Page 3479 - Week 08 - Thursday, 23 August 2012
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reserved judgements so they can be dealt with before they retire. That will have huge impacts on the court system, which is already struggling. Despite all the bells and whistles about the blitz and how everyone said the blitz was really great, this is from ABC online today:
The waiting time for ACT Supreme Court trials appears to have only diminished slightly since this year’s well publicised blitz on cases.
Waiting times for the Supreme Court trials appear to have diminished only slightly since this year’s well-publicised blitz on cases.
The Supreme Court worked through hundreds of criminal matters this year, with the help of visiting judges, to reduce the average waiting time for trials to 18 months.
To maintain the gains, the court started a new docket system last week …
Says the ABC:
Today lawyers seeking trial dates were told they would be waiting until the beginning of 2014.
People being brought before the Supreme Court in the ACT on criminal matters from today will have to wait until the beginning of 2014. Madam Assistant Speaker, some of those people will be remanded in custody. They may be found guilty and the offence for which they are found guilty may not have a sentence long enough to compensate for the fact that they have already been remanded in custody. We see it time and again. People remanded in custody are found guilty and are immediately released because of time already served on remand. That is not justice in this system, and this is the justice system that has been overseen—and overlooked—by Jon Stanhope in the first instance and now Simon Corbell. Simon Corbell has been there for over six years. It is nobody else’s fault but his.
Looking at the budget, we see we are coming up to an election and we have to look at the things that were promised at the last election that have not been delivered. One of the things that were promised at the election which has not been delivered was to do something about community legal services and create a community legal hub. The government went through a long tortuous process this year of putting together a feasibility study, the riding instructions of which were “show how expensive this will be so as to justify us not doing anything about it”.
What we saw in the budget this year was $660,000 over three years to re-house the women’s legal entre. That is good for the women’s legal centre, and members on this side have been advocating for a long time that they should have better facilities than they currently have over their split site and their appalling conditions. But that is not what the community legal centres have asked this government for over a long period of time. They would like a hub. But Minister Corbell has spent a whole lot of time putting together a scenario whereby we will never see this hub while ever he occupies the role of Attorney-General because it is not convenient for him. He would rather waste his money elsewhere.
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