Dr WOODRUFF (Franklin – Leader of the Greens) – Honourable Speaker, I want to thank the minister for Health for bringing this ministerial statement. It has been waited on for a long time by the affected families and I want to first recognise the families who were affected by what happened with the unlawful taking of parts of people that they have loved and describing them as specimens and putting them in bottles to be, as one family member put it, ogled at by other people for research or as a curiosity. People have spoken of their grief, shock, anger and trauma that they feel for not having this information and realising it was not something that only happened to them, it was systemic and it went on for decades.
The coroner has uncovered that, over 33 years, 177 individual samples of human remains were retained by the Rodda Museum at the University of Tasmania. That would be, I imagine, and people have talked about, extra hard to think it was a systemic practice. It wasn’t an accident or a one-off, it was something that continued over decades. It was essentially normalised to unlawfully make decisions on behalf of grieving families, to take parts of the body of the person who died and to see it as an object for medical research without having a discussion with the families. It’s utterly out of step with people’s expectations today in Tasmania of how a grieving family should be treated. It is utterly out of step with the wider community and it sits particularly horribly with the families and other loved people of people who died.
It was quite clearly noted in Coroner Simon Cooper’s report. He said:
The belated discovery that human remains were removed at autopsy and not returned to the body has been a source of pain and anger for many families.
The retention of human remains without family or coronial approval, or even knowledge, is a historic practice out of keeping with, and offensive to, contemporary standards and values. It is inconceivable to my mind that it would ever happen again although the fact that the practice continued for as long as it did and ended only comparatively recently is almost equally inconceivable.
It is important to make the point that the coroner’s report noted that it was unlawful behaviour. It can’t only be put down as an accident or a benevolent action. It was unlawful behaviour, as the report says:
There was no jurisdiction for a coroner to authorise the removal or retention of any part of a dead body for any purpose other than for investigating the manner and cause of death for that person. Similarly, any part of a dead body that had been removed and retained for legitimate coronial purposes should have been subject to a burial warrant in consultation with the family and replaced in the body prior to burial.
We know these things didn’t happen. We obviously look forward to, and thank the minister for talking about making, a formal apology – something that has been discussed with all the families involved, so that people have time to know about that.
I end with saying it is a fair question that people want to have all the answers to the things that the minister raised. People want to have the confidence that can only be achieved by evidence that this could never happen again and that checks and balances are in place. That is important information for justice and healing.
