Page 1610 - Week 04 - Thursday, 7 April 2011
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
Perhaps an even more succinct statement of the matter was contained in a letter written by Civil Liberties Australia and sent to the attorney, Mrs Dunne and me. Civil Liberties Australia wrote:
The right to a jury trial in the British common law world has been a basic common law right for more than 800 years, with its fundamental importance being entrenched in the Magna Carta. It is a right that has endured through major world wars, the security imperatives of the Cold War, and the threat from Irish republican Army terrorists, and later from Islamic extremist terrorists.
These are the arguments and the factors that have driven the Greens to investigate if there is not a better way to cut the backlog while at the same time protecting the right to a jury trial for serious cases that warrant one. And there is clearly a tension here between two competing rights, that of access to a jury trial and that of access to timely justice. That is something we sought to very much weigh up in considering whether there was a possible different approach to this matter, and we were pleased to find that the answer was yes, there is indeed a more responsible way through this. And, as Mrs Dunne has touched on, the Canberra Liberals and the Greens are in the process of putting that into legislative effect.
To conclude at this point I would like to touch on the criticism that I anticipate will come from the attorney when he rises to speak this afternoon, because I well imagine he is going to go back to his proposal for a district court and argue that if we wanted to protect jury trials we should have gone with the district court proposition.
The Greens did not support the district court proposal at the time for two key reasons, and I believe those reasons remain valid today. Firstly, a compelling case was not put at the time of why adding a third tier to our courts would assist in the efficiency of the court system or in addressing the backlog. It was argued that having more judges would mean the same amount of work would be spread across more judicial officers. However, a more detailed analysis raised more questions than answers and questioned whether the workload would indeed remain the same or whether having more levels of court would ultimately add to the complexity and the overall level of work.
It raised questions such as: what about appeal rights? By creating a third tier to our courts, how would the threat of increasing avenues of appeal and increasing the workload be guarded against? More courts would also raise the possibility of requiring more staff at the DPP to attend at court and progress matters through it. And what additional court staff would be required? Unfortunately, none of these questions had clear enough answers to enable us to support a district court proposal.
The second concern we had with the district court was that it risked rewarding inefficiency. The Greens made the decision that we wanted to make sure we were getting the most out of our existing two tiers of courts and judicial officers before adding to them with more. We thought there were efficiencies that could be gained through better processes, and the working group has identified some of those.
In addition, we made suggestions to the attorney on where we thought some of those efficiencies could be gained, and some of them have already been adopted. The Bail
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video