I'm not too sure how to answer it in that I'm surprised as well by the low numbers. In fact, sometimes I wish that all 6,600 jurors accessed a juror support program after jury service.
I think the answer lies in something that both Mr. Trudell and Ms. Donaldson said. We do what Mr. Trudell was suggesting should be done on the front end.
I don't know if you remember the numbers, but we start with 170,000 people who are randomly selected, and only 20,000 people actually show up to a courtroom. We have accepted applications to be excused on a personal basis, a one-to-one basis, from many citizens for all those reasons—such as financial impact—that may lead to stress should they end up on a trial.
In Victoria, the employer is obliged to make up the pay that a person would reasonably expect to be paid had they not been on jury service, and that obligation has no end to it. If you're on a nine-month trial, your employer is obliged to make up your pay, but we will excuse people who work for small businesses or are self-employed, or where the financial burden might be there. If you care for children or other people in your family, we don't ask you to upset your life entirely.
So we have weeded out—for lack of a better word—a lot of people who might otherwise be stressed or feel an impact as a result of serving as jurors. We do a lot of that front-end work in our orientation. We are continually communicating with people along the way about what they can expect in a courtroom, not the details of the trial but who's in the courtroom, what they can expect, and how things run.
Once a panel of jurors—30 or so people—show up in a courtroom, and they're in the hands of a judge, and the selection process has to occur, and peremptory challenges are there, and people can apply to be excused, judges should be pretty confident that people are only going to be excused on the basis of the detail of that trial. At that point, if a person feels that they can't sit through a trial because the subject matter is too close to home or because they know something about the trial, they can apply to the judge to be excused from that trial.
Finally, as I think Ms. Donaldson suggested, they don't have to do it in open court. It is very unusual for a judge not to offer everybody the opportunity to write their answer down, and the judge will excuse a person without reading in open court what the reason is.
I think that's probably why the numbers are low. I think the numbers should be higher. Recently, we've been promoting the service more, so I'll let you know how it goes in the next couple of years.