Clendon DavidDAVID CLENDON (Green): I want to just make some brief comments in regard to clause 41 of the bill which replaces section 80. The theme of this particular clause of the bill is around the decision of whether or not to conduct an inquest into deaths in custody. The current situation of course is that it is mandatory. I am speaking specifically about deaths in prison but there are other forms of custody and care obviously.The default position at the moment is that a coroner must undertake an inquest when there is a death in one of our prisons. When the original drafting of the bill came to us and we saw that there would now be a discretion allowed that was a deal-breaker for the Greens. That was entirely unsatisfactory for us for two reasons the primary one being the wording in the original bill that said that there would be some discretion and the coroner would have to consider the following that: the dead person was at the time of death a person in official custody … and the negligence or misconduct of a person other than the dead person appears to have contributed to the dead person's death." In effect that said to us that you had to be proven guilty before there would be an investigation. It suggested almost that a coroner would have to be satisfied there was something unwholesome in the death something of concern before they could conduct an inquest. That seemed an entirely roundabout way of approaching things.I guess my other general point is that sadly in my view the Department of Corrections is not an organisation renowned for its transparency. I believe it has a culture that is very inward-looking and very defensive. We have seen several inquiries in various forms into deaths in custody where it has been demonstrated beyond doubt that those deaths were preventable and they were a result of lack of adequate monitoring or lack of appropriate and timely health care and so for all of those reasons we were completely opposed to the idea of discretion.Our position has changed now because in large part of the submissions we got from the coroners themselves. The Chief Coroner came to the Justice and Electoral Committee and one of the points she made was that due to some very misguided—I call it—changes to sentencing and other laws we do now have this phenomenon of many more people growing old in prisons. The general health status of inmates in our prisons—generally their health is probably like that of a person 10 20 30 years older than their chronological age. As people age in prison they are susceptible to illness and disease and the coroner specifically noted examples where a person might be diagnosed with a cancer they might spend their last year in prison suffering from that terminal condition and yet at the point of their death the coroner was obliged to conduct an inquest. I heard similar submissions just informally from meetings with several other coroners and they were all unanimous in their belief that they ought to have a degree of discretion in these cases.We have got to the point of being satisfied with that given that the new wording now speaks to the fact that the test if you like for coroners is that the death was a death in custody and the death would not reasonably have been expected by a doctor who had access to the person's health information as defined etc. That seems to us to be a much more straightforward much more sensible solution where there is a degree of discretion for coroners. Where there is an otherwise apparently fit healthy person who has died unexpectedly and if a medical practitioner looking at that person's notes would not have expected that death then that is a reasonable base level we think for triggering a coroner's inquest. On that basis I think that has come to a good place.In fact I have got a great deal of confidence I would have to say in the coroners. I think they are appropriately sceptical in these matters—they will conduct a fairly rigorous investigation initially and if they are not entirely satisfied that the death was explainable by for example a pre-existing health condition then they will trigger that inquest. We think that is a better place to be. Inquests are expensive they demand a great deal—not least of all from any family that an inmate or a person in custody might have—and they can cause significant delays and upset so I think that has probably come to a good place. As I say I must stress that that was based on a number of both formal and informal conversations with coroners who were unanimous in believing that we ought not to have that mandatory provision. For that reason the Greens are now supporting this bill."