The Northern Territory’s criminal lawyers will lodge a formal complaint about a judge who told an Indigenous mother she probably got drunk on pension day and “abandoned your kids in that great Indigenous fashion”.
Last week Guardian Australia revealed a series of remarks made by a local court judge, Greg Borchers, in hearings across central Australia. He told a woman who breached an order prohibiting alcohol consumption that she had “probably” got her pension money, got drunk, and abandoned her children to relatives in that “great Indigenous fashion”.
Borchers also likened an Indigenous domestic violence offender to a “primitive person dragging his woman out of the cage” and, in a separate case, wondered aloud whether one day “some important anthropological literature” would help explain “Indigenous laissez-faire parenting” and “why it is that people abandon their children on such a regular basis”.
The judge has previously been reprimanded for inappropriate comments. In 2017 he was removed from the Alice Springs youth court after an investigation by the chief judge, John Lowndes.
The Criminal Lawyers Association of the Northern Territory met on Wednesday night to consider Borchers’ latest conduct. It resolved to make a formal complaint to the chief judge, likely to spark the second investigation of Borchers in as many years.
Its president, Marty Aust, told Guardian Australia the association was drafting its complaint and would on Thursday submit it to the chief judge and share it with the territory’s legal fraternity.
“Last night the Criminal Lawyers Association committee met, we reviewed the material that had come into our possession and we determined that complaints were warranted,” Aust said.
“We have drafted or are finalising a draft of particularised complaints, and that will be sent to the chief judge of the local court today … we expect that the complaint will require investigation, we can’t speak any further on the nature of the complaint, because that might lead to prejudicial outcomes.”
The association is frustrated that the issue was ventilated in the public, rather than through official internal channels. Aust told Guardian Australia it showed the urgent need for a judicial complaints commission in the NT.
“The way in which this matter has come [to be] in the public sphere is particularly worrisome and what we want is for the NT government that the time is here to pass legislation that enacts an independent judicial commission or a structure for the investigation of complaints against judicial officers,” he said.
“And also what is particularly disappointing is that there is already a framework that has been provided to the attorney general that has been signed off upon by the entire profession.
“It’s been sitting there for well over 18 months. If they can pass punitive retrospective laws that discriminate against Aboriginal children in custody under urgency, they should be able to pass legislation that is for the betterment of the profession that everyone agrees with in a shortshrift manner.”
Borchers was previously approached for comment through the Department of Attorney General and Justice, which said judges do not publicly comment on their decisions or deliberations. Complaints against judges are generally treated as confidential by the court.
