Page 2918 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 13 August 2013
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Minister Rattenbury regularly talked in the last term about an evidence-based approach to policy. What more evidence do you need that we need a fifth Supreme Court judge? I think that it is compelling. Certainly the issue is supported by those in the fraternity. The Bar Association, the chamber of commerce, the Law Society and so on all back the need for a fifth judge.
Accountability indicators for 2012-13 show that 10 per cent of criminal cases in the Supreme Court are pending for more than 24 months, and 24 per cent of civil cases are pending in the Supreme Court for more than 24 months.
Moving to the DPP, recommendation 38 of the estimates report says:
The Committee recommends that the ACT Government not proceed with the proposed cuts to the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions and review the funding for the Office to ensure the capability and funding of the office matches the workload.
That is because the funding for the DPP reduces by $110,000 from 2012-13 to 2013-14. $52,000 of that is a reduction due to the cessation of the one-off allocation to assist with the Supreme Court blitz and the remaining reduction is due to a savings measure imposed by the government. With regard to that, Mr White talked about the workload on the DPP. He said:
When I was appointed, the historical levels of Supreme Court trials conducted a year was something in the low 30s; they are now trending in the 60s, so that is almost a doubling of Supreme Court trial output … I would say that, for every two trials that are run, there is probably one trial that is prepared and not run and ends in a plea of guilty or whatever at the last moment. So running 60 trials probably represents preparing about 100 trials. So, that is a massive increase in that area …
The DPP said that there are days when they struggle to find anyone to get to the court on a particular day. That is an entirely unsatisfactory situation. When we talk about all of these areas, be it corrections, the courts, the DPP or the police, they are all interconnected. A delay in the justice system, in the court, means you will have people on remand waiting at the jail for longer than they should be, and that exacerbates the problems there.
If you are not resourcing the DPP it means that it is very difficult for them to bring issues to trial. There are frustrations with the police because if they are out there on the ground and they know that the hard work that they do results in the perpetrators of crime not having their day in court, and essentially justice not being delivered, that is a real frustration for the police. Most important, I think—and this is something that is sometimes missed, particularly by this government—are the victims of crime. At every step they are the ones that wear the burden of what is happening in our justice system at the moment.
I often talk about the need to rebalance the scales of justice. We know that justice is the statue with the scales that are meant to be balanced; you see it outside many courts.
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