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Legislative Assembly
 
OPEN COURTS AND OTHER ACTS AMENDMENT BILL 2019

20 March 2019
Second reading
Frank McGuire  (ALP)

 


Mr McGUIRE (Broadmeadows) (16:02:55): I wonder if I should call for an extension. The new member seemed to be in full flight, making a considerable contribution to the matter of public importance. But I will stick with protocol and continue on this bill. Just to reframe the argument: rather than an ad hoc approach to suppression orders, courts will now be required to give reasons outlining the grounds on which a suppression order was made, its duration and its scope. This was a critical proposition that particularly the media were concerned about, and the bill attempts to get the balance right there. But the presumption should always be in favour of open justice. That is why these amendments are needed. The law will empower victims and empower the community, and that is another initiative because that has been important in a lot of cases particularly around violence towards women, particularly around sexual abuse. This is something that has evolved now, and the victims of sexual and family violence offences will be empowered to share their stories under a new process enabling courts to make orders lifting bans on publishing a victim’s identity. The bill also makes an important change to the existing laws preventing the publication of prior youth convictions. What we are also doing is ensuring that patterns of behaviour are easily identified by amending the law around prior youth convictions to allow the County and Supreme courts to publish relevant convictions in the sentencing remarks of adult offenders if the youth convictions are part of an entrenched pattern of offending. That is the key point—that it is an entrenched pattern. These changes build on amendments introduced by the government last year which explicitly excluded victims from non-publication provisions applying to Children’s Court proceedings as these relate to disclosure of their own identities. This bill was introduced in the last Parliament, and it is now looking to be enforced. I do not think I need to go into why it did not get through in that last Parliament—the arguments have been well ventilated. But just in summing up the key points: what it will do is get the balance right. We had an outbreak of suppression orders, and in the media in particular, as I know from my own experience in an earlier phase of my career, it is difficult to know what is being suppressed and where you can go to establish that. There is a mechanism for addressing the issue, which I think is critical for certainty. The bill also looks at how we address this as best we can now, looking at these issues. It is also improving judges’ understanding of suppression orders with new programs and materials developed by the Judicial College of Victoria, and that refers to the fact that the Vincent review found that too many judges and magistrates had limited understanding of their responsibilities under the Open Courts Act 2013. You could tell where the cultural blind spot had occurred. This is a way of addressing that. Another proposal is creating the central, publicly accessible register, as I have described, so that you know where suppression orders are and where they have been made by courts and tribunals—you know where to go get access. I think this is an important initiative. Having a central databank will enable journalists and other people who need to know to ascertain whether there is a suppression order in place or not so that they can comply with the law. Another recommendation is that all suppression orders be treated as interim orders for the first five days so that interested parties, including the media, can make submissions against the need for the order. That means they can be contested and arguments can be raised again in court, and I think that is good for transparency and accountability. I think we have now seen a range of different approaches arising from the work of Frank Vincent and his recommendations. The government is adopting those and now putting this bill through the house as a way of addressing as best we can the need to rebalance this issue and to allow greater access to what happens within the courts. To be able to deliver that is important. We have to address the issue of the internet, digital technology, social media and whether they make suppression orders all but irrelevant anyway. This is the modern era that we live in. We have seen in a high-profile case recently—because it is on appeal I will not go into the detail, but I want to make this point from this perspective—that even though it was suppressed here it was reported overseas, and with the echo chamber of the digital media the results were known and understood here. So this will continue to be a work in progress, but I think that this is a suite of admirable reforms that will go a long way to providing greater transparency, and I commend this bill to the house.