Before I make my brief contribution this afternoon, before we go to question time, I will give a big shout-out and also, do I dare say, in the countdown to Christmas, merry Christmas and a happy new year to all of the incredible legal minds working hard to support folks, particularly in Melbourne’s west, when it comes to the criminal justice system. I have to say one of the highlights for me this year was going ahead and being there at the official opening and launch of the new offices in the western suburbs for Westjustice and also for Victoria Legal Aid in the heart of Sunshine. It is very important that those lawyers who are protecting some of our most vulnerable Victorians have a workplace that is fit to work in and one that they very much deserve – really nice digs there in Sunshine, I have to say.

This is another justice bill that I am more than happy to speak on, because it shows just how our government, our Allan Labor government, is committed to making our justice system fairer for all Victorians – something that those on this side of the house take very seriously. What this bill does in particular is it deals with the committal hearing stage. This is usually the first and earliest stage of a criminal proceeding in our court system. It is a really important one, where a judge or usually a magistrate has to weigh in and, importantly, consider whether there is sufficient evidence to warrant a full trial for the offence. This is a really important step in determining which cases come to court. It is also responsible for throwing out poor cases that have little or no evidence to support a conviction.

What we are actually trying to do with this bill is not replace or remove these types of hearings in their entirety but make them easier to manage and, importantly, make them more efficient and streamlined so that cases can progress through our courts in a more timely manner and that cases with poor evidence that are unlikely to be successful are thrown out a whole lot quicker. These changes stem from a 2020 report by the Victorian Law Reform Commission, which made a total of 51 recommendations to reform pre-trial procedures to be more effective. Whilst this bill does not implement all of them at once, these are the changes that we can make now with the existing resources that we do have.

What the bill aims to achieve is replacing the test for committal with a new, modern case management process. Currently, a committal hearing involves a magistrate reviewing the evidence presented to them and considering whether what is being presented is of sufficient weight to support a conviction for an indictable offence. This is the test that, importantly, determines whether there will in fact be a trial, and what the bill does is remove it. This was, importantly, a key recommendation from the Victorian Law Reform Commission, and its removal will allow for magistrates to prioritise case management so that disclosures can be made and the main legal issues that are in dispute can be better identified. It is really important to recognise that this test has been changed and removed over time in other jurisdictions, as the member for Malvern pointed out, including New South Wales, Tasmania and Western Australia. There is actually no time-honoured tradition or legal concept for the court to uphold by modifying or removing this test. In fact the committal hearing actually arose from a time before we had independent police and independent prosecutors, something that is a reality today. I have to say that when I read that, when reading about this bill, I did not quite realise it, and it is something that perhaps from time to time we do take for granted. It is really interesting to be reminded of that.

When we look at the statistics for committal hearings, only about 1 to 2 per cent of cases are discharged at the committal stage, and what this means is that at the moment these hearings are not working as effectively as they could be. What we are seeing is that they are duplicating the process. They are adding time into the resolution of a dispute and causing witnesses and parties additional stress and, sadly, additional trauma associated with the case, not to mention costing courts resources that could be better spent on resolving other cases.

This also reflects the fact that our prosecution system has also evolved since this was first introduced, and today the independent Office of Public Prosecutions have their own systems, importantly, in place for assessing cases that come before them to determine if they believe a case is viable before proceeding to trial with it. The criteria they use is already set out in the directors policy and is readily available online. In other words, the Office of Public Prosecutions are already doing the job that a committal hearing seeks to do, and in extreme cases the Director of Public Prosecutions can even override the decision of a magistrate who determines that a case does not pass the committal test. It is clear that what we have got with the system –

[Speech interrupted for Question Time]