17 December 2024

LCWA Commits $11m for a Judicial Commission

Addressing a recent meeting of the Australian Lawyers Alliance, Hon. Dr Brian Walker MLC, leader of the Legalise Cannabis WA Party, announced a major funding commitment to support the creation of a long-awaited Judicial Commission in Western Australia.

“Labor has sat on its hands for two full terms, promising reform, but delivering next to nothing in this area,” Dr Walker explained.

“We need urgent and funded action, not more empty words.”

“LCWA is committing to spend $11m over the term of the next parliament to found and fund a Judicial Commission with all the powers necessary to bring our judicial system back into repute.”

Western Australia is one of the few jurisdictions in the country not to have a Judicial Commission in place already, meaning that ordinary Western Australian citizens have little or no recourse when it comes to appealing any aspect of their treatment at the hands of judges, many of whom hold their positions for
twenty or thirty years, without any real oversight.

“Judges are as human as any of us, and just as fallible,” Dr Walker continued. “We would hope that they are wise men and women, upon whose judgement we can rely; but I know from the correspondence I receive on a worryingly frequent basis that that isn’t always the reality.”

“I hear from litigants and lawyers alike, concerning judges who belittle and berate those who appear before them, who refuse to take medical advice into account, preferring to believe that they know better than our medical professionals, and who, in the very worst of cases, collude to ensure that particular
cases appear before them.”

“At the moment, the only way to remove a WA judge who is misbehaving is by a motion to both houses of the state parliament, but, and here’s the kicker, the Standing Orders of both houses make it almost impossible to name and shame a judge, which in turn means that, in practice, only the government of
the day (which often has a vested interest, having appointed the individual in the first place) can initiate such proceedings. In the history of our state, no government has done so to date.”

“This is in spite of us having at least one serving judge in the District Court who, while a prosecutor in another state, was found by a presiding Supreme Court Judge to have committed “the worst fundamental abuse of power” in the “most outrageous case” seen in forty years of legal practice. It simply isn’t good enough for the government to continue to tell us to trust them to administer judicial appointments fairly, when we have seen too many examples of the system failing the ordinary voter, who then has no recourse when seeking true justice.”

“Nor is it limited to a single instance,” Dr Walker explained. “I’ve had a number of approaches in recent months concerning a sitting Supreme Court Justice here in WA who regularly bullies defense lawyers, and manipulates the system to ensure that particular cases appear before them. Taken as a whole, there
are clear signs of institutional rot, and these issues needs to be addressed as a matter of the utmost urgency.”

The NSW Judicial Commission receives $5.3m in funding a year, and is considerably larger than the WA Commission is envisaged to be. With that in mind, LCWA is confident that $3.5m in start-up funding, followed by an annual budget of $2.5m in each of the next three years, will be more than enough to
provide the people of WA with an impartial arbiter upon whom they can rely.

The funding for such a Commission is part of LCWA’s larger commitment to use the $1.25b revenue from the legalisation of cannabis at a state level to assist all citizens of WA in their search for justice, and a better standard of living.

“The Law Commission has been calling for the establishment of a Judicial Commission for more than a decade, as have organisations such as the Australian Lawyers Alliance. Meanwhile I have spoken to senior lawyers here in WA, and across the country, who are frankly aghast at the lack of accountability and transparency here in the West. Labor can’t or won’t deliver without pressure being brough to bear from the crossbench, and this fully-funded commitment on the part of the Legalise Cannabis WA Party is the first concrete step towards turning their paper promises into reality,” Dr Walker concluded.

ENDS