Page 1140 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 20 March 2013
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What is the community saying? Greg Stretton SC, President of the ACT Bar Association, said there was “certainly a good case” for at least one more judge. It was “certainly not” acceptable for a judgement to be reserved for more than four years. Noor Blumer, the President of the ACT Law Society, said the Law Society remains seriously concerned with the number of reserved judgements in the ACT Supreme Court. David Biles, criminologist, said two new judges were required to give the current bench the breathing space to work through reserved judgements. That is not to mention the fact that Chief Justice Terrence Higgins has consistently asked for a fifth judge, and he reiterated his case on 14 December 2012 in a speech to newly admitted lawyers. So there is a lot of opinion in the community that says the system needs an additional judge.
What is the attorney’s response? To date his response to the request for the fifth judge has been unequivocal. In fact, he has been quoted on the record as responding that a fifth judge is “unwarranted and too costly”. Instead, he came up with a docket system. But the effectiveness of such a system is dependent on individual judicial officers and practitioners. It was viewed with scepticism and dismissal by some in the legal community, not to mention the fact that meaningful evaluation will take years.
Then there was his idea for the virtual district court, which was roundly rejected by this Assembly, as Mr Seselja would clearly remember. Then, of course, we had the most tangible action from the Attorney-General—remember, the minister said the system is working okay and we do not need an extra judge—was his blitz, a blitz on the court lists with the aid of interstate judges. The interesting thing is that, yes, they got through some cases. Cases finally got into court and got heard. But guess what? Did we get decisions? Did we get judgements? Not necessarily so. The blitz was kind of half-cocked, because it did not guarantee that reserved judgements would be made. Yes, you got your day in court, but without the decisions and without the consequences of the decisions becoming available, the blitz has failed.
What can be learned from this is that an additional judge cleared up the bulk of the outstanding cases. With the aid of the interstate judges we had more judges on deck and cases started to get cleared up. Clearly, the need for the extra judge is made. About a fifth of criminal trials and a large proportion of the civil workload was done. However, now that the blitz has concluded we are seeing that the jury trials for some judges are being listed for mid-2014. Defence lawyers continue to invoke the Human Rights Act, arguing that unreasonable delays are in breach of their clients’ rights.
So what other lessons can be learned here? In the case involving the complaint against the judge, an acting judge was hired to give the judge under discussion a reprieve from court work to clear his reserved judgements. In the case of the blitz, the 12 weeks of churning through cases was only possible with the aid of additional judges. It is quite apparent from both of these cases that, in order to permanently fix this matter, we need at least a fifth judge.
The Attorney-General has run out of excuses. No more docket systems, no more blitzes—we need a permanent fix. The government owe it to Canberrans. They have a fiduciary responsibility to ensure that the waiting times for judgements and court
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