State government makes repeated excuses to why Court Information Act hasn’t commenced
The state government has repeatedly delayed moves that would force the courts to be more transparent, The Daily Telegraph can reveal. Despite being passed by parliament back in 2010, the government has made repeated excuses for why the Court Information Act has never been commenced.
The state government has repeatedly delayed moves that would force the courts to be more transparent, The Daily Telegraph can reveal.
Despite being passed by parliament back in 2010, with backing from the courts and the powerful Bar Association, the government has made repeated excuses for why the Court Information Act has never been commenced.
Shadow attorney-general Paul Lynch has slammed the government for its secrecy and for not enabling the act, which comes with a presumption in favour of open justice.
It was passed in the final year that Labor was in power.
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Since then, the number of suppression orders made across the courts has reached record levels soaring from 97 in 2011 to 185 last year.
MPs have regularly raised the progress of the Court Information Act in parliament as it languishes in legal limbo.
In November 2013, Greens MP David Shoebridge was told that the Department of Attorney-General and Justice had “convened an advisory group to assist in implementing the act” and amending it to “address a range of practical concerns that have been identified,” according to official parliamentary reports.
The NSW Attorney-General at the time, Greg Smith, told parliament “action is expected to be taken in relation to the act in 2014.”
In August 2014, Mr Lynch was told in parliament that the act had not been commenced “due to a number of operational issues that have been identified by the court and other stakeholders”.
In September 2015, Mr Lynch raised the matter again in parliament asking why the act had not been proclaimed.
He was referred to the “official government website for online publication of legislation.
The Attorney-General who proposed the act, John Hatzistergos, is now a District Court judge, and the then-president of the NSW Bar Association who backed the act, Tom Bathurst, is now NSW Chief Justice.
The courts are currently on leave and neither man could be contacted for comment.
Current Attorney-General Mark Speakman last week referred the act for another review, this time to the NSW Reform Commission.
Mr Speakman said that was not the panacea.
“If it was the panacea, we would have expected Labor to implement it and they didn’t. Time has moved on, technology has moved on,” he said,
“We want to make sure that in limited circumstances when there has been some denial of access (to court documents), that has been justified.”
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