them in their final form because I thought that they were somewhat complicated. I had some discussions with members of the legal fraternity who, while they were supportive of the approach, thought that the means were somewhat complicated.
In the course of that discussion a member of the Bar Association offered to me a simpler version. I understand that a similar offer was made at about the same time to the ACT Greens. I looked at the proposal. I thought that it had merit because it was simpler and more streamlined. We drafted an alternative set of amendments. In the
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