Parker DavidHon DAVID PARKER (Attorney-General): The Wellbeing Budget this is another part of it. The Hon Mark Mitchell mustn't have been here for the central part of the Budget which was increased funding for family violence mental health and addiction services which is the holistic way in which you actually reduce pressure in our courts because you actually deal with the problems.I just want to briefly catalogue the history to this. Some time ago the number of District Court judges was increasing markedly. The prior Attorney-General with the best of intentions was increasing the number of temporary judges. The number of temporary judges ballooned; therefore the number of total judges ballooned and the cost to the Crown increased substantially and there was a controversy as to whether there was any increase in output as a consequence. There was also the problem that temporary judges who hadn't previously been judges were thought to somehow be accountable to the executive—cosying up to the executive in order to get a permanent warrant. The former Attorney-General thought that was wrong and he was correct. So he stopped the appointment of new temporary judges and put a cap on the total number of District Court judges which was a bit of an estimate because at that time there hadn't been a judicial resourcing model completed to properly assess the number of District Court judges that were necessary.Those temporary judges have since progressively been made permanent judges but as they become permanent judges you can't appoint a new temporary judge and the effective number of judges—unless we fix this—decreased over time. Virtually all of those temporary judges are now District Court judges and we have a problem with the number of District Court judges.The problems have been made worse by some appalling reforms of the Family Court. The Family Court has some problems at the moment. Those so-called reforms from the Hon Judith Collins pulled lawyers out of it as if lawyers were the problem but said that a person who was applying for custody of their children following a separation—or not even related to a separation—could get an ex parte order if they alleged violence or sexual misconduct. As a consequence of that and the exclusion of lawyers from inter partes processes the number of ex parte applications has exploded. Now 70 percent of applications to the Family Court are decided on an ex parte basis. Families are dislocated and the other party to that dispute has had to wait months if not years to get an inter partes hearing to actually put their side of the case.As a consequence of that and our Government's concern about that the Chief District Court Judge has moved resources from the criminal jurisdiction to the Family Courts. The risk is then that the District Court criminal lists will get longer. The District Court has been very effective at dealing with their criminal list but they're now suffering this consequence of failure in the Family Court and have had to move resources as a consequence.This measure that's been brought forward by the Minister of Justice with my support increases the cap so that we can appoint some more permanent judges. In the meantime we have actually been filling this resource gap by appointing previously fully warranted District Court judges post their retirement as temporary judges. That doesn't raise the constitutional problem that temporary judges do in advance of a permanent warrant. That's the way we've been filling the gap but we need more permanent District Court judges. How they will be applied will be for the Chief District Court Judge but I would posit that she will fill in the hole that's been left in the criminal jurisdiction by the need to push people across to the family jurisdiction.So as Attorney-General I am supportive of this increase to the cap in District Court judges from 160 full-time judges to 182 fulltime-equivalent judges.