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House of Assembly - Fifty-First Parliament, Third Session (51-3)
2009-10-27 Daily Xml
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MAGISTRATES COURT (SPECIAL JUSTICES) AMENDMENT BILL

Second Reading

Adjourned debate on second reading.

(Continued from 23 September 2009. Page 4035.)

Ms CHAPMAN (Bragg) (22:01): The opposition supports the bill.

Mr HANNA (Mitchell) (22:01): I support the amendments to the Magistrates Court legislation, which allow special justices to sit in a much greater variety of cases—indeed, in a range of more serious cases—than they do presently. This bill sets out to amend the Magistrates Court Act 1991. It will allow special justices to hear uncontested matters, as prescribed; for example, at the moment, guilty pleas under the Road Traffic Act. This can include offences such as driving unregistered, uninsured; exceeding speed; and log book offences for truck drivers, etc. There are also applications for relief or review, including form 51 and form 48 business, which is done in chambers.

The government currently gets its money's worth out of special justices. They are paid $25 a session or $50 a day, and I believe they bear their own expenses, which includes parking, petrol and meals or refreshments, and they can be asked to do several hundred form 51s or form 48s per day. It is great that it is relieving magistrates, who earn several hundred thousand dollars a year, from such routine business. The balancing act in all this is to see how far this government and future governments are willing to go in extending the jurisdiction of special justices.

Bail applications may also be heard by a special justice sitting alone, but I understand this rarely occurs at this point. The bill intends to extend the powers of special justices to hear any expiation-type offence where the alleged offender elects to be prosecuted for the offence, the charge of a prescribed offence or a charge where the maximum penalty does not exceed $2,500. That is an increase of $1,250 over the present limit.

Section 7A of the Magistrates Court Act is amended, wherein part A remains unchanged and part B has an additional point to hear and determine uncontested applications of a class prescribed by the regulations (we do not know what those will be yet), and part C reproduces the former part B of section 7A. The amendments to section 9A set out to clarify the charges a special justice can hear, namely, wherein a person has received an expiation notice for an offence and they elect to be prosecuted. Obviously, we will need to hear more from the government about what the prescribed offences are going to be. This is truly a transition point for special justices. In the past, the work has been relatively straightforward and simple. This will certainly mean that more serious matters are heard by special justices.

This in turn brings up the question of training for special justices. I am willing to say in this place that the training for special justices up to this point has been woefully inadequate. There is a TAFE training course. It passes on quite a bit of information about justice in general, the structure of the courts, the nature of offences, and some basics of criminal law, but it is quite poor, I am told, in respect of the daily practices and procedures of the courtroom, and these are really the working tools of the special justices.

From what I have heard, the special justices tend to sink or swim by themselves. There is a lack of mentoring. What education special justices get tends to come from their more experienced colleagues, or, if they are lucky, from a magistrate, who might offer advice or some training. So, there needs to be, urgently, an improvement in the training provided to special justices.

Consideration ought to be given as to whether this could take place within the Graduate Diploma of Legal Practice. Perhaps law schools ought to be involved. I think it may have become something that is too important and too extensive for a mere TAFE course to cover. If we are going to stick with the TAFE model there needs to be a dramatic improvement in what is delivered.

The point I have already made about the honorarium for special justices needs a little comparison. Even juries these days are going to receive more than the special justices receive. I realise that the government wants to spend as little as possible on special justices, but I think it is only reasonable that, as the responsibility increases and we seek to have an ever higher standard of special justices hearing these matters, we need to review the payment that is made to them. I would have thought that what is perhaps paid to jurors in the state is probably quite a good benchmark to go on. It certainly is—

The Hon. M.J. Atkinson interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Order!

Mr HANNA: —justice on the cheap; that is for sure. I think that there also needs to be improvement in respect of rostering. Recently, an employee of the Attorney-General's Department was appointed to draw up rosters, and that has improved the situation. The fact is, if we are going to have more special justices, we need to treat them with respect, not just in respect of their pay, but in terms of their work conditions and how the work is allocated.

On this point, I also refer to the extremely inconsistent treatment of special justices in the various courts. For example, Elizabeth, Holden Hill and Coober Pedy, I am told, allow the special justices to handle only paperwork; so, they actually do not see real, live people sitting on the bench. They are doing form 51s and other similar routine paperwork. If we are going to extend the jurisdiction of special justices, then let's treat them with respect, pay them some respectable honorarium, and let's pay them more respect in the workplace so that they are not seen as just clerical drudges. As I said, the training also needs to be improved, and with that we will improve the quality of justice dispensed by the special justices.

I also note, in terms of the support that is given to them, that there probably needs to be special consideration by the magistracy about how clerks are going to be used. That may take the form of mentoring, it may take the form of training, or it may take the form of allocating clerks' time to make some of the clerical duties of the special justices easier to process so that they can use their time for thinking rather than just ticking boxes.

With those comments, and raising those issues for the consideration of government, I am happy to support the legislation. It really comes back to being honest about having a fourth tier of the court system. We already have the Supreme Court, the District Court, the Magistrates Court, and I think it is time to acknowledge that we have a fourth tier being created here of special justices. The training and, I would suggest, the honorarium need to reflect that.

The Hon. M.J. ATKINSON (Croydon—Attorney-General, Minister for Justice, Minister for Multicultural Affairs, Minister for Veterans' Affairs) (22:11): I thank the member for Mitchell for his detailed consideration of the bill and I thank the member for Bragg for perhaps the most outstanding contribution I have ever heard from her.

Bill read a second time and taken through its remaining stages.

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