Philip Ruddock (Berowra, Liberal Party, Attorney-General) Share this | Hansard source

Others might be interested in this answer. We have a Constitution here in Australia and there is a doctrine of the separation of powers. I have sometimes wanted to look at the performance of a number of our courts, and I have wanted to help the parliament to obtain information about performance so that some objective measurements could be made. I am told that there may be some willingness to look at some of those issues in a generic form, but they are matters about which the courts have a very strong view. So I would have to say that there are no specific proposals for the sort of monitoring that the honourable member suggests is possible.

But what I can say is that, if you want to use some anecdotal evidence, the Magistrates Court has been extraordinarily successful. There has been an enormous shift in the matters that are being dealt with in family law generally from the Family Court to the magistracy. There is some data published about the extent to which requests are made in particular jurisdictions for matters to be transferred from one list to another. I notice that the member for Brisbane is in the chamber, and he may want to speak later. I saw some figures for the Brisbane court which demonstrated that the requests to the magistracy ran into many hundreds. The requests to go back to the Family Court were about a quarter or even less than that on the information that I had seen. I get anecdotal information as well from practitioners about how the federal magistracy is performing with very high levels of productivity. When you have the profession in some areas speaking with their feet, it suggests that it is doing very well.

A further point is that these comments should not be seen as a reflection on the Family Court, which, in our expectations, is expected to deal with the more complex and more difficult issues. One would expect that the workload of the matters that are more complex and more difficult might demand more time and certainly greater deliberation than less complex matters.

The only other point I would make is that in Newcastle, as you would be aware, a person who had been a magistrate was seen fit to be promoted to be a judge in the Family Court there. I understand that she has been very highly regarded, both as a magistrate and now as a Family Court judge. I might say that she is not alone. There are a number of others who were similarly able to be successful magistrates and whose qualities were later recognised in an appointment to the Family Court bench.

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