Page 3478 - Week 08 - Thursday, 23 August 2012
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Proposed expenditure—Part 1.12—Justice and Community Safety Directorate—$246,937,000 (net cost of outputs), $30,530,000 (capital injection) and $151,497,000 (payments on behalf of the territory), totalling $428,964,000.
MRS DUNNE (Ginninderra) (9.39): I heard Mr Coe make the comment earlier today about the real-time bus information system and how many times the minister, Mr Corbell, could recycle that press release and promise it again. I think the Justice and Community Safety line in this budget has some of those characteristics about it as well. For instance, we have in this budget $2.2 million over four years for a sentencing database. This was promised to us in the 2008 election and it is only being provided now. When you think about it, Madam Assistant Speaker, it is extraordinary that there is no accessible database for sentencing in the ACT either for statistical purposes or for making judgement precedents.
This was highlighted earlier this year when I moved a motion in relation to the administration of bail in the ACT and the government could not provide the data that the Assembly was asking for. It was not particularly complex data that was being asked for, but the government has no information and has no idea how its bail system operates because it cannot collect the data. This government after 11 years has made no inroads. There is new technology all over the place but there are no sensible inroads into the collection of data for sentencing and statistic purposes and for allowing judges to look at the precedents.
Other aspects of the court system highlight the failing nature of everything this Attorney-General puts his hands too. The court system, under 11 years of Labor and seven years of this Attorney-General, has gone from bad to worse. We have extraordinarily poor performance data in the area. We have huge waiting times for matters to be listed. When those matters come on, we have the terrible problem of waiting for a very long time for reserved judgements. These are particular problems, and I know there are some sensitivities about these things. But the Attorney-General does nothing about the fact that people in the ACT are waiting years for reserved judgements. He sits back and says, “Separation of powers; I can’t do anything about it.” It is about time the Attorney-General worked with the legal community, worked with the bench, worked with his legal advisers and found out a way about how we might do something about reserved judgements.
I have people come to me on a regular basis saying they cannot get on with their lives because they have matters of business held up in the courts for years at a time. Their financial situations are put on hold while they are waiting for judgements, and they go on so long that they know that they will have to appeal the decision at the other end because the whole process is so torturous. We have seen that this attorney has done nothing about it. The Law Society and the Bar Association are at their wits’ end about it. The people of the ACT deserve better than they are getting currently. The old adage of justice delayed is justice denied holds in this territory where people are waiting extraordinary periods of time for civil and criminal decisions, and they should not have to.
This will get worse because we are approaching the time when we have members of the bench who are about to retire and they will be taken offline to deal with their
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