Page 2611 - Week 08 - Thursday, 14 August 2014
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face your victim directly, to not have to answer their questions or deal with their anger and grief. Indeed it is very easy to say nothing at all. But through restorative justice, we know that an offender has to face their victim directly. They have to account for and explain themselves directly to their victim and hear about the pain, hurt and suffering that they have placed on their victim.
That is why restorative justice is so powerful. That is why the government is investing in a program of research and policy development that will look at how we can use restorative justice for adult offenders, use restorative justice for serious crime, including violent crime, and how it can become much more of a mainstream part of our justice system. I think that is a very significant development that the government has agreed to fund in this year’s budget.
We are also providing funding to support the Aboriginal Legal Service, to help Legal Aid with managing its expensive criminal cases, further improvements to the court management system and further assistance to the Supreme Court in relation to the management of its workload. It is the case that the government continues to work closely with the Supreme Court on management of its workload. We have seen some really significant improvements and reductions in delay as a result of the steps taken collaboratively between the government and the court over the past 12 months in particular.
I will give some examples of that. Civil matters pending in the Supreme Court have declined by 50 per cent over the last two years, from 1,404 matters as at 30 June 2011 to 718 matters at 30 June 2014. This is a real indicator of the success of measures put in place by the court, in particular led by Her Honour the Chief Justice, who has focused very strongly on the need to improve work practice and case management practice within the court.
It highlights, again, the government’s view and position that the effective dispatch of business within the court must be focused on practice and procedure and opportunities for efficiency as opposed simply to requests for additional judicial officers. The government keeps the matter of additional judicial officers under close review, but what we know is that the number of lodgements per judicial officer at the supreme and what would be characterised in other jurisdictions as the district court levels are some of the lowest in the country, when you look at court systems around the country.
That is one of the key indicators that we look at: are our judicial officers dealing with a workload that is over and above what would be reasonably expected in other jurisdictions on a per judicial officer basis? So that takes account of population and relative size. What we know is that per judicial officer, the number of lodgements—civil and criminal—dealt with by judicial officers here in the ACT is at the low end. Other systems deal with a higher case load per judicial officer than the ACT does, and that highlights opportunities for reform in case management. That said, the government is also committed to working with the court on the issue of judicial resources, and the Chief Justice and I have agreed on a way forward as to how that analysis and consideration should proceed.
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