Page 1139 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 20 March 2013
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It is worth going back to the quote from Justice Heydon. Three years ago the High Court criticised the ACT Supreme Court for delays and unnecessary procedural shuffling in the case of Aon and the ANU. Justice Heydon commented:
A party which has a duty to assist the court in achieving certain objectives fails to do so. A court which has a duty to achieve those objectives does not achieve them. The torpid languor of one hand washes the drowsy procrastination of the other.
Kind of a description of this government in so many ways on so many issues as well. Following this, Crispin Hull, in an opinion piece published on 22 December 2012, labelled our legal system as a national legal joke. This is the system presided over by Attorney-General Simon Corbell.
So how bad has it got? It got so bad that the ACT Bar Association lodged a formal complaint. The complaint was lodged under the Judicial Commissions Act and left Mr Corbell with one of two options: dismiss the complaint or convene a three-judge commission. On 18 January this year Mr Corbell dismissed the Bar Association’s complaint. Instead of acting, he gave the judge a reprieve from court work until his reserved judgements are delivered. Clearly there was a problem that the judge had to be taken offline to clear the backlog of his judgements, so one would question Mr Corbell’s decision-making process in not actioning the complaint.
In the meantime, to assist the workload, Mr Corbell appointed an acting judge. So we have got the judge not delivering offline doing his work, and to cover it we have to have another judge. Sounds to me like, if you add up all the numbers, the requirement for an extra judge is quite clear.
We had another incident involving a different judge. Another judge took two years to deliver judgement in a personal injury case following a police shooting. Even after two years there was only a decision on the issue of liability and not on the decision of the damages to be awarded. In two years the judge worked out the liability but could not work out the damages. And out of frustration, the parties involved ended up resolving the issue of the damages themselves so that everyone could get on with their lives while our moribund judicial system, under the leadership of the Attorney-General, could not come to the decision that it should have. Having taken so long to reach a judgement, the Court of Appeal then thought the judge had got it wrong and overturned the decision anyway.
There is another case of a litigant battling cancer. He was a public servant in a commonwealth superannuation claim receiving cancer treatment and anxious about his court case. He became so desperate for his judgement day that he had the case relisted twice. Why is it that people who are suffering medical problems are also being delayed in this way? I think it goes to the running of the system. The minister detailed all these things he is doing to fix the system, but, if the capacity is not there and we have got to take judges offline so they can catch up on their work, clearly there are not enough judges.
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