Nobody Has Got a Crystal Ball.

We all deal with uncertainty and judges, just as doctors, or parents, or teachers - all walks of life - have to make decisions where there is uncertainty involved. Nobody has got a crystal ball into the future. Indeed, often we don't have a crystal ball into the past to determine what happened. And when you make decisions based on uncertainty, it can turn out that the prediction isn't that which you made as best you could with the information at hand.

Fear about making decisions … can lead to bad decisions.

Every time there's a catastrophe or a disaster arises, naturally, people will ask, ‘Who got this wrong?’, or ‘Why was it wrong?’ And sometimes there is something that has genuinely been missed that ought not have been missed. And of course, it's natural to look at that.

When a disaster happens, and you look back at those 100 cases, you can't find any difference between the one that went into a disaster and the 99 that didn't. Now, one answer to that may be, well, then we should just never make decisions. The problem with that is the system would grind to an absolute halt. Tens of thousands of these decisions are made every year, and we don't hear about the tens of thousands of decisions that are made each year in which nothing goes wrong.

Now that's not to say that you can't learn from situations where something does go seriously wrong. But it would, as I say, grind our system to a halt if everybody approached every decision to say, ‘I'm not going to make the decision. Because even if there's only 1% chance that I'm wrong … I'm going to be pilloried, and so the only way I can avoid it is to not make a decision at all’.

And that's a real risk. It's not just for judges and magistrates. - The Hon. Peter Quinlan, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Western Australia