Page 1141 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 20 March 2013
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hearings are not unnecessarily delayed. They must stop transferring the expense of justice to those victims who wait and wait and wait because this attorney cannot manage the system properly. (Time expired).
MR GENTLEMAN (Brindabella) (3.42): Delays in the Supreme Court are serious. I have not heard anyone suggest that they are not. The important question that has to be asked and answered here today is: would the appointment of a fifth judge address the delays in the Supreme Court? The government does not think the appointment of a fifth judge is the way to address delays.
A good way of assessing the comparative workload of our Supreme Court is to compare it to the civil and criminal lodgements in the superior courts of other Australian jurisdictions. This analysis is possible because of the comparative data provided with the report on government services prepared annually by all jurisdictions. Unfortunately, it would be simplistic to simply compare the ACT Supreme Court with other supreme courts.
The ACT Supreme Court hears many matters that would go to a district court in other jurisdictions. Like Tasmania and the Northern Territory, the ACT does not have a district court. Accordingly, in order to properly compare the ACT to New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Queensland and Western Australia, it is necessary to consider the lodgements and the full-time judicial equivalent resources—FTE, of course—for both district courts and supreme courts in those places. This ensures that we are able to accurately compare the workload across jurisdictions.
For the ACT, the report on government services data does not include our visiting Federal Court judges, who each year provide additional resources to the ACT Supreme Court. On the other hand, they include our acting judges, resources that would not normally be available to the Supreme Court. The best measure of the workload of the ACT Supreme Court is to take the report on government services data, include the visiting Federal Court judges and exclude the impact of acting judges. In this way we assess the normal resources of our Supreme Court.
So without acting judges, how do we compare to the other jurisdictions? In the financial year 2011-12 the number of civil and criminal lodgements per FTE in the ACT was 178.37—that is, we have one full-time judicial officer per 178.37 cases lodged with the court. If the ACT was seriously understaffed, we would expect to find every other Australian jurisdiction having a lodgement rate well below 178.37. Do we find that? In a word, no. Instead, we find that in a number of jurisdictions the lodgement rate per full-time judicial officer is higher than the ACT rate of 178.37.
So let us have a look at the figures. In New South Wales for every full-time judicial officer there are 227.58 cases lodged with the New South Wales courts—that is, in New South Wales judicial officers have 49.21 more cases lodged per judicial officer than in the ACT. In Queensland, for every full-time judicial officer there are 298.5 cases lodged in the courts—that is, in Queensland judicial officers have 120.13 more cases lodged per judicial officer than in the ACT.
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