Court Delays

Ms BEDFORD (Florey) (15:12): Supplementary: so, aside from calling for reviews and obtaining reports and considering recommendations, what steps have actually been taken to successfully address or reduce any delay in the court system?

The Hon. V.A. CHAPMAN (Bragg—Deputy Premier, Attorney-General, Minister for Planning and Local Government) (15:12): A number of matters, including working with the DPP and with police prosecution to ensure that those cases are ready when they get to the Magistrates Court, before they are referred to the District Court. The concept here is—and this is something that was called for by defence counsel for years—get somebody in senior early in these cases so that we can know fully what the case is against the defendant or defendants and we can sit down and have a meaningful discussion about how we might address these matters.

That, again, was a repeated aspect of consideration by Brian Martin QC and we appreciate his contribution in relation to that, as a result of Mr Hinton coming into that position and goodwill, I would suggest, on behalf of SA prosecution and the support of the Commissioner of Police to ensure that we did upgrade this process so that we didn't get to the situation where a case would be many adjournments in the Magistrates Court trying to work out whether they are going to have forensic assessments, whether they going to have fingerprinting, whether they are going to have the other forensic procedures undertaken before, which were then taking some considerable time.

We, a new government, also introduced some measures in forensic services SA so that they could actually more quickly deal with their reporting and investigations to assist prosecutions. There are a number of initiatives we have already started so that we can have an earlier resolution. Clearly, notwithstanding the front page article in the paper in relation to trials being out to 12 months, we have had COVID in between. They didn't mention that actually.

One of the impediments to being able to deal with trials was the jury trials—the District Court particularly and probably the 12 to 15 murder cases in the Supreme Court every year—many jury trials. The capacity for us, including other jurisdictions around the country, to deal with those matters, including the commonwealth prosecutions we do in our courts, also were interrupted by the jury obligations. We had to reconfigure the courts, actually take juries in limited numbers up to the courts in lifts, spread them out, give them a separate meeting room so they could spread out. All during COVID we had that to implement.

Unlike the Federal Court—which is still not doing full trials, which is a concern in itself, here in South Australia and in fact lots of areas around the country—we have resumed that, although there was a four or five-month delay in being able to address a number of jury trials. Some elected by negotiation to go to a judge-only trial so that they could actually get their cases heard, but there was clearly an indication by the DPP to us at that stage that they would expect by this year there would be trials up to 12 months for some cases.

That's what has been reported. I would suggest the major factor in that was not actually the major indictable reform issues; it was in fact the intervention of COVID which made it very difficult for anywhere in Australia to do jury trials safely for jurists, and indeed the judges themselves were not prepared to be able to facilitate that.

We continue to do the Magistrates Court on a group A and group B arrangement, so they are rotated. Our District Court and Supreme Court criminal trials were interrupted by COVID, as was the capacity for jurors to safely come in, be empanelled for the purposes of jury service and then actually to operate in the courts. It is about a four or five-month delay in those cases, which has ballooned out to 12 months in some of our criminal cases for jury trials.

The SPEAKER: The time for answering the question has expired.