Dr WOODRUFF (Franklin – Leader of the Greens) – Honourable Speaker, the Greens will be supporting this amendment to Justice and Related Legislation (Miscellaneous Amendments) Bill today. I particularly want to speak to the amendments to the Coroners Act, with which the Greens in our small way have been involved with a number of different cases of people.
For Hansard, I want to recognise – hello – we have Jason and Amanda in the Chamber with us today. Dante, who I heard speak at a rally, was here earlier. Sky and Echo are also here, I think. Thank you again for travelling all the way down here. This is an important day to have some closure, and to enable a process to be undertaken, which you’ve been fighting for, to get access to records and this legislation will enable you to get access to those records. We’re deeply grateful to be able to play a small part in moving this on.
I recognise that while there appeared to be initial resistance, I want to mention the previous attorney‑general, Elise Archer, who started this conversation – and especially you, Attorney‑General, for the work that you have done in making sure that this matter of justice has been delivered. It is especially for the Westbrooks to be able to access records for your beloved daughter, Eden, and to really understand the circumstances of what happened to her.
There are many other Tasmanians who have hit against what appears to them an administrative wall at a time of grief when they want to have access to records. I have also personally advocated for former Australian Greens senator Janet Rice. I know she would feel okay about me mentioning her situation because she went to the ABC and was on the public record about it. She also hit a bureaucratic administrative wall which was deeply painful for her when her beloved wife, Penny Whetton, died in unexpected circumstances. A coronial investigation was undertaken. The question for her was to be able to access records accompanying the coroner’s report from medical practitioners. She was getting a ‘no’ about being able to access them, except through a GP. Finally, after months of advocating, the records were released to a GP but she was not allowed to view them. That was a real injustice for a woman with the searing intelligence of Janet Rice to not be able to look at records and make her own determination about the issue.
Removing the mediation of the medical profession from this space allows senior next‑of-kin to make their own decisions about whether they need to get counselling before they access records. Or, as the Attorney‑General said, they might decide to pass the records through to a third party that can access the records so they don’t themselves have to be exposed to the material. These small things matter so much. When you said there were over 1000 coronial investigations just last year, Attorney-General, that speaks to the volume of people this legislation will affect. We have just a few people in the Chamber here today but thousands of other Tasmanians.
Thank you, Attorney-General, for bringing it on and for bringing in the 28‑day period because it is important to have a deadline. I want to put on the record the Greens’ respect and thanks to the Chief Coroner, the Coroners Office, the Coronial Division and all their staff who do the work. It is a lot of work. The Attorney-General needs to make a passionate plea to get more funding for the Coroners Office. This is a very tight budget but when you look at the sort of cases they are investigating, some enormous multi‑person deaths they have to look at, the complexity is huge. We want the work to be done as forensically and correctly as possible because it is about getting justice for people when they have passed away. It is critical that we have confidence in their work and that requires a budget sufficient to resource them for the work they do. I am sure you hear this on all the issues, Attorney‑General, but I am sure you will advocate and do your best on that matter.
When you are summing up, maybe you can speak about how long you think – if, for example, the Westbrooks made an application, I would hope that this may be able to move through the other place in the next week. We cannot prescribe the timing, but it would be excellent if it did and then it could get royal assent. We would hope that there might be a 28‑day period before the end of the year. That would be desirable, given the election interrupted what otherwise might have happened earlier.
The honourable member for Clark, the shadow portfolio holder, Ms Haddad, asked about subsection (5) of 58C, which is where the coronial authority may refuse to provide records when there is an unreasonable intrusion on the privacy of a person who’s referred to in the record who is not the deceased person but another person.
I also wondered about that, but I see proposed subsection (6) of proposed section 58C does enable the coroner to release the records redacted, so they can be redacted and modified and that, therefore, would mean that there there’s no argument for the records not to be released; they just have to be appropriately anonymised, as I understand it.
In relation to nurse practitioners, the Greens strongly welcome the removal of any barriers to nurse practitioners being able to work fully and to extend into the scope of work that their capabilities enable them to cover. This change to the Workers Rehabilitation and Compensation Act will allow nurse practitioners to issue workers compensation certificates in accordance with the certificate protocols that have been approved by the secretary of the Department of Health and the WorkCover board, so that’s great.
Nurse practitioners are a vital plank in the community. Their time has slowly come into being. There’s been fighting for so long. Let’s just make a general global statement about when women try to break into professions that have been male dominated sometimes it can take centuries, but we get there in the end and I think there is now acceptance that nurse practitioners have the competence. They have so much space to work in between the GP and all the other professional staff, particularly in community settings, and we really need that in Tasmania because we need more fantastically skilled professionals in the community.
I’ve seen what can happen in a Cygnet family practice where Kerrie Duggan[checked], in particular, has done an incredible job of single handedly making this enormous change and pushing ahead with an after-hours emergency response service that is available in a rural area that would otherwise be totally unprovided for out of hours. It’s been really life-changing for people in my community.
There are still other administrative roadblocks that can be removed to allow nurse practitioners, emergency responders and paramedics to be able to fully expand their scope of practice and their capabilities. We need to harmonise our legislation with other states so that we’re all working to best practice. I understand that is not your area, Attorney-General, but it’s something that I will keep working on with the government to make sure that happens sooner rather than later.
They were the main things I wanted to say. I put a lot of my other comments on the record previously.
It’s really important to end by thanking the staff of the department for the work and the briefings we had initially on these amendments. I am really grateful to be working with other members in the House to finally have this little piece of the puzzle that will allow the Westbrooks to get this investigation to understand what happened. We wish you all the best and we will do whatever we can to facilitate anything else that needs to be done to get justice.
