McKee NicoleNICOLE McKEE (ACT): Thank you Madam Speaker. I stand on behalf of the ACT Party to once again support this Remuneration Authority Legislation Bill. It's a straightforward bill that transfers the responsibility for determining the remuneration of some judicial and statutory officers away from the Cabinet fees framework and to the Remuneration Authority. The Cabinet fees framework was first introduced in 1997 and is administered by the Public Service Commission. The commission give guidance to agencies around setting fees that are not set by the Remuneration Authority or by the fees methodology managed by Treasury. The bodies that are covered by the Cabinet fees framework include Crown entities; some trust boards; advisory boards; royal commissions; public Government and ministerial inquiries; some statutory tribunals; and other statutory bodies not covered by the Remuneration Authority and some subsidiary bodies.What this bill seeks to do is to remove some of the judicial and statutory remuneration settings away from the Cabinet fees framework and into the realm of the Remuneration Authority. Those being transferred from the framework to the authority include referees of the disputes tribunals community magistrates of the District Court the chairpersons and deputy chairpersons of the Human Rights Review Tribunal tenancy adjudicators of the Tenancy Tribunal and the environment commissioners and deputy environment commissioners of the Environment Court. This bill will also create five permanent legislative authorities which are needed to determine the remuneration of those affected by this change. This doesn't mean that they get an immediate pay rise or a drop; in fact their pay will remain the same in the immediate future at least until the authority makes its first determination. The Remuneration Authority Act 1977 itself actually prevents a pay drop citing that at the very least any of the officers transferred to this new authority from the framework must retain their current level of remuneration.We only received four submissions on the bill as has been canvassed. Two supported the bill and two made recommendations that were outside the scope of the bill but did raise some pretty good points. Mr Baker suggested that we should also be running courts at night to clear the backlog of minor infringements. With the backlog we are experiencing in our courts that does on the face of it actually sound like a great idea. But sadly it is outside the scope of this bill. But it does go to show however that people are putting their brains into gear trying to figure out how to ensure access to justice is timely utilising all the avenues that they can to get their points across that our justice system is breaking if not already broken in many of our towns and our centres. But this bill is about removing remuneration settings from Cabinet and to the authority and unfortunately not about how we improve timely access to justice.There is a constitutional principle that our courts are and should be independent of the executive so that we can ensure impartiality in our judicial systems. This principle also depends on institutional independence. Independence of the judiciary is a founding principle of democracy and thus is of the utmost importance. Moving the responsibility for setting the pay of these judicial and statutory officers away from the executive is justified and in our view a positive move. And with that we do support this bill through the House.