There is no "absolute" obligation for a magistrate to be called Your Honour, although it would be nice if people did, as a gesture of respect and to reflect the formality and gravity of proceedings, according to the ACT Chief Magistrate, Lorraine Walker. An older title of Your Worship was now archaic, she said.
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Dealing with a complaint from me that a fellow magistrate had insisted on being called Your Honour - a salutation which has traditionally been reserved for judges of superior courts of record, such as the Supreme Court - Ms Walker said that ACT magistrates, and other magistrates around Australia had been wanting people to call them Your Honour, and the practice had been common for the past 10 years. Although magistrates were at the bottom of the judicial tree, they performed judicial functions like others. According everyone the same title also reduced the risk of confusion for individuals appearing in the court.
It was a matter of custom and practice, Ms Walker said, making it clear that magistrates were attempting to establish a custom of having their titles upgraded.
Ms Walker also defended a practice, and, she admits, virtual policy, that presiding magistrates deal with matters involving solicitors before they attended to cases involving unrepresented parties. "There is no hard and fast rule,''' she said. "However priority is generally given to members of the profession first with a view to minimising the cost to those paying for their time, and freeing up those representatives to deal with other legal work, often also at court.''
She also said that the unrepresented people, who have to wait much longer as a result of the court's preference for solicitors, "might benefit from seeing cases dealt with by professionals before they are required to appear on their own behalf."
It was not clear that any appreciated the tutorial accorded them, but few, of course would have dared to say.
Ms Walker claimed that any one with special needs or commitments could request priority treatment, because "the court aims to balance competing priorities fairly and efficiently''.
There was no such opportunity accorded to anyone when I was in court on a parking matter last week. Any non-lawyer who approached the court official attending to the needs of solicitors was told peremptorily to wait until she had attended to the lawyers. Many unrepresented people on the list, some with children, waited an hour and a half or more before their cases were dealt with. No unrepresented person asked for "special" treatment, but, had they been accorded the "same" treatment as the profession, most would have been dealt with in half an hour.
