Page 2509 - Week 06 - Thursday, 23 June 2011
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wants to ingratiate himself with Mr Corbell, and Mr Corbell is desperate, desperate, desperate, for a win as the Attorney-General.
He has had the virtual district court; that was a failure. He has had the attempt to restrict jury trials to people who are charged with offences of less than five years; that failed because it was bad law. This is equally bad law, but suddenly Mr Rattenbury has lost his standards, and the reasons that he will give you today for why this is good law are laughable. And he knows that he is embarrassed by the fact that his support for this today is an embarrassment. It is an embarrassment for him. He is a lawyer. He has been criticised in the legal community for his lack of communication on this. People are scratching their heads and wondering why Mr Rattenbury, who has always shown such courtesy to the legal community, suddenly does not want to talk to them. The reason is that he would rather be a minister in a Gallagher government than actually serve the people of the ACT.
MR ASSISTANT SPEAKER: The question is that the bill be agreed to in principle. I call Mr Rattenbury, and please, Mr Rattenbury, resist the temptation to tell us about the menu. Thank you; the floor is yours.
MR RATTENBURY (Molonglo) (10.09): I will do my best, Mr Assistant Speaker. The Greens will be supporting this bill today. We believe that jury trials are an important part of our justice system which ensure that community standards are part of the decisions our courts make. We support a strong role for jury trials because they add value to the verdicts handed down. They add value by ensuring that 12 ordinary people have agreed on a verdict after hearing all the relevant evidence. That is a high threshold to reach, but an appropriate one to set when it comes to criminal matters, particularly in light of the potential consequences for an accused person if they are found guilty.
Community involvement through juries is important to the accused on trial, it is important to the victim and their family, and it is important for the rest of the community more broadly. For the accused, jury trials ensure that verdicts reached are agreed to by 12 people. As I have said, this is an appropriately high threshold to set. For the victim and their family, jury trials are important because they can see that ordinary people have been involved in the case, have heard the evidence and have reached a verdict.
This is important because lawyers and judges can have a certain air of detachment and are not viewed by some victims as normal people who empathise with their situation. I hope that the lawyers who are listening or who perhaps look at the transcript later will forgive me for making this reference, but through the clothes they wear, the language they adopt and the analytical way they describe the evidence, some victims do at times find the system and those involved in it hard to relate to.
Finally, jury trials are important to the wider community because in a free and fair society, we want the decisions our courts make to be aligned with community standards. The division of responsibilities between the judge and the jury are important. The judge has expertise and experience in the correct legal principles and how they should be applied to the case. The judge sets out the parameters in which the
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