Committals, Offence Classification and the Jurisdiction of the Magistrate's

he debate about the future of the committal or preliminary hearing is part of a much wider debate. In the 1980s a range of issues came together and crystallised into a debate about court management, case management, the costs of justice, access to justice, and the effectiveness and efficiency of the criminal justice system. There can be no doubt that the debate was and is resource driven. The unwillingness and/or inability of government to provide more funds for more court resources led to court congestion and delays in justice. On the other hand, the unwillingness and/or inability of government to provide more resources to legal aid led to accusations that the legal process had become the preserve of the very poor and the very rich. Mr Justice McGarvie, who has a longstanding commitment to these issues stated recently: A system which is so slow and inefficient that persons acquitted of criminal charges have already spent long periods in prison awaiting trial, or which keeps people waiting for years before recovering money due to them, is not providing applied justice. This is so, even though the judge who eventually hears the case, finds the facts and applies the law so that the determination is fair and correct. A system which is so expensive that ordinary people cannot use it simply fails in its practical objective (McGarvie 1989). Pressure on government led it to consider ways of responding. Throwing money at the problem would alleviate the pressure in the short term, but the problem would not go away in the long term. One of the first ways it found of responding was to tribunalise 'things like small civil claims, landlord and tenant disputes and so on. These tribunals had the twin advantages of being cheaper and quickerand much more could be achieved if one banned the use of lawyers in them. But there were limits to this approach, and the legal profession started to resent it loudly and publicly. It also did not do much for the problem in the criminal area. Close investigation revealed that there was no one answer to the problem. As the Victorian Bar Council/Judicial Administration Australian Institute of (AIJA) Shorter Trials Committee stated in debunking the notion that all this was the fault of legal aid