Dear Gertie,

I am a non-lawyer with a particular interest in how systems work. I have been following your podcast in which Victorian Supreme Court judges and others explain a bit about that court. I would like to take up your invitation for listeners to ask questions. The following questions all relate to the first episode in the series. ¹

Question 1

At one point, Justice Champion said:

“I think the community look at this building – and they walk past it every day – have very little idea about what goes on in the building [and] not much appreciation of the kind of work that we do.

We need to find ways of bringing the community in.

When I sit on the bench, you would look around with some fantastic cases, full of drama and full of importance. You would look up and see the seats are empty.”

His Honour emphasised the word “in” in a way that suggested to me he wanted some action on this point. I could not agree more. Some general ways of achieving this might include:

• Making the community aware that they can and should come in.
• Giving people an incentive to come in.
• Making proceedings more interesting to the casual observer.
• Letting the public know when a particularly dramatic or important case is on.

Q1: What specific actions will Gertie take bring the community back into the court?

Question 2 Justice Riordan said in relation to commercial matters:

“For the parties, things are happening at a million miles an hour. There are strategies being undertaken. To the informed observer it’s quite intriguing as you watch the way the parties are manoeuvring, but generally it’s by reference to documents and if you don’t know what’s in the documents, you’re not picking up on the subtleties that might be apparent to someone who is crawling all over the detail.”

Not knowing what’s going on is a major impediment to making cases interesting for people. The answers are not clear because documents can be lengthy and have information that may be private and sensitive.

Q2: How can (non-sensitive parts of) documents be made available to the public gallery? WIFI?

Question 3

Justice Riordan also said:

“You will never read in the Herald Sun, or in any other paper for that matter, the paper saying, ‘Justice Riordan got the sentence right again.’”

I assume Justice Riordan does do a good job of sentencing and for this to be misrepresented to the community creates problems: We are left with a ridiculous situation where ordinary people, through their interaction with newspapers/TV/Facebook, have come to believe they know better than judges.

Q3: Why aren’t more journalists ever charged with scandalising the Court? Would judges prefer to be unfairly criticised so they can collectively play the martyr rather than be justifiably criticised and have to improve?

Julian Hetyey, judicial registrar in the Commercial Court told us:

“A lot of cases arise from property development, that’s not surprising given all of the activity in the property market in Australia. We’ve also seen quite a few cases involving litigants from Asian countries, particularly litigants who reside in Asian countries and have various business interests in Australia. So, a classic example would be a business investment by an overseas mainland Chinese party investment in an Australian business where there’s a Chinese counterpart and they have a falling out. They raise a number of different considerations for the Court. Often, we notice that the cases involve very little by way of written documentation, so if a deal is done between the two parties it’s not always reduced to writing. The court needs to be aware of those cultural considerations. The reality is we are living in a multicultural society and we’re also living in a world where commerce is globalised. It means that people will move capital across borders. They will invest in businesses in other countries and we have to be responsive to that.”

Q4: Cross-cultural dealings raise very interesting issues. Could we have some examples of these issues in a future podcast?

Regards,

Phil Bachmann

¹ Supreme Court Podcast Episode 1

Sent to gertie@supcourt.vic.gov.au on 16 May 2019