Evidence (Pre-trial Special Hearings) Amendment Bill

The Hon. H.J. GUMBYS (11:29): I rise to speak in support of the Evidence (Pre-trial Special Hearings) Amendment Bill 2026. This bill makes two changes to the Evidence Act 1929. It expands the offences and witnesses eligible for pre-trial special hearings, and it broadens when a witness's recorded evidence can be admitted before trial. Both changes are practical, both are modest in scope and both matter a great deal to the people they affect.

Pre-trial special hearings exist so that vulnerable witnesses do not have to wait months, sometimes years, for a trial date before they can give their evidence. Under section 12AB of the act a young child, a person with a disability affecting their capacity to give a coherent account, or the alleged victim of a child sexual offence or domestic abuse can have their evidence recorded early to be played at trial.

It is a sound principle: get the evidence down while it is the freshest, and spare the witness the burden of reliving it as the trial drags on. But the current scheme has gaps. Attempted murder and attempted manslaughter are eligible offences; the completed offences are not. This is an anomaly with no logical basis, and the first proposed amendment fixes that.

The bill also adds choking, suffocation or strangulation in a domestic setting as an eligible offence in its own right and extends eligible witness categories to expressly include the alleged victims of stalking, domestic strangulation and causing serious harm regardless of the victim's age at the trial.

The second proposed amendment addresses a more technical but equally important problem with the current legislation. Section 13BA currently only allows recorded evidence to be admitted at trial or at a pre-trial special hearing. The District Court's criminal priority program fast-tracks certain sexual offence trials precisely so that they reach trial sooner, which means in practice pre-trial special hearings are often skipped altogether. The result is that the very witnesses this scheme was designed to protect have no avenue to use it because of the swift-moving nature of their matter.

To address this issue, the bill amends 13BA to allow the court to admit the recorded evidence at any time before the trial. Pre-trial special hearings can and should be used in conjunction with the aforementioned priority listing practices used by the District Court to help particular witnesses and victims give their evidence in a timely manner that reduces emotional stress.

This is not a bill that exists in isolation. It builds on a body of work this Malinauskas Labor government has already undertaken: criminalising coercive control, establishing the northern and southern domestic hubs, legislating paid family and domestic violence leave, and requiring electronic monitoring for those charged with violently breaching an intervention order. Moreover, in 2024 we reformed the stalking offence itself, modernising it to capture the use of technology to harass and intimidate and introducing an objective test so that an offender cannot hide behind ignorance when their conduct plainly would cause fear.

This bill also responds directly to the work of the Royal Commission into Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence. The commission's final report, handed down in August of last year, found that delay had a corrosive effect on victim survivors, so much so that it can cause individuals to disengage from the justice system entirely, leaving the person who used violence against them never facing trial at all.

The commission was equally clear that timely listings are not just a matter of court efficiency, they are a measure of respect for victim survivors' wellbeing, reducing the psychological toll of unresolved trauma while supporting both the reliability of evidence and a witness's ongoing engagement with the process.

That finding is the spirit in which this amendment bill was drafted. It closes two specific identifiable gaps, one in the offences and witnesses covered by the existing scheme and one in how the District Court's own priority listing practices interact with it so that the protections parliament already intended are not undermined in practice.

These amendments were shaped substantially by those administering the system day to day. The Director of Public Prosecutions and the Chief Judge of the District Court both raised the issues this bill resolves. That is exactly how legislation of this kind should be made: informed by the people who see where the system falls short, in service of the people the system exists to protect. I commend this bill to the house.