Justice System

Ms CHAPMAN (Bragg—Deputy Leader of the Opposition) (14:12): My question is to the Attorney-General. Has either the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court or the Chief Judge of the District Court raised any concern with the Attorney about the number and level of outstanding judgements and, if so, when?

The Hon. J.R. RAU (Enfield—Deputy Premier, Attorney-General, Minister for Justice Reform, Minister for Planning, Minister for Housing and Urban Development, Minister for Industrial Relations, Minister for Child Protection Reform) (14:12): I thank the honourable member for her question. There have been discussions frequently between me and both the senior judge of the District Court and the Chief Justice regarding progress of matters in both of those courts. The conversations take place on a more or less regular basis, and they share with me various pieces of information about how their courts are performing because, of course, I am interested and obviously so are they.

Usually the conversations are around the number of matters in and the number of matters out, that is to say the number of new matters of whatever type that are filed with the court registry, and the number of matters that are disposed of ultimately by way of a judgement or a settlement, or in the case of a criminal matter, a guilty plea. To the best of my recollection, that has been the focus of these conversations. As to the matter of outstanding judgements, I would suggest that the honourable member have regard to the statement of principles which has been circulated. I can't think of the precise title of it right now, but it is the judges' view of how the relationship between the judiciary and the executive should be managed, and I think the honourable member would find that, seen from the perspective of the courts, matters such as the length of time to write a judgement or get a judgement out is seen very much by them as their own business and not mine, just as the actual detail of how the court runs its list, for example, is seen by the courts as their business and not mine.

I can give an example. If I were to say to the courts, 'Look, I want all of you to suddenly run a docket system,' they would say to me, 'Well, look, you might want us to do that but that's our business. That's not for the executive to tell us what to do about how we manage our court.' So, I can't see any reason why, viewed from the perspective of the judiciary, they would be enlivening a conversation with me about outstanding judgements.

That's the position, but I say again: we do meet regularly, we do talk about statistics pertinent to the performance of the courts, because I am very interested in those things. We do look at the clearance rates, whether they are clearing 100 per cent, 103 per cent, 90 per cent, whatever it might be. We do talk about why we have the phenomenon of no judge. That's a phenomenon where a case is listed, and on the day the case is listed—because they over-list, as you would know, Mr Speaker, and they over-list because they know from their own experience that on a particular day—

The Hon. A. Koutsantonis: Like an airline.

The Hon. J.R. RAU: Exactly; a bit like an airline. They know on a particular day there will be a number of no-shows or matters that for whatever reason won't proceed, so they over-list. In some circumstances the over-listing that they do means that unpredictably in a particular week or on a particular day more matters than usual do proceed, which means other matters which are listed for that day, if you like, as reserved matters, don't get reached, and that's very frustrating. It's frustrating for the litigants and it's frustrating for the legal teams who are involved, and it's a matter that causes much unhappiness in legal circles and amongst the people whose cases are involved in that. We do talk about that, too. We talk about how we can possibly improve that statistic. So, we talk about many things, but I do not have any recollection of us having sat down and had conversations about outstanding judgements.