Page 1667 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 3 May 2011
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perspective but, in terms of the drafting and operation, they are preferable to the alternative proposed by Mr Rattenbury on behalf of the Greens.
I think it is just worth making a couple of points at this point in the debate. I will not be engaging in the specific clauses because the mechanics of what Mrs Dunne and, indeed, Mr Rattenbury have indicated they propose to implement through their amendments are, I think, now well understood by this place.
The issue that comes about is the right of access to a jury trial. The government recognise and reaffirm the importance of a jury trial. But we also recognise and reaffirm that it is all very well to assert the importance of access to a jury trial, but unless you also recognise the importance of accessing justice in a timely manner then such assertions are quite meaningless. That, of course, is the issue the government is seeking to address.
The right that is protected under the Human Rights Act is the right to a fair trial. The government would argue, and I do not believe anyone can reasonably or responsibly assert otherwise, that our magistrates are capable of dealing with matters that face penalties of up to five years in prison. I do not think anyone would doubt the competence or the impartiality of our magistracy to deal with such matters and to deal with them in an expedient and straightforward manner. That really is the issue that the government is trying to deal with in this bill and why the government adopts the approach it does in relation to the amendments that are now being proposed.
The fact is that in a small jurisdiction we should be utilising our judicial resource in an efficient and effective manner. We will never have the luxury of a large bench of judges to deal with the broad range of matters that are currently before the Supreme Court. The luxury that we have enjoyed up until now has gone; it has evaporated. It will not come back. With the growing size of the city, we will continue to face pressures in the administration of justice unless we more equitably share the workload between the two tiers of our court system that we currently have available to us. It makes no sense to have a large number of competent, professional and respected magistrates unable to deal with a broader range of matters and having a smaller number of judges having to deal with an inordinately large range of matters. That is the issue that the government seeks to address in this bill.
I put it on the record again, as I have repeatedly in the past but it is worth saying it again, that without structural reform in our courts these types of reforms that the government will reluctantly support today in the amended form proposed by Mrs Dunne will simply not be adequate. I fear very much that in 18 months or two years time this Assembly will again be debating the issue of a backlog or delay in the Supreme Court with matters being listed for an inordinate amount of time before they are heard before a judge and people potentially being remanded in custody for extended periods of time because this place has not been prepared to grasp the nettle of serious structural reform about the way our courts operate. That, Madam Assistant Speaker, will, I think, be a debate for another day.
The government will support these amendments reluctantly, as I say. The mechanism is simpler and less open to injunctive orders than the mechanism proposed by
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