Page 3523 - Week 09 - Thursday, 21 August 2008
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Dr Foskey also says that these cases often fail because of the poor standard of police work and prosecution evidence. My experience of police work in Canberra, in terms of the evidence, is that it is far better than what the police do interstate. That is probably because they have to jump through more hoops in our court system than police elsewhere. Yes, we have had a few little problems with prosecutions too and, yes, they have lost six staff out of 26. That does not help either, and a lot of the staff are fairly junior.
One of the biggest problems faced by the prosecution and the police in the ACT is the attitude of the Supreme Court, which is completely out of kilter with every other jurisdiction in Australia. I think that they need to lift their game. It has got nothing often to do with the prosecution of the police. It is just a rather strange attitude adopted by some of our judicial officers, which maybe I can politely call “defendant-centric”.
I have absolutely no confidence about what would happen if this amendment were passed. In fact, I have probably got every confidence that if this amendment got up, rather than just giving the court a discretion, the court in fact would invariably direct that a person has to give evidence again. That does defeat the whole aim of this legislation.
Let us see how this goes. I perhaps have much greater sympathy for a robust committal proceeding for people who are not the victims of sexual assault or any violent crimes—less traumatic, different types of offences. I think a strong case can be made there. A committal is actually to tease out exactly what the evidence is. It is to find out how strong the prosecution case is. If it is a weak prosecution case often it will be dropped then and there.
We used to have in New South Wales, and I think in the ACT, the old nolle prosequi situation. We would not proceed with the prosecution if the committal found out that a case was weak. But I think there are enough checks and balances here. We have moved on enough here. We have had enough instances of the sexual assault laws, the way the courts have operated, the way the law has operated and the way that practitioners have operated to really bring home the need for some change here to put the system back in kilter, to ensure proper fairness to both defendant and accused. The accused should not be treated like some treasured citizen. We should have a little balance in the system.
Yes, there are potentially some problems here. I have the greatest regard for Ken Archer, and it worries me when he said there may be problems with admissibility of evidence and that the prosecution may have trouble getting up. I certainly hope the government officials who are present in the chamber—I see Mr Quinton smiling and shaking his head; I hope he is right—have taken it on board. I would hate to see this, but there might be a few little problems here which might make it harder for a prosecution to get up. We do not want prosecutions to get up when it is wrong that they get up.
I have seen people who believe that if an accused is not guilty the police would not have brought the person to court. That is going to the other extreme. But by the same
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