Page 2589 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 5 June 2012
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The Canberra Liberals cannot support this approach and we will be opposing it in the detail stage. We believe the process of justice needs to speed up in the territory, but we do not support achieving this through such artificial means as this discount. We will not support it at the expense of the delivery of justice for victims of crime and at the expense of safety and security for the people of Canberra.
MR RATTENBURY (Molonglo) (11.58): The Greens will be supporting the majority of this bill today. As the attorney noted previously when he presented the bill, the changes were made necessary following the reforms announced last year by the Supreme Court. The court, following consultation with the government and the profession, announced plans to introduce a docket system where a single Supreme Court judge would be assigned to a case from the start and to expand on requirements for exchange of information by parties. Both these changes flow out of consultation undertaken by a working group that was tasked with looking at better and more efficient ways to manage cases coming to the Supreme Court. As members will be aware, delays in the Supreme Court are a continuing problem, and the Greens certainly supported the work done by the working group to look at improvements that were available.
Both the docket system and the exchange of information are technically matters over which the Supreme Court has jurisdiction. Both issues go to how the court registry will conduct its business and how the judges will manage the cases that come before them. There is no law that a parliament could write to dictate that these initiatives be adopted by the courts. Because of this, the bill we are debating today removes legislative barriers that exist rather than actually setting up the new processes themselves.
One issue we are concerned to look into is ensuring that the good consultation that took place with the working group continued on to the more technical aspects of how the changes will actually operate on a day-to-day basis. The devil can so often be in the detail, so it would have been a mistake to have the working group consult on the principle and agree to it only for that consultation to stop when it came to the detail.
My office was briefed on this recently, and I thank the directorate for the written answers to our questions. From that information, I am pleased to see that Justice Penfold is preparing a paper outlining details of the two proposals and consulting with stakeholders, including judges, the bar, the Law Society, Legal Aid and the Director of Public Prosecutions. These are the groups that will be required to work in accordance with the new changes on a daily basis, so it is appropriate that they be consulted on the finer details. The Greens support the process that has led to the two changes, and we also support the continuing consultation that is occurring on them.
A final amendment made by the bill relates to the sentencing discretion vested in the court, and Mrs Dunne has flagged her intention to move an amendment on this. Currently, the Crimes (Sentencing) Act 2005 explicitly lists 26 factors that a court must take into account when deciding an appropriate sentence. One of those 26 factors is whether the defence has made any pre-trial disclosures and, if so, the extent of those disclosures. What the government’s amendment would do is add a 27th factor for the court to take into account as a mitigating factor which would
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