THE Chief Magistrate, Ron Cahill, has a point. He has seven or eight courtrooms in four or five locations.
It is inefficient to have magistrates wandering about the town and court staff working all over the place. How much better it would be to have one court building next to the Supreme Court with a common library, cells and offices for court staff.
And thus the ACT Government came up with a plan for a six-storey building next to the Supreme Court in Vernon Circle. But that area is part of the national area of Canberra and the present national plan has a height limit of three storeys, so as not to detract from City Hill, one of the points of the Parliamentary Triangle.
The ACT was silly enough to spend a lot of time and money on the six-storey plan without getting Federal approval. And the Feds, in the form of the parliamentary Joint Committee on the National Capital, have knocked it on the head. That committee is fairly powerful, so it looks like Ron Cahill will not get his court. Let’s hope he has more success in getting an AFL team to Canberra.
Perhaps some proposals of a decade ago should be looked at again. Then it was thought inevitable that just as Woden and Belconnen got shopping centres and police stations (of sorts), they would also get courts.
At the time I thought it an appalling idea, so did every other court and law reporter at The Canberra Times. It was hard enough being in five places at once in Civic, let alone having two more courts in the sticks.
But there is a greater case now, than a decade ago. Co-location of libraries is less important, now that every Federal, NSW, Victorian, Tasmanian, South Australian and ACT case and statute is on computer. So are all US Supreme Court cases. Fax machines make office co-location less imperative. And in these days of easier bail joint custody arrangements are not such a great economy. Or why can’t prisoners be kept at the police station? Why not move the magistrates out of town and closer to the people? (I can hear the screams from the big central law firms now.)
But if co-location is essential, there are still other options. The Feds have imposed the six-storey restriction for sound reasons: you cannot mess up 70 years of planning integrity because of a magistrates court. The only reason for putting it where Mr Cahill wants it is because the Supreme Court is there. But the Supreme Court is in a 30-year-old, two-storey building. It is not a very good reason upon which to base something which will affect the whole city plan.
That residential monstrosity next to the Lakeside, and the Lakeside itself are examples of ad-hoc decisions that can mess up a city plan. A six-storey building near Vernon Circle would do the same thing, though admittedly to a lesser degree.
Instead of basing the plan around one 1960s Supreme Court building, let’s move the Supreme Court. Why not build a whole new magistrates and supreme courts complex on the car park on the western side of London Circuit, opposite the police station? It would also be closer to the Federal and Family Court in Childers Street. It would also be just as close to the police station.
The Supreme Court building could then be used to house the Legislative Assembly. Gasp. That would help provide some extra money for the new court, and we have some grounds for calling on the Feds. The ACT Attorney-General, Terry Connolly, has a point in saying the Federal planning requirements have caused extra ACT expense (though the ACT must wear the blame for the $1 million wasted on planning a six-storey building before getting planning approval).
Some of the above might be a bit whacky, but the essential point is: the ACT should never have got straight-jacketed into one plan predicated upon an fairly ordinary 30-year-old Supreme Court building in the first place. So instead of now crying to the Federal Minister to give back the six-storey rattle which we never had any right to anyway, a little lateral thinking is required.