When assessing admissibility of a co-offender's hearsay statement under s 65(2)(d) of the Evidence Act 2008 (Vic), the trial judge must focus on the objective circumstances in which the representations were made, not on an overall assessment of the truthfulness of the maker's account. Consistency between the representations and other evidence (such as covert recordings) goes to the reliability of the representations themselves and must be distinguished from the circumstances of their making, though the existence of such evidence in the hands of police at the time of the statement may form part of the relevant circumstances. The trial judge must explicitly identify the particular representations sought to be adduced rather than assessing the statement as a whole.
The full text is available to signed-in members, including the 2 later cases that cite this judgment.