The rejection of 96.7 per cent of all complaints against judges is not evidence the system is stacked against complainants, judicial conduct commissioner Ian Haynes says.
"I can understand people saying, 'we have this commissioner upholding only a small proportion of complaints', but that's just the way thecomplaints have fallen," Mr Haynes told Law News.
The commissioner's role is to field complaints about the conduct of judges and decide whether they should be quashed or forwarded to the relevant court or a judicial conduct panel.
Between Mr Haynes' appointment in August 2005 and August 2008 the office considered 241 complaints, of which only eight were passed forward.
Mr Haynes said the figures did not tell the whole story as some complaints should have been listed as "resolved" rather than "dismissed", but the system for recording results did not offer this option.
He said a large percentage of complaints referred to a judge's decision rather than conduct. As the office was not an appeal court those complaints fell outside its jurisdiction.
"I'm just having to explain that to complainants all the time."
He said the majority of people complaining were laymen who had chosen to represent themselves without understanding how the courts worked.
As such, many were caught out by court procedures and felt hard done by when judges expected them to follow the rules.
Mr Haynes said one person had laid 25 complaints with his office.
